What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (13 page)

You may dream of driving a convertible car through the mountains of southern France on a beautiful summer’s day. But, having done this sort of thing on many occasions, I’m able to tell you that you will arrive at your destination with a comically red nose and a shirt that appears to have spent the past few months at the bottom of a stagnant pond.

As a general rule, you should not drive a convertible with the roof down when it is more than 70 degrees. But here’s the problem. If you try to drive a convertible when it’s less than 70 degrees, pretty soon you will notice that your fingers have frostnip, that your nose has fallen off and that you are in the advanced stages of acute hypothermia.

It’s not just the temperature that causes problems, either. It’s also the wind. Wind is the most debilitating of all climatic phenomena. I have experienced extreme cold at the North Pole, and, while it’s extremely unpleasant, the human frame can cope. It’s the same story with extreme heat. I once interviewed a man, in December, in the Australian outback, and at no point did I feel I was suffering from the onset of madness. I’ve also been drenched without problem. But wind is different. In one hour at our holiday cottage on a peninsula on the Isle of Man in March, I became a drooling vegetable, incapable of rational thought.

Wind is like a barking dog, or an early-morning Italian strimmer. It’s inconsistent. There’s no regularity or predictability. The noise goes away but never for very long, and you never know when it will be back. I don’t know why the CIA uses waterboarding to extract information from suspects; just put them on
a boat in the Irish Sea for ten minutes and they’ll tell you anything you want to know.

Wind also messes up a girl’s hair. This is a fact. Every girl I know loves the idea of driving with the roof down, but after just a few moments every single one wants to put it up again.

Even if you are impervious to heat, cold and the constant pounding from Uncle Hurricane, you still have the problem of embarrassment. This is very real. You may think, as you cruise about in your convertible, that you look good. But unless you are Angelina Jolie or Pierce Brosnan, which you are not, I can assure you that actually you look a tool.

What message are you giving out? That you are carefree? That you are young at heart? That you are available? But you aren’t. You’re middle aged and a bit pathetic. Driving with the roof down when you are paunchy and balding is like having a sign on your desk that says, ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here …’ There is a rule we devised on
Top Gear
. Once you are past the age of twenty-seven, you can drive alfresco only when it is safe to drive naked. In other words, when no one is looking. Because if people are looking, they will laugh at you.

To sum up, then, driving a convertible is uncomfortable and will cause other road users to think that you are a prat with manhood issues. And yet, despite this, we buy more convertibles in Britain than any other country in Europe. And we are certainly the only country where you will find people going to work dressed as Scott of the Antarctic simply so they can get the roof down. We are all mad.

Perhaps this is why Volkswagen is now offering two versions of the Golf convertible. There’s the Eos, which is a Golf with a folding metal roof, and the Golf, which is a Golf with a folding canvas roof. I’ve always rather liked the Eos, but I will concede that it is quite expensive. The new Golf is not: £25,000 for the GT version I drove is really not bad at all. And the diesels cost considerably less.

The roof on the new car is a triumph. Even though it’s the
size of a family tent from Millets, it can be raised or lowered in less than ten seconds. And, what’s more, even if the lights turn green before the manoeuvre is completed, you needn’t worry. Because it all still works provided you keep your speed below a precise and Germanic 18 mph.

When it’s up, the refinement is genuinely astonishing.

You can drive at motorway speeds and there is absolutely no sense at all that you’re separated from the slipstream by only a pac-a-mac. And things are similarly amazing when you fold it away. Gone is the hysterical, hair-whipping madness you endured in the original Golf cabrio. Provided you use a sturdy hairspray, you have no worries at all.

Another thing that’s gone from the original is the rather awkward-looking roll-over hoop. That car was built by Karmann, but you would have been forgiven for thinking that actually it had been constructed by Silver Cross. The new car, built by VW itself, also has a roll-over hoop, but it’s hidden away and will burst forth only if it thinks you’re about to turn the car over.

Sadly, however, there’s something else that has gone missing: any sense of joie de vivre. Those early Golf drop-tops were joyously raucous and wonderful, with their peppy 1588 cc injected engines. The car I drove may have been badged as a GT and it may have developed 158 horsepower – nearly 50 more than the original – but it’s not what you’d call peppy.

