What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (17 page)

For the past couple of weeks, everyone has been running around, waving their arms in the air and wondering what in God’s name possessed the Indian government to express a preference for a bunch of Frog warplanes rather than the faster, more manoeuvrable and far deadlier Eurofighter Typhoon.

Some have said this is India sticking two fingers up at its former colonial masters. Some have said that France has offered to do some kind of behind-the-scenes nuclear deal as a sweetener. Some blame David Cameron, and others will undoubtedly point the finger at the
Top Gear
Christmas special.

But I suspect the real reason the Indians look set to go with the French is this: their Rafale plane is around £20 million cheaper than a Eurofighter. And it’s all very well saying that the British-backed plane has an operational ceiling of 55,000 feet – 5,000 higher than the French jet – because so what?

The Eurofighter was designed to hold back an invasion of western Europe. It’s designed to reach the dark blue edge of space so that it can shoot down spy planes. It’s designed to reach Mach 2 so that it can intercept Soviet bombers coming in low over the North Sea. It’s designed to twist and turn so that it can enter a dogfight with a fearsome MiG 29.

All of which is of no use to the Indians because the Tamil Tigers do not have any spy planes and the Bangladeshis do not have any low-level nuclear bombers. Yes, Pakistan can muster quite a few American-made F-16s, but these have a notoriously short range before they have to be refuelled. India, then, doesn’t
need technology. It just needs a plane with a gun on it. And frankly, the Rafale will do.

Today, with the arms race over, I have no idea why the jet fighter is being developed at all. The Americans announced recently that their new F-35 is bedevilled with many technical issues – such as it disintegrating every time it lands. And I can’t help thinking, What are you doing?

The US navy has its F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets, and it’s hard to see why these need replacing. Because it’s not like any other country in the world has anything even half as capable.

I must confess I sometimes think along the same lines when I’m musing about cars. Because where we are now is plainly good enough, and recent attempts to make cars better have made them, actually, a little bit worse.

Take the horsepower race as an example. Audi, BMW, Mercedes and to a certain extent Jaguar have been trying to outdo one another for years, so that each new model had to be more powerful than anything else on the market. Sounds fine. But we have reached a point where a road car simply cannot handle the potency of the engine under the bonnet. Try driving an AMG Mercedes up a gravel drive to see what I mean. It just digs a hole.

And then try doing a full-bore standing start in a Nissan GT-R. It’s so vicious, it hurts your head. Why would you want that? Why would you want a car that gives you whiplash and light bruising every time it starts moving?

The fact is that 350 horsepower is probably enough. And with only that much under the bonnet, there’d be no need for extremely expensive brakes, tyres and suspension components. Furthermore, less power from under the bonnet would mean better emissions, which would in turn remove the need for electronic power steering and flappy-paddle gearboxes, and engines that shut down at the lights and all the other green-sop trinketry that’s only necessary because of the sheer amount of fuel needed to produce a shedload of power that can never be used.

Maybe, then, in order to go forwards, we ought to go backwards a little bit. And that brings me neatly to the door of the Aston Martin DBS Carbon Edition. There are mutterings in the rectory that Aston Martin needs to make a new car fairly soon, that its current range has been around for too long. And received wisdom would suggest these mutterings are quite correct. Aston may be able to say that it has launched both the DBS and the Virage but both of these are DB9s with fancy bits added on. And we’re not fooled.

Now comes the DBS Carbon Edition, which sounds intriguing, but actually it’s just a standard car that has special paint. I do not know why the paint is special but there you are. So as I pulled out of my gates, I was ready to be a bit cynical, to suggest that the time has come for Aston’s Kuwaiti backers to cough up some development readies. But then I started to think, Right. And if they did, how would they improve on what we have here?

Would the new car be better looking? That’s highly unlikely. The DBS is about as close to perfect as a car can be. Would it be more powerful? The marketing department would insist on it, and would that be a good thing? Probably not. Because more power would mean more torque and that would mean the traction control would have to work overtime just to keep you pointing in vaguely the right direction.

No. The fact is that when the DBS first saw the light of day, I fell head over heels in love with it, and while it has been overshadowed in recent months by various new Ferraris and the Mercedes SLS, it remains an absolute joy.

