And then there’s the noise. Oh my God. Around town it’s fun. It snuffles and roars and farts, but last Saturday I had to drive up the M1 to the Midlands and, by the time I reached Watford, I’d had enough. I think my ears were actually bleeding. Manfully, I reached 70mph, at which point I started to understand how General Noriega must have felt when the Americans bombarded him with volume. I just wanted to get out. But as we know, that’s not possible.
I didn’t think life could be any more miserable. But then in Northamptonshire I hit the 700-mile roadworks that are monitored by average-speed cameras to make sure everyone does 50mph. There was a sign showing a middle-aged woman in a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket that asked drivers to be careful by saying: ‘My mum works on this site.’
Don’t be so bloody daft. Of course she doesn’t work on the site. No one does, or they’d have finished whatever it is they were supposed to be doing two years ago.
Anyway, the joy of being forced to drive at 50mph – at which speed the sound is roughly akin to the noise generated by the Grateful Dead – was short-lived because a new problem had reared its head: tramlining.
I have driven the 4C before in Italy and was assured that its alarming tendency to follow the camber would be solved in the UK by smaller wheels. Well, it wasn’t. Holy cow, it’s frightening. You’re trundling along, minding your own business, when suddenly the car will turn left. Or right. There’s no warning at all, and unless you are an actual Terminator with an ability to know the future, there’s nothing you can do to stop it happening.
And to make matters worse, it really was causing absolute mayhem. The occupants of every other car were swarming around it, trying to take pictures, and there was nothing I could do. If I slowed down, they slowed down, causing people behind to jam on their brakes, and I couldn’t speed up or I’d get three points on my licence. The mandatory 50mph limit is already one of the most dangerous aspects of driving in Britain because it causes bunching and frayed tempers. But in an Alfa it’s borderline lethal.
And so there we are. It’s a terrible car, riddled with the sort of faults that every other motoring manufacturer had addressed by about 1972. And yet I completely adored it. Every other vehicle, with its perfect refinement and its perfect electrics and its perfectly adjustable suspension, cannot help but feel like a machine. Whereas the Alfa, with its flaws and its tendency to go where it wants, feels human.
Will it go wrong? Probably. But so will your girlfriend from time to time. And you’re not going to swap her for a librarian, are you?
I may not have enjoyed getting out of the Alfa very much but I loved getting into it because it’s just so exciting to drive a car that has a mind of its own. I’ve driven a few vehicles over the years that made me happy but none of them even gets close to this. It’s a wonderful little package of deep, deep joy.
The problem is that I cannot realistically advise you to buy one. And worse, I could not even buy one myself. Yes, it’s everything a true petrolhead wants in a car, but the noise and the veering about and the veterinary operation that’s necessary every time you need to get out would drive me insane.
I wish Alfa would call because I’m not busy at the moment and I really do have a few ideas that would keep the wild-child spirit but sandpaper away just a couple of the really rough edges.
As it is, I’m left with a problem. Because, as a car, it gets two stars; one for having a fabulously clever stereo system and one for being very economical. But as a thing, I’d give it six.
31 May 2015
Usually, they send a Bluebeard. This time I got a blue rinse
VW Passat 2.0 TDI SE Business
Motor industry press officers are no fools. If a journalist asks to borrow a car to test, he is sent an all-singing, all-dancing, four-wheel-drive, top-of-the-range super-turbocharged model that has been fitted with every conceivable extra.
The reasoning is simple. The journalist will be so impressed by the 250mph top speed and the fold-away ski jump in the boot, he won’t realize that the suspension is made from milk-bottle tops and that the dashboard consists of recycled video-cassette boxes. And nor will he notice that, while the range starts at a headline-grabbing £15,000, the car he’s testing would cost more than a Gulfstream GV.
Volkswagen, however, is different. The Jetta I borrowed recently was in full rental-car spec, with wipe-down seats, wind-down windows and the sort of engine that you would normally find in a motorized pencil sharpener.
