Clarkson on Cars (25 page)

This is a peculiarly English thing and that’s why no postcard of Westminster Bridge is complete without one big red bus and two cabs in it.

People come here from all over the world and when they get here they want to go in a black cab with a driver who knows, without being told, where their hotel is and how to get there. They would not find the concept of a ride in a Portuguese-built, Japanese-designed people carrier quite so ‘quaint’.

The first time I was driven in a black cab, I was an eight-year-old Yorkshire boy, and I got an erection with all the excitement. The first time I went in a Nissan, I was 24 and I was sick.

I spent half an hour in a computer shop this week and only when the salesman said ‘goodbye’ did I realise he hadn’t been talking to me in Norwegian.

I don’t know what DOS is. I don’t know how many megabytes this Mac has and even if I did, I wouldn’t know whether it was a lot, or not. They say I need more Vee Ram. Gosh.

There is nothing wrong with this of course. Every group of like-minded people always dreams up a new language so that lesser mortals can’t understand what they’re on about.

Police people can have an entire conversation and you wouldn’t recognise a single word. They call cars ‘vehicles’ and they never walk anywhere. They ‘proceed’. Doctors are as bad, solicitors are worse. And then there’s the world of film and television. I know what ‘Roll VT’ means and you don’t, so I am brighter and cleverer than you.

I also know that a car which can get from o to 60 in five seconds is fast. And that a car which takes 14.7 seconds is likely to be a Volkswagen.

You cannot be a car person unless you understand what 0 to 60 actually means. You need to be impressed when friends tell you that their new car does it in 6.9.

Basically, the metrestick was dreamed up in continental Europe where road testers measure the time it takes for a car to accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometres per hour, which near as dammit, is 0 to 60 miles per hour.

Similarly, we’ve always rejected the American habit of referring to the standing quarter, a stupid system which comes from their drag-racing scene. When someone says they have an eleven-second car, they mean that it gets from rest to a marker post a quarter of a mile away in eleven seconds which, incidentally, is pretty fast.

But it’s myth-exploding time again because judging a car on its ability to get from 0 to 60 is completely daft.

First of all, you have to be absolutely brutal with the clutch and the gearbox in order to get the best possible time. And no car can stand treatment like that for long – the mile straight at the Millbrook proving ground in Bedfordshire is littered with broken drive shafts and gearboxes and the air hangs heavy with the aroma of cooked clutch plates.

You see, what you do to get a car going quickly is build the revs up to, say, 4000 rpm and then you just move your left foot sideways off the clutch pedal. This means the full power of the engine is applied, very suddenly indeed, to the rest of the moving bits.

I once did six full-bore take-offs in an Aston Martin Vantage, whose undersides are tougher than the hinges of a seventeenth-century barn door. And on the seventh attempt, the diff exploded.

Now the Vantage has rear-wheel drive which is what you need for a fast start on grippy tarmac. Getting a powerful front-wheel-drive car off the line quickly is harder because if you drop the clutch pedal with too many revs, the wheels just spin. Too few and you’re not going to get the best time. Too many attempts and something will break.

But let’s just say you do manage to get rolling without a mechanical mishap; you are then faced with a gear change. And what you do here is simply wrench the lever from first to second without using the clutch.

Now come on, are you really going to do that sort of thing with your own car? Of course not, so you look in the back of a car magazine to find out… and it says your car does it in, say, 7.6.

Well, a few points spring to mind here. First of all you need to know whether the track was wet or dry when the road tester tried it because dampness underfoot can add a second and a second in the world of 0 to 60 is a light year.

Second, there may have been a bit of floor mat behind the throttle pedal when the run was timed.

Third, how many gear changes were needed? Some cars can do 60 in second gear whereas others need another shift to get into third.

And finally, it doesn’t really matter whether your car does it in 7.2 or 7.7. Just look at the second hand of your watch and tell me that half a second is a long time.

Top speed is equally meaningless. I regularly test cars on the two-mile runway at Greenham Common and you wouldn’t believe how much difference a slight breeze can make.

