Clarkson on Cars (36 page)

But it wouldn’t work in Britain. Here, you can know someone for fifteen years before you get past the weather. The foundations of friendship are deep and strong.

Once, at a party in California, I was invited to stay for a week with someone who I’d only known for five minutes. They needed smelling salts to bring me round. But it would take something a lot stronger than that to get car sharing off the ground here.

Let’s assume, for a minute, that you could actually find a near neighbour who works close by, too.

Can both of you guarantee that you will start work at exactly the same time and, more importantly, finish within a few minutes of one another? I mean, these days, when half the population suffers from presenteeism and will sit at their desks long after the day’s work is done, what possible chance have you got?

Then there’s the other guy’s driving to worry about. Everybody sincerely believes that they are better behind the wheel than everyone else which is why so many couples have such spectacular rows in the car.

My wife, for instance, cannot park and I cannot let her get past the third attempt without saying something. But what if I was with a stranger? I’d burst.

And that’s just the parking. What if your car sharer thinks it’s fun to go the wrong way round roundabouts? What if you climb in on the first morning and he announces that he can never remember whether it’s red or green which means stop?

How do you explain, on day two, that you don’t want to go with him any more? It’s easy in America – you just say, ‘Look slimeball, you can’t drive and your breath smells worse’n a badger’s crotch’ – but you can’t do that here.

OK, let’s say you have found someone who drives well and works close to you, and for the same duration each day: what if he’s a berk? What if he is the sort of person who thinks having a sense of humour means having a vast repertoire of jokes?

Every morning. Hey! What do you call the box a satellite dish is attached to? A council house! Ha ha ha.

Every fibre of your body is telling you to punch him right in the mouth but you’re British so you have to sit there, smiling and waiting for the next joke, and the next and the next. Your only consolation is that while he’s telling funny stories, he is not giving you a blow-by-blow account of home brewing, or how to get brake dust off an MG wire wheel.

The trouble is, of course, that car sharing, despite the problems, does seem like a good idea. It is stupid that one person, driving to work, needs a 15 by 6 foot box all to himself.

But look. If you were to fill all the seats in your car each day, you would be sharing what amounted to a compartment with three people you either didn’t know, or didn’t like. Or both.

And you’d be cruising down the motorway behind another compartment full of people who didn’t know one another.

Indeed, you’d be in a huge long snake full of compartments which would give the jam something of a train-like quality.

Let’s face it: the whole point of using your car to go to work is that you can listen to the radio station of your choice while picking your nose. You can sing, rant, chat on the phone and generally revel in being on your own.

If sharing ever becomes compulsory here, I shall buy a bubble car.

I’ve just spent a month with the Renault Laguna V6 and will not beat about the bush: it was, without any shadow of doubt, the most boring car in the world.

It looks like the humbler four-cylinder versions so there is no way passers-by are able to tell that it cost not far short of £20,000.

If I were to spend that sort of money on a car, I would like my neighbours to be aware of the fact and the only way you could enlighten them with this Laguna is to keep the price tag on the windscreen.

Or offer to take them out for a spin. Inside, to make the outlay seem reasonable, you have a CD player with remote operation, air conditioning and electrical operation for everything. But this, I fear, is like sprinkling a bit of grated parsley on a piece of week-old cod.

The engine is unobtrusive and quiet but I was truly amazed to find that it displaces a massive 3.0 litres. You’d expect the car to be lively, but as it takes 10.3 seconds to get from 0 to 60, you’re in for a nasty shock. A Volvo 440 is faster.

I suspect the truly terrible automatic gearbox is to blame. Not only does it sap most of the engine’s limited power but it seems to have a mind of its own, changing up and down for no apparent reason, and with the gracefulness of a walrus that’s just been taken to a supermarket for the first time.

I haven’t finished yet. The seats are awful and the driving position is worse – it feels like you’re sitting on the car rather than in it. Indeed, the only redeeming feature I found in the whole car was a neat little storage hole for your sunglasses.

