I really have. Sometimes I take it out and wind it up and remind myself that, no matter how awful life might be, it was, from 1973 to 1975, one hell of a lot worse.
I would like to start wearing the Genève again. But there’s a problem. Since those days, watches have stopped being an heirloom that was presented by fathers to sons on important days and worn for life. And have become symbols of God knows what.
I fear that if I wore what is obviously a seventies watch, people might think I was being postmodern or ironic or some such nonsense. And I’d hate that, because as a general rule I pretty much despise anyone whose watch face is deliberately interesting. Which in certain circles today is: pretty much everyone. I saw a man the other day wearing a watch that was a) electric blue and b) about the same size as his face. I don’t doubt for one minute that it had cost about £60,000 an acre, and, boy, did he want you to know it.
I’d also like to bet that in a special mahogany box in his dressing room there were several other watches, and that raises a question: why? Owning two watches is like owning two irons, or two tumble dryers. It’s totally unnecessary.
Why would you buy a watch when the one you are currently using still works? They don’t – and I won’t take any argument on this – go out of fashion. And there has been no big technological breakthrough that means they are now able to keep time more efficiently than they did in the past.
I like a nice watch. I look with great attention at all the 200-page features about them in GQ magazine and I have been known to pause for several moments to look in a jeweller’s window. But I wouldn’t actually buy one, because what’s the point? My current Omega Seamaster is still going strong and I don’t doubt for a moment that the only thing that will stop it will be the incinerator into which they put me when I’m dead.
I’m going on a bit here so I’ll come to the point. When did Rolexes become naff? There must have been a time when they were elegant and beautiful and worn by people with taste and discretion. But then one day they became the timepiece of choice for people called Steve. And now I think it’s fair to say the only thing in the world that’s worse than a fake Rolex is a real one.
I don’t doubt for a moment that they are well engineered and designed to survive a nuclear holocaust, but you only ever see them sticking out from the cuff of a suit that’s a bit too shiny, wrapped round the tattooed wrist of an arm that’s a bit too thick.
And that brings me neatly on to the Range Rover. Not that long ago Range Rovers were the very embodiment of quiet good taste. And underneath the raffish, stately exterior they were extremely capable. You could buy a BMW or a Mercedes, but you would end up needing a new wing after you’d crashed in slow motion into a gatepost, having failed to traverse a muddy field. On the correct tyres a Range Rover has always been miles and miles better than anything else. It’s been a world-class car. A gem. An all-time classic.
But now something is going wrong because Range Rovers are becoming like Rolexes: a bit naff. I think I know why. They have always been extremely expensive, which meant that everybody who couldn’t afford one had to buy something else. But now things have changed because there’s a Range Rover Sport and a Range Rover Evoque and the Land Rover Discovery Sport, which looks like a cross between the Range Rover Evoque and the Range Rover Sport.
And that means every Steve in the land is now running around in one, with his ridiculously thick tattooed arm hanging out of the window.
It’s as though it has suddenly become possible for the mildly well-off to buy themselves a title. And what it means is: the really well-off who would ordinarily buy the big, proper version of the Range Rover with the split, folding tailgate are thinking, ‘Oh, Lord. I can’t drive the same car as my plumber. I must get something else.’
But what? There is nothing else. Unlike Rolex, which has competition from about a thousand other brands, there is no alternative to a Range Rover. You can get machines that work as well in the fields and you can get machines that work as well on the road. But you cannot get one car that can do both things quite so well as the King of Solihull.
And now, finally, we arrive at the car I’m supposed to have been reviewing. The new Range Rover Sport SVR. It’s ridiculous in every way. It’s ridiculously expensive and ridiculously unnecessary. And it has a supercharged 5-litre V8, so it is ridiculously thirsty and ridiculously fast.
I mean, if you want a car that goes from 0 to 62mph in about a millionth of a second and has a top speed of several thousand mph, why buy something with the frontal area of a house and the fuel consumption an of an oil-rig disaster?