In a Lotus Esprit, I coudn’t make it go faster than 120 mph when going from east to west but the other way round, it damn near went off the clock. So what is the car’s top speed? Haven’t a clue.

Quite apart from the wind, I’m fairly sure the runway isn’t completely level and anyway, I was relying on the speedometer which almost always lies. When my old Escort Cosworth said it was doing 140 mph, it was, in fact, travelling along at a mere 129 mph.

So, if the 0 to 60 time is meaningless and you can’t achieve your car’s potential without breaking something, and if the speedo can’t be trusted, and if a little wind can affect top speed so much, what measurement should we use?

I suggest four simple categories: terrifying, fast, average, and Volkswagen Diesel.

There are other advantages to this system too – non-car people will understand what we’re on about.

Every fortnight, Alain Prost hurls his Williams Renault around some race track or other, taking 90-degree bends at the kind of speeds that most drivers will never, ever experience, even in a straight line.

His car, equipped with an 800 brake horsepower engine, active ride, traction control and computer telemetry back to the pits is, without any question or shadow of doubt, the ultimate driving machine.

ABMW 316i is not. It has a top speed of 119 mph, it accelerates from 0 to 60 in a glacial 13.9 seconds and while it handles neatly, its tyres and brakes would be absolutely shattered after fifteen fast laps of a race track.

And while that automotive blancmange they call the 850i is faster and better able to stand up to race track use, it is still a long, long way behind the Williams as a technological tour de force.

So how come BMW is allowed to litter its advertisements with the stark and bold claim that they make the ultimate driving machine?

A spokeswoman for the Advertising Standards Authority said, ‘Well, it’s subjective and we consider it to be obvious advertising puffery. If BMW made a verifiable claim, then that’s different.’

So what then of Saab’s latest ‘claim’? They say that their new engines are capable of pumping out cleaner air through their exhaust pipes than they sucked in through their inlet manifolds.

For sure, some of the nasty poisonous stuff which hangs around in places like LA and Denver is eliminated by the Saab’s clever engine management system and catalytic converter but if you attempted to live in a room full of the gases from a Saab, or indeed any car, you’d last about 45 seconds.

Strangely, Saab seem to be a little out of kilter with current automotive thinking. We went through the so-called ‘green’ phase a couple of years ago when unleaded fuel was all the rage.

Every single manufacturer busied itself for months, telling us how their cars would run on lead-free petrol and therefore, the days of children being born with two noses were over. Every single manufacturer except Peugeot, that is.

Peugeots couldn’t run on unleaded so their ad department came up with the idea of getting Jack Nicholson to be photographed while pointing a gun at the head of a cute baby seal. Below it said: ‘Buy one of our cars or the seal dies – and no, they don’t run on unleaded.’ Oddly, the campaign never made it past the drawing board.

Then we had a brief flirtation with the notion of recycling, when everyone was running around explaining that their car could be turned into something else when we had finished with it. Hmmm. I thought that’s what scrap-metal dealers had been doing since the dawn of automotive time.

Just six months ago we moved into the baby phase. Everyone from BMW to Hyundai was using some hideous child to hammer home the point that we were into the caring nineties and that the vulnerable and adorable baby, like the vulnerable and adorable car, was symbolic of the need to go around kissing old ladies and becoming scout masters.

Vauxhall, however, no longer feels the need to show us an infant dropping to all fours when presented with a slope, so that we’ll understand how four-wheel drive works. Peugeot has fired the kid driving a toy car round the kitchen to spell out the advantages of its advanced chassis.

Even safety is no longer absolutely essential. No longer do you have a huge head-on shunt in your Audi and walk off smiling. Besides, Vauxhall has used research to show that if you even so much as mention the word safety in an ad, never mind show a dummy flying through a windscreen, people will assume the commercial is for Volvo.

Today, the car you buy must give you a low profile. It must have beauty with inner strength like, say, Ford. It must be so rare that you will never see another on the road, like Rover. Renault go further. They stress, inexplicably, the importance of stealth.

