Really?

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Because this is tiresome, you may be inclined to use the touchpad. On this, you simply trace the letters of, say, the town you want to go to. But it is in the centre console, so you must use your left hand. Which means that if you’re not left-handed, the car thinks you’re a drooling infant.

  If you don’t want to write like a three-year-old or talk like Donald Sinden, you can use gesture control. Seriously: if you wave your index finger like Robert Duvall summoning a chopper evac from a Vietnam battlefield, the volume on the stereo goes up. Which is tremendously clever. But it does cause people in cars alongside to think you have taken leave of your senses.

  It’s worse, though, if you want to skip to the next track, because then you must flick a V at the stereo. And because it won’t register the first time, you have to do it again. And then, usually, again.

  That’s exactly what I was doing one evening last week when my rear-view mirror filled with blue lights. It seems that while I was telling my car to eff off over and over again, I’d driven past a government camera that had noted the 7-series was uninsured.

  While calls were made and checks done, I stood with one of the officers, laughing about the technology that had made the mistake. ‘You don’t need a camera linked to a central database to find uninsured cars,’ I said. He agreed, and at that moment a six-year-old Škoda Superb minicab went by. We both laughed because, of course, the point was made.

  You sense the same issues in the new 7-series. It uses the satnav, for example, to decide what sort of road surface and what sort of bend lie ahead, and then it sets up the air suspension to provide the right balance between comfort and handling. I can’t even begin to imagine how much software code is needed to do this. But I do suspect that a boffin in a brown store coat could achieve better results using a spring.

  The Comfort Plus mode does make the ride almost unbelievably soft, but in high winds on a motorway it felt as if the damn thing was chine walking.

  Also, the 7-series is confused by potholes and it’s not quite as quiet as you might imagine. You sense that there was a dilemma in the early stages of this car’s design: should it be a BMW with inherent sportiness, or should it be an out-and-out limo? The result is a car that’s sort of neither.

  That said, the interior design is lovely – far nicer than in the Mercedes. And because there’s so much stuff to play with, you will never get bored in a traffic jam.

  But I think the main reason you’d buy the 7-series is that everyone else has an S-class. It’s a reasonable point, except the reason everyone else has an S-class is: it’s a better car.

  28 February 2016

  Sit back and let it torque the torque

  Lexus GS F

  When the Lexus first arrived at my house, I decided I liked it. And when it went away a week later, I liked it even more. Even though it had been annoying.

  I think one of the reasons I like it is that I like most smallish, fast saloon cars. They seem to make sense, because you don’t really need 6 acres of room in the back. The rear seats are for children, and after a party they’re happy to sleep on the floor, so they certainly won’t mind being squashed for a few minutes.

  And it is only ever a few minutes. It’s not as though you take them to the Kamchatka Peninsula every morning, so they’re not going to develop gangrene or anything like that.

  No, a smallish saloon the size of a BMW 3-series is all you really need. Which of course brings us on to the father figure and trailblazer of the 3-series range. The M3. The latest incarnation is not perfect. If you put the steering in anything other than Comfort mode, it feels lifeless and twitchy at the same time.

  Also, its engine is turbocharged. There used to be a time when turbocharging meant that you put your foot down and nothing happened while the exhaust gases spooled up the fan. Then everything happened all in a big rush and you careered into a tree.

  That doesn’t happen any more. There is no discernible lag at all in an M3, but all the time you know the power is coming from witchcraft and that, if it weren’t for various pie-in-the-sky EU emission regulations, BMW would not be using forced induction. It’s effective. But it’s not proper. It is to engineering what cornflour is to cooking. A cheat.

  The engine in the Lexus GS F is not turbocharged. It’s a 5-litre 32-valve double-overhead-camshaft V8. It’s old-school. It’s a roux. And I liked it a very lot. I especially liked the noise.

  In the mid-ranges – up to, say, 4,500rpm – it sounds baleful and hollow, like a lonely wolf. But if you keep your foot planted in the carpet and go up past 6,000rpm, it starts to sound as though it’s angry about being a hollow wolf. It sounds – and this is the highest praise you can lavish on any car – like a Ferrari 458 Italia.

  It doesn’t develop as much torque as a BMW M3, but at no point do you ever think: ‘Hmm. This is a bit slow.’ Because it isn’t. And it isn’t fitted with a speed limiter either, which means that, flat out, you’ll be knocking on the door of 170mph.

  If anything, it stops even better than it goes, thanks to enormous Brembo brakes, and because it’s fitted with an eight-speed gearbox – which I thought was completely unnecessary when Lexus announced it – you’re never in a torque hole. Not that the holes from a 5-litre V8 are likely to be that deep anyway.

  I’ve got to heap praise at this point on the comfort. Yes, this is a stiff car, and, yes, the suspension is firm. But even at slow speeds on Boris’s ploughed roads in London, it’s never harsh or wince-inducing.

  The only fly, really, in the driving ointment is the steering, which at low speeds feels as if it would rather be doing something else. It’s always fidgeting, as though it just wants class to end so it can go home. At higher speeds, however, I’ve no complaints at all.