Yes, it handles extremely well for something that’s bigger than a Scottish island but, if that’s what you want, why not buy a Jaguar, which has roughly the same engine, uses less fuel, goes even more speedily and costs less?
It gets worse because the ride in the Sport SVR is woefully abrupt. It’s the price you pay for its ability to lap the Nürburgring in two seconds dead.
It is a stupid car and I loved it very much indeed. Because this is a Range Rover you can buy knowing with absolute certainty that the man who comes to service your electric gates won’t have one as well.
21 June 2015
Common sense, pah. Look at this tasty Porsche pudding
Porsche 911 Targa 4 GTS
Anyone who buys anything for practical reasons is almost certainly a bore with a cardigan, a no-feet-on-the-furniture rule and so much time on their hands they can spend an entire afternoon reading online reviews of dishwashers.
Who can be bothered to write an online review of a dishwasher? They’re all the same. They’re white and boxy, and after they’ve finished making your dishes clean they issue a succession of beeps, telling you they must be emptied instantly, even if you are watching Game of Thrones and someone’s just got their kit off.
I hate Which? magazine. I hate every single thing it does and every single thing it stands for. I hate having to share a planet with people whose job is to test kettles. And I hate, even more, people who read their findings before deciding what sort to buy. It’s an effing kettle, for God’s sake. Just buy the blue one.
I keep being told there are now better phones on the market than an iPhone, and I’m not interested. Yes, they may have better cameras and battery life and they may sort pictures by where they were taken rather than when (which is idiotic), but an iPhone looks nicer and that’s the most important thing. I hate people who don’t have iPhones.
I also hate people who buy Kias, because they did not use any emotion at all when making their purchasing decision. They read road tests, doubtless in Which? magazine. They looked at online reliability surveys. And possibly even made comparative resale charts on the kitchen table. People such as this should be sent to prison.
There’s nothing wrong with a Kia. They’re good cars. But nobody’s buying them because they’re good. They’re buying them because of some finance deal or some extended-warranty package. Which is why, whenever I’m pulling up behind a Kia at a set of red traffic lights, I’m tempted to run into the back of it on purpose. To punish the chap behind the wheel. Who will then have to spend the next two months of his life researching injury lawyers to find what firm would be best at convincing a judge that he really does have whiplash.
All of which brings me on to yet another review of the Porsche 911. There are many models in the current range, and if you ask a 911 enthusiast to talk you through the subtle differences between each, you can be sure that by the end of the conversation one of you will be dead. Because either you will kill him to shut him up, or you will kill yourself.
All you need to know is this. If you have any common sense at all, you will buy the Carrera S, because if you buy anything more exotic than that you are wasting your money. Happily, from Porsche’s point of view, most of its customers don’t have any common sense and almost all of them think their lives will be enriched if they buy a 911 with no roof, or with four-wheel drive, or with a turbo or with some scaffolding in the bac
k.
The result: Porsche made more money last year from selling almost 190,000 cars than its parent company, Volkswagen, made from selling more than 4.5 million.
Do you really think it costs £401 to paint the instrument dials yellow, or £170 to make the key fob the same colour as the car? Do you think it costs £5,787 to fit ceramic brake discs? Well, it doesn’t. And if you tick that box on the order form, you are being milked.
And good for you. Because when you spend a silly amount of money on a silly, trivial thing that will help you not one jot, you are demonstrating that you have a soul and a heart and that you are the sort of person who has no time for Which? magazine because you were up till three the previous night enjoying ‘just one more bottle’.
All of which brings me back to the car I’m reviewing. It’s called the 911 Targa 4 GTS. Which means that it comes with unnecessary four-wheel drive, a massively complicated sunroof and wheels that can be removed only by someone with a degree in engineering. Not that you’ll ever need to remove them, because there’s no spare.