But other than that, it confirmed what I’d always thought – mid-range cars shouldn’t be entrusted with large engines and high prices. The Renault Laguna, like the Honda Accord and the Mitsubishi Galant and the Vauxhall Cavalier and all the others, is supposed to cost about twelve grand. It should have a four-cylinder engine and a suit jacket in the back window.

If you want to spend £20,000 on a car, then buy one that was conceived from day one to cost that much – a Saab, or a BMW or a Mercedes Benz – and not something that has had greatness thrust upon it.

Or you could ignore all that and buy a Ford Mondeo V6 LX.

Like the Renault, it looks just like every other Mondeo that you’ve never noticed but Ford do a nice little body kit and some fat alloy wheels which give it a touch of class.

But unlike Renault, Ford has not thought, Oh my God. We’re going to charge twenty grand for this car so break out the parsley. No, they’ve been realistic, and left the power seats, the CD and all the other wasteful toys in the parts bin.

You still get a sunroof, electric windows, power steering and a stereo but nothing fancy so as a result, this car only costs £16,295. That not only makes it cheaper than all the other tarted-up rep-mobiles but also cheaper than the serious players; the BMW 318i and the Audi A4 to name but two.

As far as value for money goes then, the Ford scores a solid twelve but when it comes to performance, it’s off the scale, and then some. This car rockets from 0 to 60 in less than eight seconds and what’s more, it feels fast. The engine roars and barks, the power delivery is immediate and the traction control is frequently needed to keep you on the grey bit.

If you are a serious driver who likes to press on a bit, you really can’t do much better than this. It is a remarkable and rewarding driving experience, but I fear few will ever find out. I mean, I know a sort of transport café near Newbury which does the best egg and chips in the world – just past Greenham Common on the left, heading towards Basingstoke – but no one is going to take a first date there.

No, people will continue to buy the slower, less well-equipped and smaller BMW 318i because BMWs impress the neighbours and fast Fords don’t.

Especially when they don’t start. Should you decide to bring a little common sense into your buying equation and actually go for the Ford, I do hope that you have more luck then me.

We have an ordinary 2.0-litre model in the family and it makes a third-world dictatorship look reliable. Barely a week goes by without an unscheduled pit stop and this, I guess, reinforces my original premise.

The Mondeo, like the Laguna and all the other mid range offerings, is a cheap car. And I don’t care what engine they shoehorn under the bonnet, it is still a cheap car. Remember that.

A year ago my wife and I spent nearly every moment of free time trying to think what to call our baby.

We knew it would be a girl so that narrowed the list down a bit, and we knew Janet was right out, so that narrowed it down some more. Losing Enid, Barbara, Denise and Brenda helped too.

I wanted to fit knives to the wheels of her pushchair and call her Boadicea, but eventually we went all conventional and settled on Emily Harriet. It was a tough job.

But can you imagine how hard it must be to think of a name for a new car, a name that not only works in any language but which, all over the world, conjures up the right image?

You can, of course, choose any word in any dictionary anywhere in the world, or, if that’s too limiting, you can make up your own word like Ford did with the Mondeo.

The trouble is that most of the best words have already been used by the Americans. Surely, the best car name of them all is ‘Thunderbird’ which says it all. Roll up at a party, announce that you have a Thunderbird and when you go, all the best-looking girls will go too.

Except if you’ve been beaten to it by Mr Mustang Man. It doesn’t matter that the Mustang in question has a feeble 2.3-litre engine and would lose a tug-of-war battle to a bat, the name says otherwise. The name says, ‘Hey girls. I’m hung like a donkey.’

Then there’s the Pontiac Firebird, the Dodge Charger, the Dodge Viper and the Superbird. These guys really know how to get the pulse racing.

The person who came up with Maestro, on the other hand, does not.

Indeed, choosing the right name for a car is a European blind spot. Maserati were definitely on the right track when they used to name their cars after winds – the Ghibli, the Khamsin and the Bora – and no one is going to say Diablo is all wrong for that piece of rolling thunder made by Lamborghini. Diablo is Italian for Devil.

