Clarkson on Cars (30 page)

Always give way to any vehicle that’s larger than yours.

When you encounter a sign saying speed cameras are in operation, you can be assured of one thing. There are no speed cameras for a hundred miles, just a few grey boxes with flash guns in them. Drive very, very fast indeed to prove to the locals that the experiment isn’t working.

Never follow a bus because you will be asphyxiated by the fumes from its badly maintained diesel engine. Never try to overtake a bus either because just as you’re alongside, it will lunge out and ram you. Bus drivers believe they can do this because of the tiny signs on the back of their vehicles advising other road users to let the bus go first.

Always drive in them, even when there’s no real need.

When a policeman apprehends you for using a phone while driving, explain that you can’t talk right now because you’re on the phone.

Never go to bed with someone who has a yellow car. Anyone who has walked into a showroom and, from the vast range of colours available, selected yellow is not normal. For the same reason, give yellow cars a wide berth when overtaking them.

If, on a narrow street, a van is coming the other way, it is your responsibility to get out of the way. Right out of the way. Unless you mount the kerb on your side of the road, and then park up in someone’s garden, the van will remove your door mirror.

If this happens, don’t get out of your car. At best, the van won’t stop in which case you’ll have wasted your time. At worst, it will stop. Then four baboons will climb out and beat you up a lot.

In town, drive around at 15 mph, ignoring the irate faces in your rear-view mirror. You’re on the moral high ground.

On motorways, the traffic is never light enough to permit 70 mph. It was set in the days of Austin Cambridges and Dixon of Dock Greenery. Stick to 50 mph and then you’ll hear the quiet bits in the plays on Radio Four.

It’s OK to park on these for a little while.

It’s OK to park on these too, but be safe and post a look-out man.

Do absolutely everything in your power to make their life as difficult as possible. When collecting your car from the pound, be abusive. Make these people feel that being on the dole is preferable to their brand of government-sponsored, legalised theft.

As far as the blue-spectacled advertising copywriter is concerned, old people are simply not worth the bother. They have no disposable income and what little change is left at the bottom of their purses each week is spent on cat food and tinned salmon.

That’s assuming, of course, their arthritic fingers are able to deal with the new money.

Yet in recent weeks, the television has played host to Mr Werthers Original Man, resplendent in his angora home-knit cardy doing what old people do best; talking about the days when they weren’t old.

With that sepia tint to the film and the soft burr that goes hand in hand with knackered vocal cords, you can bet that pensioners the length and breadth of the land have been dying of hypothermia, and that sales of tinned salmon have plummeted.

This is because all of them will have been turning off their bar fires and spending their money instead down at the newsagent’s, on old-fashioned sweets for their grandchildren – who, sadly, would much rather have been given some Evo-stick.

My mother-in-law – bless her – actually buys those commemorative plates which litter the advertisements in Sunday’s colour supplements. She swoons over the frilly dolls called Emily. She is misty eyed at the snowstorm paperweights. And it’s really only a matter of time before our new child is sent a nice packet of those sweets she saw on the bioscope.

So that’s all well and good on the sweet front, but what about everything else? Why is Werthers Originals Man so unique? Why are all other advertisements on the television presented by people whose teeth shine so brightly it hurts? Be it for a pension or a washing powder, the images, the music, and the script are very obviously aimed at the under-forties.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of car advertising.

In every commercial break, a huge finger leaps out of the screen and a deep, booming voice announces, ‘Hey you – yes you with the tartan shopping trolley and the stupid slippers with zips up the front. Don’t you dare buy one of our cars.’

BMW is slightly more subtle but the message is the same. Whether they’re explaining how perfect weight-balance improves handling or how ellipsoidal headlamps let you see further at night, we are being told that BMWs are fast cars… and are therefore no earthly use if you only want to go to the post office once a week.

Volvo has a bigger problem. In the queue for stamps every Monday morning, the talk centres around crime, osteoporosis, the Blitz and how the Volvo 340 is the best car ever made.

There’s space in the boot of any Volvo for a tartan shopping trolley and a dozen Zimmer frames, but is this the message we get from their TV ads? No it is not.

Instead we have rock music, a man in a T-shirt and a sinister-looking all black T5 hurtling across the Corinthean Canal. I now have a T5 and wherever I go, young men point approvingly. Old people tut.

Both Honda and Nissan have announced, in public, that they worry about the average age of their buyers so both are now engaged on a crash course in wooing teenagers.

Have you seen that absurd commercial where a group of improbably tanned youths ring up a group of impossibly lithe girls, asking if they’d like to go to the beach? ‘They’re on,’ exclaims our hero.

We’re then treated to the rather far-fetched scenario of these ridiculous people loading up their ridiculous Nissans with beach furniture. The last time we saw such a blatant attempt to woo people who still have need for Clearasil, it was called the Hitler Youth, but there is a happy ending. The average age of the Nissan Micra buyer continues to climb.

Or how about Mazda. They ask us to video the commercial for their new 323, knowing full well that no old person in the land knows how to use a VCR.

Then there’s Volkswagen, with its hurtful divorce campaign. You may have noticed that everyone who’s cheering on the courtroom steps is young, and that the only disapproving look for the recently unbetrothed woman comes from a pensioner.

But all is not lost for the old people because Ford, always the first to spot an opportunity, has stepped in with the ‘Which is right for you?’ ads. No squealing tyres here. No mini drama. No cunning twist at the end where the man turns out not to be an adulterous bastard after all.

No, Ford tells us straight how much the car costs and what features it has. And I couldn’t help noticing last night as I drove past my local dealer that it was full to overflowing with people in brown suits, asking for the price to be converted into old money.

Ford’s marketing team may have been the first car-industry people to realise what has been staring everyone else in the face for about two years – young people burdened with a mortgage are unable to meet the monthly repayments on a car, let alone the awesome insurance bills.

