Clarkson on Cars (16 page)

And because Britain can only cope if the weather is 55 degrees and drizzling, the country fell apart. In the same way that every snowplough breaks down just before their drivers go on strike every time it looks like snow, everything designed to keep us cool went west in August.

The fridge in every corner shop was only able to bring Coca-Cola down to the sort of temperature found in the manufacture of glass. British Rail was forced to slow down its trains to 50 mph because the rails had all gone wonky, petrol pumps packed up, roads melted and old women the length and breadth of the land keeled over and died because they’d spent all their hypothermia allowances on two-bar fires and wouldn’t turn them off.

And then there was me. The office, so cosy in winter, was a hellhole of fire and damnation and pestilence – mostly as a result of my armpits – and there wasn’t even any fornication to liven it up.

Regularly we see that it gets above 100 in Luxor, but let me tell you there’s a world of difference between 100 in Africa and 100 here. In Africa you starve. Here you sweat. I prefer starving.

I needed to get home to a cold bath but I didn’t want to get into any of the cars outside. I had no way of knowing just how hot it was in the Esprit but there was no way of holding the steering wheel without wearing Marigolds. The Audi, all £33,000 worth of it, had a lift-out roof but the metal was simply too hot to touch; although Audi gives you a spare can to cope with a dearth of unleaded fuel stations, it doesn’t provide oven gloves.

I have described the 20-valve Quattro mother ****** as the greatest all-round car in the world. It isn’t. It has better ventilation than any Audi currently made but it can only blow hot air out of its vents on hot days.

And the BMW had leather seats which, after three hours in the heat, were capable of melting a pair of Levis at 400 paces.

The Ford, which let’s face it can’t quite match the competition for outright speed or handling, was provided with a sliding sunroof with a cover for when it’s too hot and a windscreen that isn’t raked so much that it allows the sun to heat up the wheel to a point where it becomes oval shaped.

It also had air conditioning. Now this was not the best system I’ve ever encountered, but, nevertheless, it was capable of sucking hot smog from the outside and turning it into cold smog for the people inside.

Rolls-Royce says the air-conditioning plants fitted to its cars have the power of 30 domestic fridges. Ford’s has the power of one, but one is better than none. So, all last week, I was the berk in the blue Sapphire with the windows up and the coat on.

And I’ve been doing some thinking. If the weathermen are to be believed, Britain is going to get warmer and warmer as each year strolls by. I read a report last week which said that, in twenty years’ time, temperatures of 107 degrees will be entirely normal during the summer months.

Now, some will say that as the motor car with its infernal catalytic converter is partly to blame, motor-car drivers must be made to sweat. But this is a vegetarian stance.

As a red-meat eater, I see it the other way round. If motor manufacturers are going to heat up the world on the one hand, it is their duty to cool the people who live in it down again.

The air conditioning in my Sierra wasn’t standard. After a few minutes’ research, I have found that the cheapest car in Britain to come with it, whether you like it or not, is the £13,000 Hyundai Sonata.

The only other mass marketeers to include this life-saver as standard on humdrum boxes are Ford, which sticks it on the Sapphire 2000E, and Nissan, with the Bluebird Executive. And let’s face it, these two aren’t that much better than the Sonata.

Can it be a coincidence that three of the nastiest saloons you can buy get one of the best extras provided as standard? Maybe not.

What I would like to know is why someone hasn’t fitted it to a cheaper car yet? Why, when the trend is towards smaller, faster, more luxurious cars, is the air con ignored? Why can we have a Metro with leather seats, a Charade with a 100-bhp, intercooled, turbo engine and four valves per cylinder, a Renault 5 with PLIP central locking and a Mazda 121 with an electric sun top when we cannot have a small and convenient car that doesn’t poach its occupants?

When I asked a Rover spokesman if such a thing might be in the pipeline, he said there was always one rainy day a week in Britain, that there was no demand, and that the standard of living here was about to fall, that two-thirds of Rover production went to the UK and that it was hard to fit air con to the K-series engine.

In other words, no.