But don’t think all is well. Remember, this is the continent where cars are called things like Cordoba, Montego and Golf. Ford, for heaven’s sake, has named all its lesser models after sizzling girly mags: Fiesta, Escort and so on.

Renault have had an even tougher time. They tried to call the 21 estate a Nevada, but the US state said no and then Daihatsu said that ‘Chamade’ was too close to their ‘Charade’ and it must go too. Thankfully, it was never sold in Britain, but they became so desperate recently, they called a top spec 21 the ‘Manager’.

That will go down in history as the stupidest name of all time even though Fiat have tried for the title more than once. Their seventies hatchback became known in Britain as the ‘Strada’ (road) because the original name, ‘Ritmo’, was shared with an American sanitary towel.

Since then, we’ve had the Fiat One, the Fiat Type and the Fiat Point which are all fantastically wrong.

But for almost unbelievable wrongness, look no further than Japan where I see the new, and completely bland, five-door Mitsubishi is called the ‘Carisma’. That’s like calling the Rover 400 the ‘Power Blaster’.

Mitsubishi have been in trouble before, with the Starion, which was going to be the Stallion until an American importer misunderstood a Japanese person’s attempt at pronouncing the ‘l’s.

Daihatsu take the Japanese honours though for calling one of its new cars the ‘Clever Little Fellow’. This is not a bird puller, but is better, I guess, than the Nissan Spam. It hasn’t happened yet but there’s time. There’s time.

I mean we already have the Nissan Silvia, the Nissan Gloria and the spectacular Nissan Cedric.

All of which proves that letters and numbers are always going to be more successful than names, if the car is in any way serious.

BMW, for instance, would never dream of giving one of its Teutonic masterpieces a silly name. No, a 5-series car with a 3.0-litre engine becomes a 530. Very German.

And it’s the same story at Mercedes where you have the C class, the E class and the S class. You know where you are.

But even this can lead to problems. I can never help smiling while driving along behind a BMW diesel because the badge says TDS, and that, as anyone who can do speed writing knows, is a short form for tedious.

Citroen came a cropper too with its Visa Diesel which it tried to sell here as the VD. And what about the BX diesel which they called the TRD.

But if you want the best name story of them all, you need to go back 40 years, to Japan, where Toyota was busy designing a new small car which would be sold in America.

And it wasn’t until the very last minute that the American importers convinced their Japanese masters that Toyopet would make the car more appealing than the intended name: Toyolet.

Hello. I drive a Toyolet.

You sure do buddy. You sure do.

To a geo-stationary satellite above Britain, I will have looked like a giant pinball over the past fortnight.

With my wife operating the flippers from our Battersea bunker, I’ve been despatched to the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the pastoral splendour of Dorset and the rain-lashed horror that is Birmingham. I’ve been to Bath, Sheffield, Northampton, Worcester and Eastbourne too.

In the course of these travels I’ve seen many species which were officially human but which didn’t look that way. In Sheffield, everyone seemed to slouch. In Eastbourne, half the population was dead or very, very close to it.

People in Bath have had their friendly genes taken out so that if you stop and ask for directions, they act like you’ve just trumped, and strut off. In a contest to find the rudest town on earth, Bath would walk all over Paris.

I have seen much in the way of countryside too. Lincolnshire was best and the farmers have thoughtfully chopped down all the trees so you can see more of it.

No such far-sightedness in Somerset where each 200-year-old oak, you just know, is shielding Jethro; someone with one eye and a penchant for camouflage trousers. He says his ambition in life is to ‘murder someone’.

Blackpool was fascinating. In my experience, every single town in the whole country has been changed out of all recognition in the last fifteen years. Out-of-town superstores have killed off high streets, which are now dominated by building societies and estate agents. But Blackpool is exactly the same as I remember it as a child, which was a pleasant surprise.

There have been different roads too, including the M1 which I simply cannot believe. Anywhere else in the civilised world, the man responsible for this ramshackle half-built and hopelessly inadequate country lane would have been killed and fed to his family. Who would then have been shot.