The big V12 engine snarls and growls when you poke it with a stick but it settles down to a distant hum when you are just loping down the motorway. It’s much the same story with the suspension. Put it in sport mode and this is a proper racing car but leave it in ‘normal’ and it cruises. I know of no other car that pulls off this trick quite so well. Some are quite good at being Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But the DBS? It’s Dr Jekyll and Vera Lynn.

Better still, though, is the reaction this car prompts from other road users. Normally, when I’m driving something very expensive, people in vans are quick with a belittling observation about price, practicality, insurance or economy. But when they see the DBS, to a man and woman, they all say the same thing, ‘That is gorgeous.’

It’s not just here, either. It doesn’t matter where in the world we take our
Top Gear Live
show, one thing is constant: people always like the Aston best.

There are some issues, chief among which is the satnav system. It’s far better than the Volvo unit that was fitted in earlier models but it’s still way too complicated. Why, for instance, is the rocker switch that adjusts the scale of the map hidden behind the steering wheel? And why, just after you’ve found it, does it decide that, actually, it’s the switch for changing radio stations.

Then there’s the price. Mainly because we sort of know the DBS is just a DB9, we can’t understand why it costs far more. And nor do we fully understand why this Carbon Edition adds yet more. Mostly, though, the problem is that it feels like you are driving around in an old car. There’s no sense that you’re riding the technological wave.

You may feel that, as a result, your friends will not wish to speak with you any more. However, the fact is that sometimes, old school is better than new school. For proof of this, ring the Royal Navy and ask if it wishes it had kept its Harriers.

19 February 2012

Over the years I have watched several hundred games of car football. It’s a staple ingredient of the
Top Gear Live
show and is much like normal football, except in every single detail. There are, for instance, three players on either side, and each of them is in a car. The ball is 4 foot across. There are no goalkeepers and the game lasts until James May’s team has lost.

We have used many types of car, and, as a result, I’m in the unique position of being able to say what’s best if you want to go down to the park this morning for a drive-about with your son and his mates. I recognize this is a fairly limited sliver of the market, but I try to cater for everyone, so here goes. The Reliant Robin is hopeless. While the engine and in particular the gearbox are strong, it has a habit of falling over every time you try to cut inside an opposing player. Or track back. Or shoot. Or defend. Or do anything, really.

The Smart Fortwo is even worse. This also has a habit of falling over and, to complicate matters, the gearbox doesn’t allow you to switch from first to reverse quickly enough. Sometimes all six players can be stationary, as they wait for the car’s brain to allow the transmission to shift. This makes for a boring spectacle.

The Toyota Aygo is much better, as is the Austin Landcrab, but the best of the lot is the old Suzuki Swift. It’s small, nimble and tough. The only real problem is the windscreen washer bottle, which is located just behind the front bumper, where it is easily damaged.

And it’s not just car football in which that little car scored
well. It was also extremely good at ice hockey. I know this because, when we filmed the
Top Gear Winter Olympics
show some years ago, we used Swifts in the rink and they were epic, whizzing hither and thither in a blizzard of snow, with cheeky exhaust noises and panache.

The Swift is a rare thing – one of only a trio of cars that all three of us on
Top Gear
like. The others, in case you’re interested, are the Ford Mondeo and the Subaru Legacy Outback. I liked the Swift so much that when I reviewed it on these pages back in 2006 I toyed seriously with giving it five stars. It was as good as a Mini Cooper, I reckoned, but it cost a lot less.

Well, now there’s a new model. It’s noticeably bigger than before, which means it’ll be less manoeuvrable on the football pitch and more exposed as well. It also means it’ll be harder to park in a town. That would be a price worth paying if the extra length and width translated into more cabin space. It doesn’t. The rear seats are very cramped and the boot is almost amusingly small.

Happily, however, the extra size doesn’t seem to have affected the weight very badly. This is an unbelievably light car, which is good for fuel economy and good for speed. Very good, actually. I’ve done some checking and it has a similar power-to-weight ratio to that of the old Peugeot 205 GTI. And that’s a vital comparison …

I miss the old Peugeot and all of the other hot hatchbacks from the Eighties. There was a time when 12 per cent of all Ford Escorts sold in Britain were hotted-up XR3s and you couldn’t park in Fulham because every street was rammed with Lhasa green Volkswagen Golf GTIs. Every car maker made a hot hatchback then because we all wanted one.

