Clarkson on Cars (27 page)

The trouble is that if you put an electric motor in a normal car, no one will buy it. The end result looks like a normal car but performs like a wheelbarrow, costs the earth and takes six weeks to recharge every 50 miles.

If we are going to have electric cars, VW believes they must look different to normal cars, which is why their designers looked back to the Beetle. Half the battle’s won already because most of the people who like the relic are the kind of souls who sport shoes made out of potatoes, and would actually want a planet-saving milk float.

No firm commitment has been made on what sort of engine it should have, but three alternatives are being examined. It seems VW likes the idea of blending diesel and battery power. Oh my God. Mogadon will be bankrupt in a week.

The man who headed up the operation to make this snooze-mobile says the original Beetle offered innovative technology when it arrived in the States in 1949 – ‘An air-cooled motor, unusual shape, no grille, motor in the back.’

The design team wanted to blend modern technology with VW’s heritage and the finished product reflects, he says, ‘Everything we have always stood for – simple, honest, reliable, original.’

And a desire to annex the Sudetenland. But he forgot that bit.

A Rolex watch may well be exquisitely crafted and priced accordingly, but there is no way I’ll be convinced that it tells the time any better than my Casio.

And furthermore, my Casio is capable of operating in space, 4000 metres under the sea and even after it’s been dropped from a 747. Battersea, then, is a breeze.

Nevertheless, at parties, the people with Rolexes are known to check the time more often, and more extravagantly, than those with Casios.

That’s because Rolexes are expensive. People who spend their weekends looking round show homes do not have them. People who go fishing don’t either, unless they’re moored off Mauritius, after marlin.

But what if Rolex were to introduce a bargain basement, pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap, battery-powered jobbie with a nice plastic strap? Sure, they’d ruin the image of the ten-grand versions but in the short term, before the name lost its exclusivity, they would be a huge success.

Which brings me neatly on to BMW.

There was a time when the blue and white aero-propeller badge meant something; usually that the driver was a jumped-up twit who drove far too fast in built-up areas, but that’s not the point right now.

BMW has always made affordable cars, but these tended to be quite sporty and quite different to the run-of-the-mill competition. And anyway, they were always overshadowed by the race cars and the more expensive offerings.

But today, on the race track, BMW is very much yesterday’s news. Sure, they currently hold the British Touring Car Championship crown but towards the end of last year, the Ford Mondeo was by far the quickest car in the field. And if you want my tip for this year, bet on Ford again.

And what of the upmarket image creators? Well, there’s the out-of-date 7 series and the almost completely pointless 8 series. I mean, if you’re going to blow upward of 75 grand on what is effectively a two-seater sports car, most people with their heads screwed on the right way round would go for a Ferrari.

This point is amply proved by the sales figures. Last year, 1400 people bought a 7 series and just 150 went for the 850.

Today, BMW seems to be concentrating its efforts not on image but on volume and boy oh boy, is it working.

In 1983, BMW sold 25,178 cars in the UK. Ten years down the line, they shifted 40,921. In the coupe sector, the 318iS outsells the Vauxhall Calibra and round here, in south-west London, there are more BMWs on the road than there are dog turds on the pavement.

BMW say exclusivity has nothing to do with rarity and that their cars are still exclusive because it’s hard to find the same sort of experience anywhere else. That might have been the case last year but now the new 3-series Compact is with us, it isn’t any more.

This three-door car is effectively a normal 3 series with a slightly altered rear end. It will appeal, say BMW, to company-car drivers on a budget or as a second car, for, dare I say it, wives. Keen drivers will like it too because unlike any other car in the class, it has rear-wheel drive.

It is not, however, a fast car. The only choice you have under the bonnet is from a brace of four-cylinder units – either a 1.8 which is quite slow and a 1.6 which is glacial. Both engines are super smooth though.

Early versions of the 3-series BMW were thrown together by playschool children and some reports suggested that the average warranty cost per car sold was running at £800 per year. But the children have now been fired and all is rosy in the garden once more. Your new BMW is likely to be a reliable companion, and because of that hatchback rear end, a practical one too.