It’s an interesting engine. Although it’s small – just 1.4 litres – it is fitted with a supercharger, which you don’t notice, and a turbocharger, which you do. On a motorway, if you caress the throttle pedal, you feel it working, girding its loins, preparing extra boost for when you stop the foreplay and dive right on in.

However, when you do dive in, it pulls up its knickers and won’t deliver. I suppose the fact is that the Golf cabrio is a heavy car and a 1.4-litre engine simply can’t deliver enough oomph to make you nod appreciatively.

That said, it’s refined and economical, and the moderate
power sort of suits the comfy ride. This is a car for cruising rather than blasting about.

The interior? Well, although the boot’s quite small, the car’s fairly spacious. However, like all Golfs, it’s a bit like the inside of Eeyore’s head. Gloomy and dark. You even have to pay £130 extra for what VW calls the ‘luxury pack’. Although, as far as I can see, all this does is give you fancy door mirrors.

There is one stupid thing. The radio tells you what song you are listening to at any given moment, which is a nice touch, but it relays the message by scrolling huge flashing letters across the screen. It’s as if you’re sitting in Times Square.

It’s actually quite easy to sum this car up, though. In the olden days the Volkswagen Golf was a fun, lively little thing, and the original cabrio was an extension of that. Today the Golf is a byword for common sense and dour practicality. And the new soft-top is a reflection of that.

I can’t see the point, frankly. If you want a convertible, you want something that’s a bit daft. And this new car … just isn’t.

1 October 2011

Douglas Adams said the answer was forty-two. He was wrong, though. It doesn’t matter what question you are posing; the answer is always a diesel-powered Range Rover Vogue SE.

What’s the best car for taking the children to school? What’s the best car for a day’s shooting? What’s the best car for a drive to Scotland? What’s the best car for a quiet drive home after work? What’s the best car for crossing Africa? What looks best in a field? Or in Knightsbridge? Range Rover. Range Rover. Range Rover.

This week I drove the new and completely insane Mercedes C 63 Black Series. It is a car designed and built specifically to eat its own tyres. One set lasted just twenty-five minutes. I absolutely loved the madness of the thing. It’s a hoot. But for life in the real world? No. I’d rather have a Range Rover. I’m not alone, either. Just recently I was at the home of a leading light of what the
Daily Mail
calls the Chipping Norton set. Fourteen couples were present, and every single one of them had turned up in a Range Rover.

We have a little secret on
Top Gear
. Well, Hammond and I do. We know that, no matter what car we review, it’s not as good as a diesel Range Rover. We daren’t ever say this out loud, though, because it would render the whole show pointless.

Hammond has about 700 cars, several thousand motorcycles and a helicopter. And you may think he spends many hours in the day wondering what to drive next. He doesn’t, though. He always uses his Range Rover. I always use mine. Because whatever we’re doing, it’s the answer.

That said, Land Rover has been trying to spoil it with a chintzy Wilmslowfication programme of adding completely unnecessary bling. The company has it in its mind that a Range Rover does not need to look good everywhere. Only behind the electrically operated golden gates of a brick and plastic many-pillared mansion on the Prestbury Road. And there’s an issue with the battery on new models, too. They go flat for no reason.

There have been other mistakes as well, chief among which is the Range Rover Sport. It’s no such thing. Underneath, it’s a Land Rover Discovery, which means it weighs more than Dorset. So it’s not a Range Rover. And it’s not sporty, either. And it doesn’t have a split, folding tailgate, which means there’s nowhere to sit at a point-to-point. It’s a silly car.

But not half as silly as the Evoque seemed to be when I first heard of it. It would be a Ford Mondeo chassis on stilts, with a four-cylinder engine and an interior designed by Victoria Beckham. It sounded as if Land Rover had taken leave of its senses. This tanning salon with windscreen wipers would ruin the whole brand.

I was wrong, though, because the Evoque is brilliant. It’s one of those cars in which I had to spend hours trying to find something – anything – about which I could complain. And all I could come up with is the dip switch, which requires a bit more effort to operate than is strictly necessary.

Some say that the plastics you can’t see are a bit flimsy. But who cares about that? The plastics you can see look great and are mostly covered in nicely stitched leather. The interior is fabulous and, in the five-door model I tried, spacious, too.