Today everyone seems to have forgotten the recipe. The current Golf GTI is a lovely thing to drive, but all the telltale styling details that set the original apart from the standard models are gone. Take away the badge and the car now looks almost identical to the diesel.

Ford has gone the other way. Its hot Focuses look as though they’ve crashed into a motorists’ discount shop and every single thing in there has become attached. Spoilers, vivid brake callipers, scoops, vents. They’re vajazzles with wheels.

Then you have Renault. It does an excellent range of hot hatches but they’re all stripped out – racy, knowing. They seem to be saying that if you buy one, you are interested only in high-g cornering, and that was never the point of a hot hatch.

They were supposed to do everything. They were fast when you wanted them to be and restrained when you didn’t. They were supposed to stand out from the crowd but only if you were concentrating. And they were supposed to be cheap. Which counts out the Citroën DS3. And the Mini. And the forthcoming Audi A1 quattro.

The car makers would probably argue that there’s no point making a crash-’em-and-bash-’em hot hatch these days because people are more interested in space and style and they all want a Range Rover Evoque. But the only reason we all want an Evoque is that you aren’t making a thrill-a-minute, bung-it-into-a-parking-space and put-the-dog-in-the-back hot hatches any more.

Which brings me back to the Swift Sport. The twin-cam 1.6-litre engine is a little gem. It has a variable intake system and variable valve timing, so although it’s small, it’s nicely techie. Starting it – with a button these days rather than a key – is like poking a small dog with a stick. Immediately, it’s keen to be off, jumping up and down and making excited whimpering noises.

To keep that feeling alive, the gearing is incredibly short. Think west highland terrier rather than alsatian, or even spaniel. This means the motor is always on the boil, always at peak revs and therefore always ready to go. From standstill to 62 mph takes 8.7 seconds. Pretty much exactly how long it took a 1.6-litre 205 GTI, incidentally.

But there is a bit of a drawback here. In sixth, at 85 mph, it’s
doing 3000 rpm, which makes it noisy. Very noisy. I’m tempted to say too noisy. It gave me a headache.

The upside comes, though, when you get off the motorway, because, wahey, this is a car that takes you back to the mid-Eighties. It feels eager and crisp, so it turns even the most dreary journey to buy milk into a fun-filled extravaganza of puppy-dog enthusiasm, squealy tyres and grinning.

It’s not that fast, but this, remember, is a £13,499 car. To my mind, Suzuki has got the blend between cheap and cheerful exactly right.

The styling recipe is bang-on as well. The alloy wheels are just the right design and size, and it has two exhausts – on either side of the car.

Inside, the seats are buckety without being stupid, and you get exactly the right level of equipment – cruise control, air-conditioning, USB connectivity and seven airbags. There’s also a good radio.

The new car has had rave reviews from all the motoring magazines and specialist writers, and it’s got one from me, too. It’s noisy and the boot is microscopic. But other than these things, it’s brilliant and almost certainly the best small car on the market today.

26 February 2012

Recently Bristol crown court sentenced a bus driver to seventeen months in prison after he was caught on CCTV deliberately ramming his vehicle into a cyclist. I’ve watched the footage and it’s extraordinary. The bus driver comes alongside the bicyclist and then veers sharply to the left, flinging the poor man 10 feet through the air, breaking his leg and crushing his precious bike. It’s plainly a moment of madness. A temper tantrum. A spot of road rage that got out of hand.

But if you watch the footage again, carefully, you see that, to begin with, the cyclist is pedalling along quite slowly in front of the bus. And when the bus moves right to overtake, the cyclist appears to go right as well. Was it an act of provocation on the cyclist’s part?

For many years bus drivers have been told by the authorities and those who read the
Guardian
that they are knights of the road, eco-warriors on a mission from God. They were given their own lanes, and car drivers were ordered by Her Majesty’s government to get out of their way.

This went to their heads. So as soon as the last passenger was seated, they would simply pull out, even if a car was alongside. On many occasions I’ve been forced to swerve into the path of oncoming traffic by a bus that’s set off without warning. And, of course, if there had been a trial or an inquest, its driver would have been given a tree or some tofu for taking the good fight to those whose cars were making life so unpleasant for the world’s polar bears.