Now that Nissan and Rover are making some half-decent cars, the motoring headline writers have turned their big guns on Ford who, it is said, wouldn’t know what a decent car was even if one jumped out of some bracken and ate the chairman’s leg.

Not unreasonably, car buffs are asking how on earth, after spending the best part of a billion quid on it, Ford managed to get the new Escort so hopelessly wrong.

This can be answered very simply indeed. It looks like Ford blundered and built a car that people want.

Instead of getting qualified engineers to sit around a conference table hammering out what is feasible in a family car these days and what is not, they got a whole load of hairy-arsed students to mill about in High Wycombe, doing market research.

It’s a fairly safe bet that if BMW had used such a technique, the Z1 would be five times faster and ten times less fun. When asked what they would like to see in a car, people are not in the habit of asking for drop-down doors.

However, Ford felt Mr Average’s opinions were important enough and
did
ask what features he would like to see on his next Eurobox. They then compounded the mistake by actually designing the car around these findings and now make no secret of the fact that appearance, quality and price were cited as the most important issues.

Just 14 per cent of those questioned reckoned that performance was important, while handling, according to a spokesman, either wasn’t a consideration or, if it was, didn’t interest anyone enough even to register on the bar chart.

Irrespective of what may or may not have been technically possible in a car like the Escort, it seems Ford’s besuited marketeers went back to its engineers with these findings and told them to design a new car around the results. This means we now have a reasonably attractive, well-priced and quite nicely built car that doesn’t handle and can’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s arse.

And now, of course, the headline writers are jumping up and down, foaming at the mouth and saying that Ford should have broken the law of averages and given us more. A lot more.

They’re quite right too. The Escort is not as spacious as a Tipo. It is not as satisfying as a Rover 200. It is not as nice to drive as a 309 and it is powered by a range of engines so nasty that even Moulinex would not accept them for use in a Magimix.

The trouble is that people outside of motoring magazines will never know just how horrid the Escort is because (a) they will never drive a rival and (b) even if they did, they’d not spot the differences. People, remember, don’t care about performance and handling.

I have a Zanussi fridge. I do not know whether it has any CFCs in its engine. I do not know how many horsepower its motor develops and, even if I did, I wouldn’t know whether that was a lot or not. I do not know if the light that comes on is ellipsoidal or even if it goes off when the door is shut. I do not know whether it is made out of aluminium or carbon fibre and, more than that, I do not care.

If I were to be stopped tomorrow by a hairy-arsed student with a clipboard and asked what features I would most like to see on the fridge of tomorrow I would tell him that it should keep my milk from becoming cheese, that it should fit under the work surface and that there should be enough room inside for 24 tins of Sapporo.

I do not know if it would be possible to have a solar-powered titanium job that could double up as a food blender cum orange squeezer so I would therefore not talk to the market researcher of such things.

Similarly, a man in the street would not know of radar parking aids or variable valve-timing technology and, as a result, he would not be able to tell Ford’s market researcher that he wanted both of them on his next Escort.

Even though it might have been possible for such items to have been engineered in, Ford has obviously made them very low priorities, concentrating instead on value, appearance and quality: things people think the people want.

Of course, people want these things but they want a whole lot more besides. It’s just that they don’t know what they want until someone gives it to them. My grandfather never used to sit around wishing that he could have a remote-control television set because, in his day, such whizzkiddery was the preserve of sci-fi writers.

My great-grandfather didn’t wander through his garden on a hot day wistfully thinking about how nice it would be if someone would invent a white box that would suck in hot air and turn it into cold air, thus keeping his Sapporo cold. And that’s not only because he hadn’t got a clue what Sapporo was.

You can’t want what you don’t know exists. I think Sinead O’Connor had some sort of anarchistic viewpoint in mind when she eloquently entitled her album, ‘I do not want what I have not got’ but the sentiment holds water on a commercial basis too.

It’s fair enough to target existing Escort drivers, asking them what features of their current car are annoying. It is fair enough to act speedily on information received, but it is entirely irresponsible to let ordinary members of the public, most of whom went to state schools, decide what the cars of tomorrow should be like.