Oh, and some have been saying it’s too expensive. But if that were true, Land Rover wouldn’t have already taken 30,000 orders. You mark my words on this. Soon you will not be able to move for Evoques. It will overtake hydrogen to become the most abundant element in the universe.

The car I tested had a 2.2-litre diesel engine, which was
smooth, returned 44.1 mpg and provided enough oomph to get from 0 to 60 faster than an original Golf GTI.

The handling was good, too; and the ride. But only in Normal mode. If you engage the Sport setting, the whole car starts immediately to pogo. This, however, is the mode you should select, because when you push the button the dials change from a silvery blue to a vivid scarlet.

You can also change the cabin lighting from a cool vodka-bar blue to a burlesque red. And this is just the tip of a techno iceberg, which must mean there is more wiring behind the scenes in this car than in an Airbus A380. Take the television for example. It sits in the middle of the dash and it’s capable of showing two things at the same time.

This means my wife was able to watch the French beat the Welsh while I looked at the satnav. How’s that possible? Even James May is stumped.

Or I could choose to look at the live feed coming from one of the five cameras mounted on the outside of the car. Or the trip computer. The central command unit in an Evoque is the best in the world. You spend so much time playing with it that journeys pass in a flash. And, because you are rarely looking where you’re going, a bang and a wallop as well.

Of course, Land Rover wasn’t content to put this excellent car on sale and revel in the plaudits and the profit. So a big cheese said at its launch that off-road capability wasn’t really important any more. It’s a silly thing to say when you are running Land Rover. And doubly silly because it’s so obviously not true.

That’s why the Evoque rides farther from the ground than even the Freelander, with which it shares many components. It’s why the angles of attack are so good, allowing you to climb and depart from steep inclines without biffing the front and the rear. And the Evoque is fitted with the same off-road electronics program as you find in the big Range Rover.

What we have here, then, is a proper Range Rover that is also an Audi TT, a hot hatch, an off-roader and a branch of Dixons
all rolled into one tiny, easy-to-park package. If I had a job selling BMW X3s or Ford Kugas or any other high-riding semi-off-road car, I’d be on the lavatory, whimpering. Because anyone who wants such a car and doesn’t choose the Evoque is so mad, they will have had their driving licence taken away.

Actually, it’s like an iPad. The truth is that if you have a smartphone and a laptop – which you do – you don’t need one. But I bet that didn’t stop you splashing out, did it?

I have the same problem with the Evoque. I have a seven-seat Volvo and a big Range Rover and a fast Mercedes. I have absolutely no need in my life for an Evoque, but I want one. And you will, too. Especially when I tell you that there’s talk of a hot version with the engine from the Ford Focus RS.

I may have to invent a new star rating for that. Because this morning’s plain Jane diesel – despite the wonky dip switch – is an easy five-star car. It may even be more than that. It may be the new forty-two.

30 October 2011

Almost no one wakes up in the morning and thinks, I know. Today, I shall start a car company. And those who do make this curious lifestyle choice never decide to make a small hatchback or a solar-powered trike that could be used in the emerging world. No. They always, always, always think, I shall make a supercar.

Usually, this is foolish. Oh, you may have a mate who is a dab hand with glass fibre and you may have a considerate bank manager who did a bit of racing in his day and likes the idea of your quad-turbo, multi-supercharged 300 mph road rocket. But what you are actually starting is a corner shop. And I’m sorry but Ferrari and Lamborghini are the supermarkets. And, as a result, their carrots are going to be more orange and cheaper than yours. Which means that pretty soon you will get a letter from your previously supportive bank manager that begins thus, ‘I am disappointed to note …’

I look at the efforts from Noble and Koenigsegg and Zenvo and Spyker and Saleen and I’m afraid I can’t help thinking that these cars, while interesting and commendable, are ultimately a shoreline on which some poor blighter’s hopes will one day be dashed.

You go to the Geneva motor show and every year there’s some poor chap in a bad suit, sitting in the unlit lowlands of the hall, desperately hoping that someone will notice the terrible car into which he’s ploughed his life savings. And you always think, Why?

The Ferrari 458 is a stunning, bewildering, brilliant, intoxicating
blend of power, finesse, poise, technology, styling, rage, speed and g. It was created by some of the most extraordinary minds in the automotive world in one of the most advanced factories. And forgive me, but you aren’t going to be able to make something better in a shed at the bottom of your garden.