And that the only people out there who can afford to buy and run a car these days are in their seventies.

Don’t be surprised then if, in the very near future, Papa is borrowing Nicole’s car and if BMW start telling us that the centre console cubbyhole between the two front seats is the ideal place for storing incontinence bags.

I was out for dinner last night with two couples, both of whom currently drive Range Rovers.

It’s the natural choice, as both live in south-west London, both have one child, and both go shooting every now and again. One of the cars in question even has a silver dog on the bonnet. And bull bars for those tricky moments when the oncoming mini-cab just won’t back up.

The old Range Rover looks so damn right too. Styled by Spen King when all his mates were at Woodstock, it has weathered the vagaries of fashion well and, if anything, looks even more pertinent today than it did back in 1972.

Certainly it’s a whole lot more regal than any other large four-wheel-drive supertanker. Especially in that sort of olive-greeny colour, with matching wheels.

And strangely that is still true today, even with a new Range Rover in town.

Much has been written and said about this new technological wonderwagon but here is a simple fact: I tried to hail one on Regent Street a couple of weeks ago.

It was black and in the half light of a British winter afternoon, it was almost completely indistinguishable from the Metrocab.

I was a little jaundiced then, even before I took a test drive, and now, I rather look like I’ve caught yellow fever. I’m sorry, but the new Range Rover just doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.

I’ll admit, I have only driven the top of the range, 4.6-litre HSE model, and only briefly, but it was enough to demonstrate that it is neither one thing nor another.

And it’s not hard to see why this should be so. The original Range Rover was conceived as an off-road vehicle, which after a day in the forests could be hosed down and used for a trip to the theatre.

Over the past 24 years, the emphasis has gradually changed. Recently, most Range Rovers have been used, largely, for trips to the theatre and then occasionally, very occasionally, they’d go off road; sometimes you’d see them with both nearside wheels on the pavement outside Fortnum’s.

I was a huge fan of the original car and even today, I stare wistfully at those great V8 monsters as they burble by. I love that lofty driving position and the way they rock from side to side when you dab the throttle.

I also loved the fact that if I felt so inclined, I could take my air-conditioned, luxuriously carpeted car up the north face of the Eiger.

But I will recognise that, on the road, they left a lot to be desired. My father had wanted a Range Rover for twenty years, right up until the moment he actually drove one. He pointed out that it was slow, thirsty and that in corners, it felt like a small kitchen chair balanced on a vibrating water bed.

And in a sort of gritty, look after the pennies, Yorkshire way, he said that because he would never, ever take it off road, he’d stick with a BMW.

There are thousands more just like him too, and it is these people that Land Rover needed to woo with its new car.

But they couldn’t just ignore their old customer base, the people who also never went off road but who revelled in the knowledge that they could if the mood took them. And they certainly couldn’t ignore the motoring publications who would dance naked round a burning Rover Group effigy if, when they tested the new car, they found it fell over on to its side every time it saw a puddle.

So the new car had to feel like a Jaguar when it was on the M1 and a Land Rover when it was just off the M1, up to its door handles in a peat bog. This is impossible.

But that didn’t stop them trying. For a few years now, the old Range Rover has had air suspension but the new model goes so far into the realms of Arthur C. Clarke, that I was completely confused.

You can make the car rise up, squat down and for all I know roll over onto its back so you can tickle its axles, but all I wanted to do was go to the pub. Pre-flight checks have no place outside the cockpit of a commercial jet liner.

And while I’m sure the new 4.6-litre V8 chews fuel like a 737, I do not want to be bothered with a big bout of button stabbing before I go anywhere. Especially the pub.

Once I’d had the whole thing explained, I set off to see whether the taxi lookalike really can perform the impossible. And guess what. It can’t.

The steering and the tendency to roll in the corners are massively improved over the old car, but it’s no Jaguar. It can’t be. It’s too tall, so the centre of gravity is too far off the ground.

Plus, this car rides like a dream over ploughed fields – I know because I did it – and you can’t have suspension that soft which will keep a car taut and level through a tightening right-hander. Land Rover has done a spectacularly good job, technologically speaking, but to what end?

My Dad would have hated all those buttons – he couldn’t even turn the radio on in his car – and he would point out that on the road, the new Range Rover is still no match for a BMW.

So, the new car isn’t clever enough to woo new buyers, and to make matters worse, I fear it’s too clever for the old fans, like me. Certainly, neither of the couples with whom I had dinner last night will be buying one.

First there’s that styling. Land Rover tried hard to make sure it didn’t just look like a large estate car, and they’ve succeeded, but only in as much that it looks like a taxi. I don’t like the square headlamps and it all goes wrong at the back too.

Yes, it’s aerodynamically better but comparing new to old is like comparing a bungalow to a wardrobe.

The interior is a huge improvement though. It’s bigger and the dashboard is a joy to behold – apart from all those silly suspension controls.

It is also faster but compared to a basket of similarly priced saloons, it’s almost glacial. Yes, it’s fast for an off-roader but if you feel the need for speed, may I point you in the direction of the supercharged Jaguar.

Yes, the top of the range Range Rover is a staggering £45,000 and for that, you get a tall driving position, the ability to tell people at dinner parties that you could, if you wanted, drive home across the fields, and A-level suspension.

If you want more than that, you could have an Audi A8, or a Jaguar XJR or a V8 BMW or a big Mercedes, or anything you damn well want. That sort of money is going to steer a lot of people back into four-door saloons.

Or maybe not. Because Land Rover, almost as though they know they might have a problem with the new car, are still making and selling the old one.

It’s called the Classic, which, ominously, is what Coca-Cola called old Coke when they launched the disastrous new variety.