Asking me to review a car such as that is like asking a food critic to review a tablespoonful of rice or a political correspondent to report on a meeting where absolutely nothing of any interest happened.
This is not because the Volkswagen PR man is an idiot. Quite the reverse. He is one of the few people in the motor industry whom I actually know and he has a delicious wicked streak about 6 miles wide. He sent the Jetta round in Oxfam trim because he would enjoy watching me struggle to review it.
And now he’s done it again. Many car journalists who have reviewed the new Passat have tested the 4×4 SCR R-Line version, with central heating, a marble bath the shape of a carp’s head and seats upholstered in whale foreskin. Not me, though.
The model he sent round to my house was the 2.0 turbodiesel saloon. In SE Business spec. And don’t muddle that up with business class. ‘Business spec’ in Volks-speak means it’s designed for the rental market and Tommy the taxi driver. It means you get four wheels and a seat.
Now at this point Paul – the VW PR man in question – is sitting at his kitchen table wearing the smug expression of a man who’s boxed me in. He’s thinking, ‘You’ve been waffling away for a while now, sunshine, but you still have a thousand words to go. Let’s see what you’ve got …’
But Paul has made a mistake. Because the car he sent round had been painted in one of the most delightful colours I’ve seen in many, many, many years. It was very, very, very lovely. Really lovely. I’d like to describe it as a sort of dusky cornflower blue, or maybe the colour of a clear tropical sky just after the sun has done that green flash trick and slipped behind the western horizon. But neither of these things is quite right.
It could be described as the colour of cyanosis, the bluey colour that fingertips become when they’ve been starved of oxygen, but actually it’s closer really to the hue of the powdery flowers that blossom at this time of year on a Ceanothus thyrsiflorus bush.
White is now the most commonly chosen colour by motorists in Britain, and I’m not sure why, because while I am not in the least bit practically minded, white really looks good only when it’s clean. Which means, of course, that if you do go down the white route, you will have to spend your weekends on the drive with a bucketful of soapy water, a hosepipe and a faux chamois leather that cost just £2.75 and appeared to be a bargain, right up to the moment when you discovered it had the exact same ability to absorb water as steel.
There’s another issue too. Anyone who has a clean car is saying to the world that they have a tiny mind. People who wash their cars are telling passers-by that, in the house, visitors are expected to leave their shoes in the front hall and that dogs are not allowed on the furniture. Furthermore, they are saying they don’t like or have sex because of the mess it makes.
In continental Europe, where people have a very great deal of sex and there are goats and rabbits on all the furniture, the most popular colour appears to be grey. I was in Paris last week and in every single street, every single car without exception was the colour of a prep-school boy’s shorts. It’s the same story in Rome.
Part of the problem comes from the car-makers, which, at best, offer a range of ten colours. I don’t understand this. Farrow & Ball can offer every colour you’ve ever thought of, but BMW and Mercedes and Land Rover, and so on, seem to think that cars can be painted only in colours that were used by Charlie Chaplin. ‘Red, sir? What, like a dog’s penis? Crikey, no.’
Bentley does a nice range, but my favourite – since Škoda dropped the Cotswold-wind
owsill green it offered a few years ago – is Mazda’s candy-apple red. That said, though, VW’s Ceanothus thyrsiflorus blue is right up there.
The car manufacturer calls it Harvard Blue, but it is wrong because the colour of Harvard University is in fact crimson.
If it isn’t to your taste, you are rather stuck, because the only other colours that are available are grey, grey, grey, grey, white, black, brown and placenta red. Inside, there are nine options for the colour of the interior trim. These are: grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, beige, beige and beige.
I realize at this point that I now have only about 250 words left to cover the all-new Volkswagen Passat, but that’s fine. I’m not panicking because that’s more than enough. A point proved beautifully by the verse from Corinthians about love.