Which brings us neatly on to Morgan. Unlike any other small car company, it does not try to beat the big boys. It simply makes stuff that you can’t get anywhere else. Sound business, if you ask me.

What Morgan makes is a range of cars for people who still believe it’s 1938. People who use the word ‘bally’. Enthusiasts of the side parting. Fans of sheepdog trials who like to get under the ‘old girl’ at weekends to do a bit of burnishing. Not me, in other words. In recent years there have been attempts to bring the company to a point where the second world war has actually begun, with cars such as its Aero. But this is dangerous because when you lose that traditional Morgan ‘look’, you’re going to alienate your customer base. ‘Pah. The old girl looks like a bally Nissan,’ is what they’d say.

Plainly, the people at Morgan thought the same thing, which is why they’ve now decided to go back to their roots, to a time when someone had invented the wheel … but not four of them. Morgan began life making three-wheelers and the company is at it again with what is surely the most preposterous car on the market today.

Imaginatively called the Three Wheeler, it started out as an American engineer’s homage to Morgan’s Neolithic approach to car design and manufacture. He built a bike-engined three-wheeler and the powers that be at Ye Olde Workshoppe in Malvern thought, ‘Golly. That bally Yank may be on to something here.’ They went over there and bought him out for a reputed sum of twenty guineas. And some beads.

First, Morgan’s engineers ditched his Harley-Davidson engine and replaced it with something called the X-Wedge. It’s a 2-litre air-cooled V2 with a solid forged crank and three belt-driven
camshafts. But the layout is nothing compared with where it is. In short, it’s not in the car. It’s slung out in front, where it sits like a big, complicated bumper. There is, so far as I can see, absolutely no reason for this.

Enthusiasts say that because the engine is air-cooled it’s better that it sits exposed, but I don’t buy this. The engine in a Volkswagen Beetle is air-cooled and that sat inside the car, not overheating, just fine. I suspect it’s not in the car so that people can look at it and get all adenoidal and nostalgic about how life was better in black and white.

Of course, putting a two-cylinder engine in front of the car is nothing compared with what they’ve done at the back, which is to fit just one wheel.

I should imagine that when Morgan enthusiasts see this, many will quickly develop a noticeable bulge in their Rohans. Whereas I stood there thinking, ‘Have these people never seen a three-legged dog? It doesn’t work. And neither will that.’

Amazingly, though, it does. I know better than most that a Reliant Robin falls over whenever it is presented with any sort of curve and any sort of forward momentum. That’s because Reliant chose to fit a single wheel at the front. Morgan, however, has turned everything around and fitted a single wheel at the back. The stability is remarkable. It takes a while to get the confidence to push, but push you can until, eventually, you discover that it will get round Donington’s Old Hairpin at 80 mph. At almost exactly three-quarters of the speed that would be possible if it were an actual car.

Other things worthy of note? Well, the vibrations are bad, and if you are more than, say, 3 foot tall, you may have to take a leaf out of the car’s book and leave a limb at home. Also, at £30,000, it is expensive.

However, I’m afraid to admit I rather liked it. I like the way Morgan painted it to look like a second world war fighter plane – something most Morgan owners think has only just been invented – but most of all I like the way that it feels so completely
and absolutely different from anything else that is allowed on the road.

One of the big differences is that it’s very difficult to reach the brake pedal. Another is that your head’s in the slipstream and your right arm is like the engine, sitting outside the bodywork.

Even the engine feels weird. Because there are only two cylinders, the torque comes in staccato bursts. One second you have enough to fell a tree; the next you’re becalmed. Morgan even had to fit a cushioning device to the running gear so that the Mazda MX-5 gearbox could cope.

And yet, you can do a doughnut in it. And you can leave the lights in a cloud of smoke as that single rear tyre does its best and fails to put the power on the road. I bet if you really wanted, you could make it buzz the bally tower. After five minutes behind the wheel, I began to think I might be Kenneth More.

Is it fast? No. Is it safe? Perhaps not. Is it practical? No. Is it comfortable? Yes … compared with being stabbed. But did I enjoy myself in it?

Absobloodylutely. Let me put it to you this way. You have a choice of going to Paris this afternoon on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Would you prefer to make the journey in a comfortable Airbus A320, or a draughty, noisy Spitfire? My case rests.

6 November 2011