And I amused myself for hours with the head-up display system, moving it up the windscreen to its highest point and then wondering what shape a driver would have to be to want it there. Another game was pushing buttons and guessing what you’d done. Half the time, nothing seemed to happen.
This is because, behind the scenes, the Lexus is phenomenally complicated. There’s a normal 4-cylinder 2.5-litre petrol engine that produces 153bhp, but then there are other motors too, doing all sorts of trickery. There’s even one in the back to power the rear wheels when you are in a field.
And they are all linked together by sorcery. It feels, when you put your foot down, as if it’s fitted with one of those awful cones-and-belt continuously variable gearboxes – technology that fills me with such rage that my hair starts to move about and my teeth begin to itch. But further investigation reveals that, although the transmission system is called eCVT, it’s different from traditional versions: all the units send their power into what in essence is a differential, and this sends the motive force to the wheels.
So you start the engine and nothing happens. You set off in electric silence, and then when you want to go faster you push the accelerator and the petrol engine zooms up to a certain point in the rev band and stays there until you decide you’ve had enough. I don’t like it at all and I cannot believe it’s the most economical solution. But the NX 300h is not aimed at me. It’s aimed at, um, people who don’t really care what the rev counter’s doing.
This is not a fast car. It’s not even on nodding terms with the concept of speed. Time and again, I found myself driving along with a huge queue of cars in my wake, wondering why everyone was being so aggressive and sporty all of a sudden. But they weren’t. It was me. I’ve never driven so slowly in all my life. I actually had to speed up for the cameras.
Which is fine because in this day and age lots of people just want to get home at night. And it’s good at that. Very good. It is extremely comfortable and remarkably quiet. There’s even an EV mode button that puts it in a pure electric motor setting, which would make it quieter still, but every time I pushed it I was told the system was temporarily unavailable. I therefore went back to playing with the head-up display.
It’s strange. The Lexus is sold as a hybrid, and it has two different power sources, so, technically, it is. But it can’t really run on batteries alone. So if you are looking for a car to save the polar bear, you’d be better off with a McLaren P1 or a Porsche 918 Spyder.
However, if you are normal, the Lexus is pretty good. It worked in a field, the boot is huge, the back is spacious and the air of good quality is all-pervading. The handling also is good for a car this tall and heavy – it’s really heavy – but despite its bulk, you can do hundreds of miles on a single tank of fuel. I enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it to anyone who for some reason doesn’t want a Range Rover Evoque.
I can’t for the life of me work out what that reason might be, but if you have one, then the NX, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is your answer.
4 January 2015
Dear Deidre, I had a fling with my first love. She’s lost it
Volkswagen Scirocco
Thirty-five years ago, having achieved 110 words a minute in my shorthand exam – by cheating – I became a qualified journalist and immediately went to work for my parents as a travelling sales rep flogging Paddington Bears. This is because they were offering me a company car.
I agonized for many months over what that car should be, because this was 1980, a period of great change. Most of my friends had Triumph Dolomite Sprints and Ford Escort RS2000s, and those certainly had a great deal of appeal. But the hot hatchback had just been born and, I dunno, that seemed to be even better somehow.
And then there was the Vauxhall Chevette HS, which, despite its rear-wheel-drive, rally-bred layout, wasn’t an old-school car, but then it wasn’t a hot hatchback either. And, as I recall, it could do 0 to 60mph in 7.9 seconds, which was 0.2 of a second faster than the Volkswagen Golf GTI. Which in turn was 0.1 of a second faster than a Ford Escort XR3. This sort of thing mattered then, more than almost anything else.
Eventually, Volkswagen came to the rescue by announcing that it would be fitting the engine from the Golf GTI into its Scirocco to create a hot coupé. I went for a fetching gold paint job that I teamed with brown velour seats and a brown dashboard.
Then, having bought the car, I immediately ruined it by fitting gigantic 205/60 white-walled tyres that filled the arches very well and looked extremely snazzy. But they made the steering wheel feel as though it had been set in concrete. Reversing into a tight space took about an hour and burnt 4,000 calories.
This is why there were no gyms back then. In the days before power steering we didn’t need them. We’d get a full upper-body workout every time we wanted to go round a corner.
However, despite the enormous effort required to drive my Scirocco, I loved it more than life itself, and in one year we did 54,000 miles together. I would drive to the pub and not drink for five hours so that I could have the pleasure of driving it home again. I’d go all the way to Wales to see a shopkeeper I didn’t like, who wouldn’t buy any bears, because it meant I could spend a whole day in my Volkswagen.
And when I wasn’t driving it I was talking about it, sometimes to girls, who would listen for a while to see if I might start talking about something else and then wander off when they realized I wouldn’t. But mostly to other men, who thought that because my car had front-wheel drive I might be a bit hairdresserish. I’d then pass them on the way home standing by their upside-down rear-wheel-drive cars and laugh.
I was born with a love of cars, a love that was ignited by the Maserati in my Ladybird Book of Motor Cars and nurtured by my first serious relationship, with a Ford Cortina 1600E. But it was cemented in place by that Scirocco.