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
That’s love covered in just 60 words, so you can see 250 words is easily enough to cover the Volkswagen Passat SE Business saloon with the 148bhp 2-litre turbodiesel engine and six-speed manual gearbox.
So here goes. Ready? Good. Then we shall begin. It’s a very handsome car that handles nicely, uses little fuel and is extremely quiet and comfortable. Inside, everything is screwed together beautifully and everything is where you expect it to be. If ever I’m at an airport and the rental company gives me the keys to a car like this, I shall be very pleased.
There are now just thirty words left, which is enough to say that no petrol-powered versions are currently available but that an estate is.
There you go, Paul. I managed it. But next time I try one of your cars, can it please have a bit of angel dust?
7 June 2015
Does this Spanish fly? No, it’s a homage to catatonia
Seat Leon
This is one of the most important reviews I have yet written. Because, since I started testing cars thirty-one years ago, I have never once driven a Seat. The company has never offered and I’ve never asked because I really couldn’t see the point.
Unlike Jaguar or Honda or Chevrolet, Seat wasn’t created by one man with a vision and a passion for speed, beauty and power. It was created because at the time Spain was emerging from its Third World status and the government didn’t want its people squandering their beads and their chickens, or whatever currency they used at the time, on high-value imports such as cars.
So it did what all emerging nations do: set up a factory on home turf that made cheap little run-abouts and then put huge taxes on imported cars. The choice for Spanish consumers was simple: buy a Seat for £2.75 or a Volkswagen for £856 billion.
This may seem sound economic thinking but the fact is that, when you are making a car for people who are trading up from a mule, and there’s no competition and the beancounters are all civil servants, it’s not going to be very good.
The government didn’t even bother giving it a decent name. It’s all very well coming up with a statist acronym for the Spanish Car Company, but did it not think, ‘Wait a minute. If we sell this thing in the English-speaking world, Seat is going to look a bit silly’?
At least it didn’t go for Spanish High Industry Technology.
When I first started to notice Seat, it was making Fiat Pandas under licence and I didn’t bother driving one because why would I care about an Italian car made by a bunch of people who the week before had been shooting one another and stabbing cows?
Eventually, the deal with Fiat fell apart and Seat had a bash at going it alone. Do you remember what it came up with? Nope. Me neither. But it can’t have been much of a success because pretty soon its bosses were standing outside Volkswagen’s headquarters, hoping for assistance.
Today, Seat makes Volkswagens. They don’t look like Volkswagens, but if you examine every piece, by which I mean the engines, the gearboxes and all the switches, you will find they are identical to the engines, gearboxes and switches that you find in a Golf.
So why would you buy the Seat version? Who would choose to have his car made by Spaniards, who are good at fishing off Cornwall, when he could have the exact same thing made by Germans, who, let’s be frank, are good at making cars?
The answer is simple. Seat’s Golf – the Leon – is cheaper than VW’s Golf. But again, there’s a problem. Because if you want a cheaper Golf, you can buy a Škoda Octavia. Which is made by Czechs, who are also good at making cars.
The idea is, though, that if you buy a Seat you get a cheaper Golf with a bit of Mediterranean flair and pizzazz. A bit of that Barcelona angel dust. Which raises a couple of questions about the Seat Leon X-Perience SE Technology that was sent round to my house last week.
What Mediterranean flair? What pizzazz? What Barcelona angel dust?
Yes, I agree, it had very snazzy door mirrors, but apart from this it was easily the most nondescript waste of metal, glass and plastic since Microsoft’s Kin phone. And it was brown.
Seat tries to jazz this up by saying it’s actually Adventure Brown, but there’s no such thing. Adventure colours are purple and lime green. You never see a brown Hobie Cat or a brown jet ski or a woman in brown underwear. Unless she’s, like, ninety.