I can’t think of one great breakthrough that has been achieved through market research. Isaac Newton didn’t use a single clipboard to find out if we’d like gravity or not. Alexander Fleming didn’t commission MORI to see if we all needed penicillin. And NOP had nothing whatsoever to do with the theory of relativity.

The question Ford should have asked itself is this: how can we trust the views of a nation that, according to the market research in which we place so much faith, looks set to let a red-headed Welshman into Downing Street.

Questioning people in the street is only useful if you want to compose a silly article in a silly women’s magazine about underarm deodorant.

If you think that fertiliser is interesting, that Gary Davies is a decent chap and that opera is music, then you will probably argue that Britain’s national radio stations do a good job.

However, my idea of the perfect garden is one that needs hoovering once a year. I do not like Gary Davies and I would rather listen to a pile-driver than Placido Domingo.

Traffic jams are now part and parcel of any journey in Britain and, if you get as bored with your tapes as I do, the radio should provide alternative aural entertainment. But on a five-hour journey from Birmingham to London the other day, it became more and more obvious that the airwaves in this country only cater for my mother and Stock, Market and Bankerman. They used to keep Percy Thrower happy too, but he died.

Radio 1 is slick, ‘Our Tune’ is a good laugh and Steve Wright is a funny man, but it plays sheer, unadulterated rubbish between the chitchat.

If you are more than twelve, there is Radio 2 with its comfortable disc jockeys in woolly pullies and Vera Lynn. Radio 3 does a good job if you enjoy being shrieked at by a fat tart in a tent and Radio 5 is OK for those who want to know what sort of cake the cricket commentators are eating while the turkeys on the field take tea.

That leaves the worst of the lot. Radio 4 only has three programmes:
Gardeners’
bloody
Question Time
, which is fine if you think that greenfly on your clematis is more important than Green Jackets in the Gulf, the shipping forecast, which is of no earthly use to anyone, and
The Archers
, who live in a farm-subsidised world and think postage stamps are fascinating.

I wonder if David Mellor, broadcasting minister, has ever considered the plight of thirtysomethings who want the Doobie Brothers interspersed with informed comment; a sort of cross between
Q
magazine and
Channel Four News
, where Peter Sissons does the interviews and Joe Cocker does the singy bits.

At the moment, we either have Radio 1 which occasionally plays an old Beatles song or Radio 4 which, if it can find time between the weather in Dogger Bank and the state of Stefan Buczacki’s stupid rockery, squeezes Clement Freud in for a quick joke.

Largely, local radio is terrible too, but in London, where there are twenty stations, we have something called GLR which broadcasts, if ever you’re down here, on 94.9FM. Conceptually, it’s excellent.

Before it began in 1988 we were teased with a test transmission tape featuring non-stop Led Zep, Bob Seger, the Doobies and Steely Dan.

My appetite whetted, I tuned in on day one and found the disc jockeys were every bit as good as the music. When the radio alarm went off, I was treated to a man called Nick Abbott who rang up public figures every morning and insulted them. They had Tommy Voice, Johnny Walker and Emma Freud too. It was a damn good station.

But, systematically, the decent presenters have been shunted into late-night slots or ejected altogether. Their replacements, complete with horrid regional accents, are bad enough, but chief horror is Janice Long who, along with a sidekick called James Cameron, does the morning show.

Cameron is supposed to play at being Peter Sissons while Long spins the discs. Unfortunately, she can ‘t go for more than a minute without sticking her left-wing nose into the news items.

Every day, I leave Balham rubbing sleep from my eyes and arrive in Fulham half an hour later spitting blood and screaming blue murder. Yes, the traffic on the Trinity Road is partly to blame but worse, much worse, is that woman. I even dreamed about her last night. Things are getting bad.

I listen to her for two reasons. Firstly, there is no alternative for all the reasons I’ve already outlined and, secondly, I simply have to know how far to the left you can lean on a major radio station without falling over. It has now become a battle of wits: will she get fired before I go barking mad?