Which is why I was delighted several years ago when VW said it would use exactly the same recipe to make a new Scirocco. It would simply take a Golf and give it a new, sleeker and more attractive body.
The trouble was that the body it selected wasn’t sleek or attractive. It looked sort of broken and fat at the back. And why would you pay a premium to buy a car that looked even worse than the hatchback on which it was based?
VW came up with another reason for not buying one when it brought out the diesel version. Because there we had a car that didn’t look as good as the hatchback, was based on the previous generation anyway and had an engine entirely unsuited to coupé motoring.
When it came along, James May and I tried to make some television commercials about it on Top Gear, and I seem to recall we managed to spark fury in the process. Mostly, I guess, on the part of Volkswagen, which was probably not best pleased to have its car and its excellent advertising ridiculed in a series of casually offensive jokes about Germans.
Truth be told, I didn’t really want to drive this car for all the reasons that you read about on the Dear Deidre page in the Sun. You know how it goes. You enjoy a year-long relationship thirty-five years ago. You hook up again, thanks to Facebook. And she has turned into a moose. Nobody wants that in their lives. Better to keep love from the past as a memory.
But then in the run-up to Christmas I went to retrieve my Mercedes from the garage and it had been in there for such a long time that it wouldn’t start. It was right on the edge. The starter motor clicked and there were many whirring noises, but despite a great deal of pleading from me, and a lot of counting to ten before trying again, there simply wasn’t enough juice in the battery to prod the V8 into life.
I needed four wheels and a seat. And a boot for all the presents. And all that I could get my hands on in the time available was the Scirocco diesel.
It still doesn’t look right and it still makes all the wrong noises when you start the engine, and there’s no getting round the fact that you are driving a car based on the Golf Mk 6, not the current and much better Mk 7. Oh, and you can’t see anything out of the rear-view mirror. An
d what’s this? Yes. It’s stalled.
It stalls a lot. Doubtless for reasons that have a lot to do with the polar bear, this diesel engine needs a bootful of revs before you can even think about setting off. And then, when you do, you think something is broken because there simply isn’t enough oomph.
On top of the dashboard are three dials in a raised binnacle. They tell you nothing you need to know but they look good. They look sporty. They tell you that you are a man in a hurry, but here’s hoping you aren’t, because this is not a fast car.
And the gearing’s weird. Time and again when cruising along the motorway I’d try to change up from sixth. And third is so high that in town it’s never really an option. Probably the polar bears again.
Yes, it’s priced well, and, yes, the Scirocco badge still carries a bit of kudos, thanks entirely to the Mk 1 that I fell in love with. It’s also beautifully made and blessed with some lovely touches – pillarless doors being the standout feature on this front.
But as an overall package it did nothing all week except remind me how much I wanted a Golf GTI. A modern version of the Scirocco, but with a better-looking body and the sort of engine you expect in a car such as this.
Volkswagen, then, has got it the wrong way round. It has built a coupé that forces you to buy the hatchback instead. I hope it addresses this when the time comes for a replacement.
11 January 2015
Sorry, sir, you can’t take that machine-gun in hand luggage
Audi TT
I was extremely drunk at the launch of the original Audi TT and can’t recall much about anything that happened. It was staged in Italy, or maybe France, and I seem to recall that one of the guests, whom I met there for the first time, was a spectacular pedant called James May.
In the interminable press conference, which went on for about two days, the German engineers droned on and on about every single nut and every single bolt, and all of that is a grey fog, but I distinctly remember one of them saying the styling was very Bauhaus.
This sounded important, so when I reviewed the car on the early incarnation of Top Gear I thought it would be a good plan to mention it. So I pulled a serious face and said: ‘The styling is very Bauhaus.’
Other motoring correspondents, including the pedant who went on to become James May, did much the same thing. Everyone did. And soon everyone in the land of petrol and noise was talking about this wondrous new Audi: ‘I love the Bauhaus styling,’ they all said, even though no one had the first clue what Bauhaus was.
Plainly, it means ‘looks that appeal to air hostesses’, because they very quickly became the TT’s core market. Seriously, have a look next time you’re out and about. Every single TT you see is being driven down the M23 by a woman with a raffish scarf and orange skin.
It’s slightly weird. Audi had made a sports car. It was turbocharged and four-wheel-drive and sleek and dynamic and Bauhaus, and it could zoom along at more than 150mph, and yet it was bought by people who drove it to the staff car park at Gatwick and left it there while they flew to Miami for a spot of light sex with the co-pilot.
With the power of hindsight, I can see why. It was curvy. And curvy cars such as the Nissan Micra and Lexus SC 430 don’t appeal to men. They come across as friendly and Noddyish. Curves are not aggressive and as a result have no place in a man’s straight-line world of guns and fighter planes and nineteenth-century former public-school boys drawing up African borders. The main reason men don’t eat lettuce is that it’s too curvy. We prefer chips, and KitKats, which aren’t.