This car is supposed to put us in the middle of Barcelona, sitting in a fun little restaurant on a sunny day, watching the crowds go past that Middle Earthy cathedral, but in fact it’s as far removed from that as a monster truck is from the gurgle of a newborn baby. I tried as I drove along to imagine who on earth would want to buy such a thing.
But I couldn’t. Because I can’t think of anyone I’ve ever met, seen or heard about who would sit down with the calculator and say: ‘Right. I want a cheap Volkswagen, but it must be built by Spaniards, not Czechs.’
I assume, though, such a person must exist. So, for the benefit of the nurse who must read this out to him after she’s mashed his breakfast, here goes …
The car I tried is fitted with a 148 brake horsepower turbodiesel engine that has been tuned to deliver as many miles to the gallon as possible. A million times a second it takes note of where your foot is on the accelerator, what gear you’ve chosen, the barometric pressure, the ambient temperature and the engine temperature, before deciding – precisely – how much fuel should be delivered to the cylinders. And the result is: unless you give it a bootful of revs when setting off, you’ll stall.
Also, any attempt to use second for a low-speed manoeuvre means you will judder to a halt and people will point and laugh and you will feel foolish. I haven’t stalled so much since I last drove a Golf diesel, which, of course, has exactly the same engine.
Speaking of which. The X-Perience tag tells us that this car is an estate and has the four-wheel-drive system used in the Golf Alltrack and the Škoda Octavia Scout. And not only do you get the benefit of all-wheel drive, but it rides higher than the basic Leon, and some of the more vulnerable panels are shrouded in plastic. It might not be a bad farm car, this. Apart from the stalling. And the fact that an almost identical Škoda is cheaper. Certainly, the boot is huge.
Further forwards, you get a Golf steering wheel, a Golf satnav system, Golf climate control and Golf dials, all for only a fraction more than you pay for exactly the same stuff in a Škoda.
I liked the vast electric glass sunshine roof. But further investigation revealed it to be a £1,060 option. In fact, most of the stuff on my test car was an option. God knows what you get on the £26,905 basic Leon X-Perience SE Technology. Four wheels and a seat, probably.
To drive, however, it feels like a Lamborghini Aventador. I’m lying. I just wanted to think of something different to say because, actually, it feels like a Golf or an Octavia, and I bet you’re getting a bit fed up with that observation now. I know I
am.
So let’s conclude. I’m grateful to Seat for lending me this car because it reinforces every belief I’ve held about Seat’s cars. They’re a waste of time.
If they were bright and funky, ran on Rioja and had upholstery made from prawn shells, then I could see the point. They would offer an upbeat, flamenco alternative to a humourless Volkswagen.
But they don’t. The car I drove was boring. And brown. And you can buy an Octavia Scout, which is the same car, only better-looking, for £1,500 less.
14 June 2015
The Rangie Rolex: it’s big, it’s daft and your man can’t afford one
Range Rover Sport SVR
As my parents dropped me off at boarding school my dad reached into his pocket and presented me with a small box. In it was an Omega Genève Dynamic, and I welled up a bit. Partly because I was very frightened about what boarding school would be like, but mostly because I had never seen such a wondrous thing. A whole watch. Of my very own.
As the years dragged by, I suffered many terrible things. I was thrown on an hourly basis into the icy plunge pool, dragged from my bed in the middle of the night and beaten, made to lick the lavatories clean and all the usual humiliations that public school used back then to turn a small boy into a gibbering, sobbing suicidal wreck.
In the first two years the older boys broke pretty much everything I owned. They glued my records together, snapped my compass, ate my biscuits, defecated in my tuck box and cut my trousers in half with a pair of garden shears, but I made sure when I heard them coming that my watch was safely locked away.
Today, the Genève Dynamic has become something of a classic. James May recently bought one and took it to work, showing it off to everyone. ‘Look,’ he said, like an excited Eeyore. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ An opinion he held right up to the moment I said, ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve got one of those.’
Really? Page 7