But the best bit is the price. Though not official yet, it seems likely the 316 will sell for around £13,000 which puts the new boy in direct competition with the Maestro, another BMW product now, of course.

With the Maestro, you get five doors rather than three and because only 7176 are sold each year, you also get some of the exclusivity that is missing from BMW these days.

It’s interesting to see that there may be some changes to the way Britain’s pop charts are organised.

Seems you only need sell 5000 copies of a single to make it into the hit parade and that you could get a higher placing than a song which, in the previous week, had found 150,000 homes.

The industry, already up to its neck in manure, is up in arms but it only has itself to blame. I heard, last week, of a boy who has been selected to front a new group whose name has gone from my mind. He can’t sing and he can’t play an instrument. For God’s sake, he can’t even read music.

He’s been chosen because he can dance a bit and because he has the looks of an angel which, he says, will give him equal appeal among homosexuals and young girls. For this reason, his ‘right-on’ contract expressly forbids him from going out with women in public.

He, then, is a machine which has been created by other machines to sell a noise which is made by machines on machines. And then everyone runs around waving their arms in the air wondering where the next Rolling Stones are going to come from. For heaven’s sake, another Golden Earring would be better than what we have in the charts now.

The car industry should watch this state of affairs very carefully. And they should take note that the really big hits these days are from established old-timers like Meat Loaf and Bryan Adams. A trudge round the Geneva Motor Show last week revealed the usual crop of dreary no-hopers which will flicker briefly in people’s lives, when they are advertised on television, and then die. Does Mitsubishi still make the Lancer Estate? Does anybody care?

Hey, Volkswagen has chopped the roof off its Golf to make a convertible version but wait a minute, didn’t I just see exactly the same car with an Astra badge on the Vauxhall stand?

And yes, there’s the Fiat Punto or is it the Seat Ibiza? Both companies explain that their new cars were designed by Guigaro of Ital Design and claim that they’re not the slightest bit bothered that he seems to have flogged them exactly the same drawings.

Renault had the Laguna – a new mid-sized car – and their designer, a genius called Patrick Le Quement, said it looked refreshingly different to all the other cars in that sector. He’s right too, except for one small thing. It doesn’t.

This is surprising as we’re talking here about a company that dared to be different with the Twingo. But then again, maybe it isn’t because they haven’t the guts to launch this stunning little one-box town car in Britain.

Over on the Volvo stand, the magically charismatic chief designer, Peter Hallbury, was explaining just how difficult it had been to get his board to approve a new yellow paint scheme on the wonderful new T5 estate.

He wasn’t talking about fins like Concorde’s wings or a three-tiered bonnet in kevlar. It was only a new colour for heaven’s sake. Even so, the suits were twitchy.

There was, however, one ray of hope and it was sitting, curiously enough, on the Volkswagen stand, next to the new Astra. It was curvily modern and equipped to match with air bags and catalytic converters and all sorts of things which, if they were food, would be ready to eat after ten seconds in a microwave.

And it was being likened to the Beetle but even if there had never been a Hitler or a people’s car, the crowds would still have been ten deep. The convertible version especially, which was finished in metallic peach, looked absolutely stunning.

Rolls-Royce had pulled the covers off a brand-new, £100,000 four-seater Bentley convertible which will kick the SL Mercedes to hell in a handcart, but the big story was on the VW stand.

Here was a brace of cars which combined modern-day safety and emission technology with something called style. Here was
Pet Sounds
on DAT.

VW says it will gauge public reaction to their new cars before deciding whether to put them into production.

Which is a bit like the Beatles waiting to gauge public reaction to recent press reports before deciding whether to make another record.

Just get on with it.

The inside lane of a motorway is where you’ll find all the flotsam and jetsam; huge 42-ton trucks mix it with yesterday’s news: an alarming cocktail of rust, mustard paintwork and peeling vinyl. Automotive lugworms like Cortinas and old Datsuns crawl along in what they see as the shallows, safe and protected from the rough waters of the outside lane, its sharks and its broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.