Plainly, Audi has now arrived at the same conclusion, and as a result the new TT has lost the rounded edges. There are sharp creases and acute angles all over it, and I think it looks absolutely terrific. Inside, it’s even better. With the exception of the Lexus LFA’s, this is probably the best car interior I’ve encountered. The seats in my test vehicle were made from quilted leather such as you get in a Bentley – a £1,390 option – and I liked that a lot.
But what I liked even more was the instrument binnacle, because you can set it up to be whatever you want it to be. Speedo and rev counter. Or a satnav map, or a radio tuner. It makes an iPad look like a Victorian’s typewriter.
And because all the information is presented right where you are looking, space on the rest of the dash is freed up for big knobs, clear read-outs and yet more dinky styling touches.
That’s before we get to the indicator stalks. Normally, an indicator stalk is a sort of cylinder, but in Audi’s attempts to get rid of all the curves it’s now sharp-edged, so when you want to turn left or right it’s as if you’re signalling your intentions with a beautifully crafted hunting knife.
Now I would love at this point to tell you that the TT is not much fun to drive and that it rides like every other Audi: not very well. But I’m afraid I can’t, because it’s sublime.
I want to start with the brakes, which completely redefine the concept of how good such components can be. They won’t stop you any more quickly than the ones in any other car, but the feel through the pedal is extraordinary. It’s as though every equation about deceleration and trajectory and distance is fed directly to your mind each time you want to slow down. Frankly, the TT’s brakes make those in every other car feel like anchors made from trifle and iron filings.
And there’s a similar leap forwards with the button that changes how the car feels. Many cars have a facility such as this these days, and, if I’m honest, in most it’s pointless. In some the button makes absolutely no difference at all. In others it simply makes the vehicle extremely uncomfortable. But in the TT it’s a tool you’ll want to use a lot.
On a motorway you put it in Comfort mode, and the car becomes just that. In a town you put it in the Efficiency setting and it consumes fuel like an Edwardian sipping tea at a beetle drive, and on an A-road you put it in Dynamic and the exhaust starts to make farty noises during gear changes. And you go faster, and the faster you go, the faster you’ll want to go, because everything feels just right.
The steering, the turn-in, the ride, the acceleration and the brakes – oh, those brakes – give you the encouragement to be Daniel Ricciardo, and the TT is so good you will feel you’ve succeeded. It’s fabulous.
And yet here is a car that has two back seats into which any normal person could fit, provided they had no legs or head, and a boot that is genuinely useful. It’s practical and economical and safe, and quiet and unruffled, and it’s an Audi, which means it’s a Volkswagen, and that means everything is screwed together properly.
This, then, is Audi’s best car in decades, and yet I couldn’t actually buy one because … well, let me put it this way. Imagine Agent Provocateur putting a Y-shaped front on to its latest line of thongs and marketing them at men. You still wouldn’t, would you?
Such an undergarment might be practical and finished in a fabric that appealed to your inner testosterone but you couldn’t go round telling people that you were wearing Agent Provocateur underwear.
And there’s another issue. By fitting the new model with sharp edges and the sort of tech you normally find on one of Tom Clancy’s stealth destroyers, Audi runs the risk of making the nation’s air hostesses think the car’s become a bit unnecessary. A bit stormtrooperish.
And that’s a problem. It’s a machinegun in a dress. A car with a badge that appeals to BA’s cabin crew and dynamics that will go down well on the nation’s automotive web forums. Which means Audi has ended up with a brilliant car … that no one is going to buy.
25 January 2015
It’s drizzling, I’m doing 2mph … and all’s well with the world
Ferrari California T
A recent report suggested that people who use Apple iPhones are more intelligent, more successful and, of course, better-looking than those who use telephones made by other companies. But I’m not sure this is accurate.
I have an Apple iPhone and I’m well aware that it is riddled with faults. The map feature doesn’t work, the battery life i
s woeful, its camera is up there in quality with a Zenit SLR from 1973 and the screen smashes whenever there’s a light breeze. And I can’t update to the latest model because experts tell me it’s all bendy.
There’s more. I recently bought a new laptop and loading it with all my data was a nightmare simply and only because of Apple, which wanted my password seven times before announcing that I’d entered it all wrong and that I’d have to come up with a new one that must feature a capital letter, a number, a cave drawing, a fully working model of the Tirpitz and three letters from my mother’s middle name.
Then, when I’d come up with something it liked, I was told not to write it down anywhere. Which I didn’t. Which meant I’m now in a bit of a pickle because all my other devices won’t work unless I remember what it was. By Thursday I was wishing Steve Jobs had never been born.
But I will not switch to another brand because I simply cannot be bothered to learn how it all works.
We see this with everything. I have a PlayStation and won’t entertain the idea of an Xbox because it all seems to be the wrong way round. I have a Gaggia coffee machine that is utterly and completely useless but I can’t change to one of George Clooney’s Nespressos because I don’t have enough hours in the day to work out what its buttons do.
Car firms plainly understand this, which is why they all use completely different command and control software. After you’ve spent a year learning how to turn the bossy satnav voice off, you are not very inclined to switch to another brand and learn all over again.
Really? Page 2