The GTS badge means this car is fitted with a collection of options that are available individually on the normal Carrera Targa 4. And if you had all the time in the world, and a calculator, you could work out whether or not they represent good value. Knowing Porsche, I have a hunch they don’t.
To drive? Hmm. Well, because of the massively complicated sunroof, this car is quite heavy, a point that becomes obvious shortly after you’ve put the exhaust in Sport mode, said to your passenger, ‘Watch this,’ and put your foot down. There is acceleration, for sure, and anyone from the 1970s would describe it as vivid. But today? It feels a bit lacklustre, to be honest.
It’s much the same story in the corners. Because the Targa is more softly sprung than other 911s, and because this one has four-wheel drive, it’s not quite as exciting as you might imagine. It’s a long, long way from spongy, but it’s pointing in that direction.
There’s more, I’m afraid. When you want to open the sunroof, it’s like a scene from Thunderbirds. The whole car splits in half, palm trees lie flat, swimming pools fold away and, after a little while, everything goes back together again. Except now the bit of canvas that was above your head is stowed behind what are laughably called the rear seats.
Not since the BMW Z1 with its drop-down doors have I seen such a complex solution to such a simple problem. And to make matters worse, as with all Targas, the noise and the buffeting when you drive along with the roof stowed is, shall we say, noticeable. No, let’s not. Let’s be honest and say horrid.
And I don’t care. I like the idea of the GTS because GTS sounds good. And I like the Targa because it looks fabulous. The back window with that brushed-aluminium hoop is style at its best. Yes, it makes the car heavy, puddingy, slow and noisy, but those are things that trouble only the weak and the foolish.
Put it this way. You can go skiing in Aviemore, which is close by and the locals speak an approximation of English. Or you can go to St Moritz. You can fill yourself up when you’re hungry with a cheese sandwich, or you can eat out. You can live in Huddersfield, or you can live in San Francisco. Why not live as well as you can?
And why allow practicalities to stick their awkward noses into the equation? If you do, you won’t buy a 911 Targa. It has too many drawbacks. But if you don’t, you end up with a car that looks nice.
Let me put it this way: when you buy a painting, do you go for something that fits in a particular space? Or one you like looking at?
28 June 2015
Let me introduce the latest member of the 500 family: Uncle Fester
Fiat 500X 1.4 MultiAir Cross
I think I wouldn’t enjoy working in marketing very much because, when you go home after a hard day’s thinking, you have absolutely no idea whether your endeavours were successful or not.
You may have dreamed up the most brilliant sponsorship deal or an extremely clever bit of product placement, but did it have any effect at all on sales? There’s no way of knowing.
I bet you any money that the man in the polo-necked jumper and thin glasses was given an immediate pay rise and keys to the executive lavatory after he managed to do the deal for the Philips logo to crop up time and again in various James Bond films. It was on the stereo in Timothy Dalton’s Aston Martin in The Living Daylights, and on the keyring finder he used to kill a villain in Tangiers. But did that have an impact on sales? Not in my house, it didn’t.
Or what about Robinsons Barley Water? If it were removed from the umpire’s chair on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, would there be gallons of the stuff sitting around undrunk in warehouses? And if there were, could the slump have happened anyway, because kids prefer Coca-Cola?
We see a lot of marketing in the world of cars and we have no idea whether it works or not. Take Audi’s Vorsprung durch Technik campaign. It was hailed as a triumph, but since it stopped being read out at the end of the TV ads, sales of the brand have skyrocketed. It’s much the same story at Ford. In the olden days, Ford spent a fortune on Formula One and rallying and, as a result, it dominated the sales charts. And today it does much less motor sport, which means, er … it still dominates the sales charts.
Enzo Ferrari used to say that if you win a race on a Sunday afternoon, you make a sale on a Monday morning. And everyone nodded sagely. But if that were true, Ferrari wouldn’t have sold a single car for two years, and, let’s see now, it has sold loads. Mostly to James May.