The inside lane is not where you would expect to find some of the fastest and most exotic cars in the world. And yet, it’s where they all live. I’m talking about Hondas.

You will never find a Honda playing cut and thrust in the outer reaches of motorwaydom. These guys never mix it with the suits in the Cavaliers. Even the cheapest little Honda is so technically clever, it makes an F-16 jet fighter look like some kind of barn door, yet it will never even attempt to play ball with a Mondeo.

In terms of automotive time, Honda is still very much a new boy. Until 1963, this world-renowned motorcycle manufacturer had never even made a car. But then came the little S500 – a two-seater sports car that could rev to 8000 rpm.

In just 31 years, Honda has grown so vast that it now has plants in Japan, obviously, Swindon, obviously, Canada and in Maryland, Ohio. In 1989, 1990 and 1991, the Honda Accord was the best-selling car in America. The young upstart had bloodied the noses of Ford, GM and Chrysler and then, this Colin Moynihan of an operation had kicked them all in the testicles for good measure.

And it was the same story in Formula One. Honda had a brief flirtation with this megabuck sport back in the 1960s, but then lay dormant until 1984.

No one really thought they’d be serious players until 1986, when they lifted the world constructor’s championship. A fluke? No, not really because they did it again in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991.

Having beaten Ferrari on the race track, Honda decided it was time to beat them on the road too and, in 1990, launched the NSX, a two-seater supercar that simply didn’t play by the rules.

Lamborghinis, Lotuses and Ferraris are hard to get into, hard to see out of and harder still to drive. You need thighs like redwoods to depress the clutch (though calling it names sometimes works), a neck like a birthday cake to stop the G-forces ripping your head off and the strength of Samson, pre-haircut, to make the steering wheel move. On top of all this, the gear lever feels like it’s been set in concrete.

You need to be brave and talented to find out just how fast cars like this will go. But though the Honda NSX looks like a supercar and goes like the very devil, it is no harder to pilot through a crowded shopping street than one of the company’s mopeds.

The steering is power assisted and the visibility good. The headroom is fine, even for beanpoles like me, and the pedals are so softly sprung that to operate them is no harder than treading in some dog dirt.

And yet when you press the one on the right, all hell breaks loose. The six-cylinder, 3.0-litre engine hurls the horizon right through the windscreen, and through your Wayfarers too if you’re not careful.

Now a 3-litre engine doesn’t sound all that impressive when you remember the new McLaren is hustled along by something with twice the volume and twice the number of cylinders, too. But thanks to what Honda calls VTEC technology, the smallness doesn’t matter. At low revs, the NSX is a normal car but as the revs pass 5000 per minute, the four camshafts shift, and begin to poke the valves with big, spiky, high-performance lobes. Clark Kent becomes Superman and Dr Jekyll all rolled into one.

Honda were so pleased with VTEC that it is now available on the stunning Prelude, the CRX sports car and even the little Civic – by far and away the most stylish of all the little hatchbacks.

What’s more, Honda is now using the VTEC system to improve fuel economy. The Civic VEi is more efficient with the jungle juice than most diesels, so you can save money without giving every pedestrian a face full of carcinogenic smoke and a lung full of asthma.

So, Honda has proved itself on the tracks and the lessons it learned there have been passed on to you and me. On top of all that, the cars are fun to drive, good looking and comfortable.

And yet, despite all this, I passed a Civic VTEC yesterday, its super-advanced engine spinning at maybe 3000 rpm and its aerodynamic body cleaving the air at all of 55 mph – on a motorway.

Behind the wheel was a man who had bought his suit from Alfred the Great. He was thousands of years old.

The trouble, it seems, is that Hondas are perceived, above all else, as reliable which is the one thing, above all else, that a retired couple wants.

I ran a CRX for five years and even though it was never serviced or even washed, it never went wrong. That suits the oldies just fine. They want a car that will outlive them. They want a car that will never break down, that will never need to go to a garage and which will never cost them more than the price of a gallon of oil once a decade.