Is that, I wonder, why they made the Safrane look exactly like every other car on the road?

Or are they just trying to distance themselves from that fantastic 1980s advertisement for the 25; the one where that idiot in a sharp suit was explaining to his wife how he was going it alone, how he had the bank and a colleague on his side and how everything was going to be a barrel of beer and skittles from now on; except the company car would have to go. Wifey was not best pleased.

Neither was I because I simply couldn’t work out how he’d managed to set up an entire, and seemingly major business deal, without bothering to whisper a word of it to Mrs Yuppie until the very last moment.

Perhaps she was the woman who turned up later, in VW’s ad for the Golf, smiling and laughing her way through a divorce. In the world of advertising, they may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but image and puff will not sustain an inferior product for long.

For proof, see Mercedes. While motoring journalists and engineers will always be able to pick holes in a slick but drivel-filled 30 seconds of prime time TV – I can, for instance, easily resist the Renault 19 – we get stuck when Daimler Benz tell us their products are ‘engineered like no other car in the world’.

Because they just are.

Adolf Hitler set something of a trend when he decided to use a Mercedes Benz because today, every single government in the entire world owns at least one car with a three-pointed star on the bonnet.

Indeed, in Swahili, African bigwigs are named after the cars they invariably drive – Wabenzi.

Of course, for official functions, politicians from car-producing countries are forced to use models that are actually made by their people; thus Mitterrand has a Renault Safrane, Yeltsin has a Zil and Clinton has a Cadillac to go with his own 1964 Ford Mustang.

At the recent London G7 summit, Mrs Major kept the trend going by arriving in a beige B-registered Montego with a dent in the door. We’re talking here, I think, about a real woman of the people. And a real patriot too.

Edwina Currie has tried to follow in Norma’s footsteps, opting for a Toyota, on the basis that the company’s Burnaston plant is in her constituency. Unfortunately, the factory makes a model called the Carina while she uses a sporty Corolla GTi which has about as much to do with Britain as sake.

Not only is it important for politicians to drive something jingoistic but also, it’s important to ensure that it is safe. John F. Kennedy, for instance, probably regrets the moment he said, ‘Honey, let’s get a convertible.’

His brother Teddy went for a saloon but should really have gone for something with better road holding. Or if he hadn’t been forced to buy a Yank tank, he could perhaps have opted for the British-made amphi-car.

A Nigerian government minister was almost certainly as sore as hell that he hadn’t done something about Lagos’s appalling traffic problem, as gunmen riddled his car with bullets while he sat in a jam.

In Italy, where they’re all good enough drivers to get across bridges without falling into the water, they are plagued with the nightmare cocktail of bad traffic and terrorism.

To get round the problem, Italian manufacturers deliberately make their top models look dull and uninspiring. They believe that gunmen will expect their targets to be in something big and flash and will not dare open fire on something so ordinary as a Fiat Croma.

Hmmm.

In Italy, every single male, and most females, between the ages of five and seventy-five, loves cars. They love driving them, touching them, admiring them, and most of all, talking about them.

Drive a new model around the streets of an Italian town, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Ferrari or a Fiat Punto, you will be swamped at every set of lights. They’ll want to know how fast it goes, whether it corners well, whether it’s quicker off the mark than their car.

I have driven a great many new models in Italy and it’s always the same. You are pumped for information like you have just come back from Mars and the simple fact that I only know two Italian words – mussels and bitch – doesn’t seem to put them off.

Things are different in England. Drive a car that no one has ever seen outside the pages of the specialist press before and you may as well be on foot, in a grey Marks and Spencer suit with shoes to match.

And even if passers-by are forced into conversation about the new set of wheels, the questions are quite, quite different to those that are fired at you in Rome or Milan or Taormina. In Barnsley and Birmingham, they want to know how much it costs to insure, why there are only two doors and how much fuel it uses; practical, sensible, dull things.