All of which brings me to Fiat. Several years ago it made a cheeky little homage to the original 500 and decided – after a great deal of market research, I should imagine – to call it the 500. It sold like hot cakes. In Britain alone, 200,000 estate agents have bought one.
Ford obviously thought this runaway success had something to do with the actual car, so it launched its own version of it – the second-generation Ka. And nobody wanted one. This must have caused Fiat to think that the success of its 500 had something to do with the name it had given it. So when it decided to make a people carrier, it called that the 500 as well.
Then it decided to make a trendy, city-based European version of the rugged, all-American Jeep Renegade. So what would it call this, do you suppose? Well, after many meetings and a lot of espresso, Fiat has decided that it should be called the 500 as well.
There was a time when Fiat gave all the cars it made different names. You had the Panda, the Strada, the Stilo, the Croma, the X1/9, and so on. But it has decided that’s very old-school. So now, to keep things simple, everything is called the 500, whether it’s a hatchback, a lorry, a sports car or an off-roader. I wonder how long will it be before La Stampa, the Fiat-owned newspaper, is relaunched as La 500.
Anyway, back to the latest 500, which is badged with an X. This is an internationally recognized symbol to tell onlookers the car has four-wheel drive. But in the 500X that isn’t necessarily so. All-wheel drive is just an option. So it’s not a 500 and it’s not a 500X either.
Several trim levels are available. In the ‘Off-Road Look’ versions of the car there’s Cross and Cross Plus. And in the ‘City Look’ there’s Pop (coming later this month), Pop Star and Lounge. I am not making the last one up. I am aware, of course, that ‘lounge’ these days is supposed to conjure up an image of some chill-out music wafting through calico drapes on a perfect Ibiza morning. But to me it’s the horse-brass-festooned front room in a Cheshire semi.
It’s probably best we strip away all the marketing nonsense and concentrate on the car. It shares its basic architecture with the Jeep, but the two cars are very dissimilar. The Renegade may have grown up a bit, but it’s still the only car that actually shows up on a man’s gaydar. The Fiat, on the other hand, is aimed at estate agents who’ve met a client, got married and had children. So they need something with a bit of space in the back and a proper boot.
Hmm. And why would these thirtysomething bods and boddesses buy a Fiat that is made by Italians out of American components, rather than, say, a nice’n’sensible Niss
an or Škoda?
Well, here’s something strange. In recent years Fiats seem to have stopped grinding to a halt in a cloud of steam when they are three minutes old. New figures suggest they are pretty reliable. That’s one thing. The next is: it doesn’t feel even remotely as though it’s made out of George Michael’s chaps.
In essence, it’s a five-door hatchback that looks quite good, in an unthreatening way. It’s also good value when you look at the long list of equipment that’s provided as standard.
And yet I didn’t like it very much. Part of the problem was that I was driving around in a car that was called a 500 but so plainly wasn’t. That’s a bit like me deciding to call myself Brad Pitt. I could, but you wouldn’t be fooled for very long.
Then there’s my natural aversion to this sort of car. The Mini Countryman, the Nissan Kumquat, and so on. I can’t see why you would need the ground clearance or the extra headroom. And why pay a premium for something you don’t need? Why not just buy a normal hatchback? A Volkswagen Golf, say.
The main reason I didn’t much care for the Fiat, though, was: it was deeply uninspiring to drive. The ride was poor, the steering was loose, the clutch was sudden and the brakes were so sharp that pulling up gently was nigh on impossible.
Then there was a switch on the centre console that made everything worse. Turn it to the left and the steering got heavier, which seemed fairly pointless. Turn it to the right and the car pulled away from a junction as though it had suddenly become a tortoise with some kind of cannabis addiction.
As I said, I would never recommend any car of this type, unless you have a farm and need the ground clearance and the headroom for your horse. And if you have your heart set on such a thing, I still can’t really recommend the Fiat.
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