But then someone of a
Guardian
disposition decided that,
actually, bicycles were an even better way of going to work than the bus. So cyclists were suddenly given their own lanes, and their own special spaces at junctions. And there was talk that in any impact between a motorized vehicle and a bike, the driver would – no matter what the circumstances – be blamed.

So, all of a sudden the roads are filled with two groups of people who believe they have right on their side. It’s the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. It’s all the animals being equal but some wishing to be more equal than others. And the consequence is inevitable. One man is in prison. The other suffered a broken leg.

The only solution is to take away their special lanes and their priorities. It’s to make them understand that they may use the roads but only if they’re jolly careful, because roads have always been for ‘the people’. And the vast majority of people have cars.

Mind you, on Kensington High Street last week it didn’t feel that way. I thought at one point I’d become involved in a west London étape of the Tour de France. It was 7 p.m. and there were hundreds and hundreds of people with wizened bottoms and beards and idiotic hats and luminous clothing, cycling through red lights at way beyond the speed limit.

As they passed, many shouted abuse at me for daring to be there, stationary at a red light or cruising along at a mere 25 mph. Some banged on my doors. Some bared their teeth. It was awful and I considered carefully the idea of running one of them down. Maybe two.

Mind you, some of their rage may have had something to do with the fact that I was driving a Jeep Wrangler, which is a big American off-roader. They obviously hated it very much and that’s why I decided to leave them alone. Because I did too.

As we know, Jeep began by making rugged military 4x4s in 1941. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said the second world war could not have been won without the company’s first effort. It was a simple thing, too, which is why many claim Jeep stands for ‘just enough essential parts’.

Over the years, that original morphed gradually into the Wrangler. This was often converted by its fanbase into a high-riding, doorless, roofless monster with a V8 under the bonnet. It was usually to be found cruising around in Key West in Florida with a giant purple eagle on the bonnet. But, crucially, it still worked well off road. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable drives I’ve ever had in any car was in a Wrangler, going up the craggy Rubicon trail over the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Its heart may have been in San Francisco, but its soul was still in the back country.

Unfortunately Jeep decided to start selling its Wrangler in other countries – countries in which people do not talk loudly around the swimming pool and giant purple eagles are considered poor form. In Britain, for example, we have the Land Rover. And Germany has the Mercedes G-wagen. So Jeep has decided its Wrangler should become more restrained. More practical. More European. And it hasn’t worked at all. First, it is extremely ugly. And, second, you can’t see out of it. The blind spots are so big, bicycles are invisible. So are buses. So is the Albert Hall.

There’s more. The only way Jeep has been able to fit in rear doors and seats is by shunting the front seat so far forwards that you can – and must, in fact – operate all the controls with your face. To make matters worse, the satnav screen is so bright that once the sun has set, it’s as if you’re driving into the beam of an alien spaceship’s searchlight.

Of course, there are many levers and switches that mean it still works off road, but I’m afraid that on the road it’s not good at all. The 2.8-litre diesel engine feels as though it was designed by people who had no real concept of how such a thing might work. We have a name for these people: Americans.

Then there’s the suspension. It is very soft. So soft, in fact, that you can drive over even the most alarming hump at whatever speed takes your fancy and you won’t notice it at all. On the downside, it feels as if you may fall out on every bend. And the
steering is woeful. And, strangely, the ride on the motorway is unbelievably fidgety.

Then again, a Land Rover Defender is pretty hopeless on the road as well. But that doesn’t pretend to be a luxury tool, whereas the Wrangler I tested does. It has roof panels that lift out – if you have a PhD in engineering – and cruise control and lots of gizmos. It’s like a diamanté wellington. A gold-plated cowpat. A village idiot at the Savoy.

There’s a sign picked out on the dash that says, ‘Since 1941’. What it should say is ‘Mechanically unchanged since 1941’.

It’s a shame. I used to like the old Wrangler. I know it was a bit, ahem, Venice Beach, and that if it were a man, it would shave its scrotum and enjoy going to the gym. But it was a good and interesting take on the 4x4 theme.

The new version has lost all that. It’s trying to be a Land Rover for those who also want a few creature comforts. And for £28,000 it’s not as if you’re short of alternatives. All of which are considerably better. Except cycling, of course, or using the bus.

4 March 2012