  I read a road test of this car in one of the ‘oversteer is everything’ car magazines recently, and the writer said that he preferred it to the AMG Mercedes and the BMW M3. And, thinking of it as a driving tool, I’m with him. It really is that good.

  But, oh deary me, it doesn’t half try its hardest to make you hate it. First of all, if I put anyone in the passenger seat, the brakes squeaked, and every time anyone tried to retrieve a can of zesty drink from the cup-holders, the satnav immediately decided it wanted to go to Pinner.

  The problem is, Lexus decided several years ago that a computer-style trackpad was the best way to operate the central command and control system. Time has taught everyone else that it isn’t, because it’s too fiddly and too sensitive and the trackpad itself is mounted right next to the cup-holders.

  Lexus, however, will not be deterred, so instead of enjoying the braking or the old-fashioned V8 power, what you’re actually doing most of the time is concentrating, with the tip of your tongue out, on getting the little arrow over the icon you want and then swearing when you miss and end up going to Pinner again.

  Oh, and once it’s decided it’s going to Pinner, then that’s where it’s going. There is no changing its mind. And to make everything worse, it tells you every fifteen seconds that it has found a new route, and would you like to accept it? I learned eventually just to say yes and let it get on with its trip to the London suburbs while I used signposts and common sense instead.

  Other things? Plenty. The wiper stalk is on upside down; there are several million buttons on the steering wheel that all retune the stereo system to Radio 3; and just about the only knob of interest is the big silver one on the centre console that ruins everything. It changes the settings of the car to either Eco, which isn’t interesting, or Sport S, which is bumpy, or Sport S+, which would work only at the Nürburgring. But you’re not at the Nürburgring, because you’ve just reached for your can of refreshing orange pop and now you’re going to Pinner again.

  I’d love to tell you that the problem is that the GS F is too clever for its own good but, actually, there are almost no gimmicks at all. There’s no voice activation or wi-fi connectivity or any of the stuff you see these days on even fairly humble Fords. It can’t even park itself, f
or crying out loud. And my Golf GTI can do that.

  I assumed that this back-to-basics approach would mean that the Lexus sat at the bargain-basement end of the spectrum. But no. I damn nearly fell off my chair when I found out it costs, as near as makes no difference, £70,000. That’s BMW M5 money.

  And then I fell off my chair again when I found that, while it feels small and nimble like an M3, it’s actually – give or take 5 millimetres – the same length as the 5-series. It’s uncanny. And it’s another tick in the box, because a car that shrinks around you is a good thing.

  This is the best Lexus I’ve driven since the LFA, which is also riddled with annoying details but remains my all-time favourite car.

  I wouldn’t blame you at all if you went off and bought a BMW M3 or M5 instead. They’re both tremendous. But don’t assume they’re the best of breed. Because, in my book, this flawed old-school charmer has them beat.

  6 March 2016

  Bubbling with ideas for inventors to pinch

  Suzuki Swift 1.2 SZ2

  I’m baffled by the car industry’s apparent reluctance to think more seriously about hydrogen as a replacement for petrol and diesel. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so we wouldn’t run out of it for about a billion years, and it’s clean too. A car powered by hydrogen fuel cells produces nothing from its tailpipe but water.

  Right now, we have the technology to make hydrogen-powered vehicles, and yet, by and large, the car industry is sitting on its hands. Several years ago, with a fanfare provided by a lone bugler on a distant hillside, Honda leased out a handful of test examples in California, but then the bugler stopped playing and went home. And we’ve heard very little since.

  Like everyone else, Honda is now making hybrids that use two motors to combat the problem of overconsumption. And the demand for hydrogen is so low that, in the whole of the UK, only four public filling stations stock it.

  Rather gamely, a small Welsh company called Riversimple is swimming against the tide and has developed a hydrogen car called the Rasa. It’s clever because it uses electricity garnered from braking to provide acceleration and electricity from hydrogen fuel cells to provide a gentle cruise.

  But while the Rasa is made from all sorts of exotic materials, the company has given the poor little thing styling that Riley would have dismissed for being rather old-fashioned, and then added tyres that W. O. Bentley would have called ‘a bit thin’. Any normal person would look at it and think: ‘You know what – I think I’ll stick with my Ford Fiesta.’

  This is what the modern-day pioneers of future propulsion systems must remember: we know how a car should look, and we simply won’t take the plunge if it looks odd in any way.

  It’s like houses. We may swoon over the cleverness of modern architecture in magazines but, when push comes to shove, we all want to live in something that looks as though it was designed by a Georgian.

  This is where Riversimple is going wrong. It’s no good saying that the Rasa weighs about the same as a mouse, uses almost none of the world’s resources to move about, produces only water and could be used at night, silently, to provide electricity for a whole street. Which it could. Because no one is going to drive a car that causes other people to laugh at them.

  Extreme petrolheads crave the extraordinary and will even drive a car that has no windscreen if they think it will deliver one more mile an hour, but everyone else craves the ordinary. They want to blend. And going to the shops in a Rasa would be like going to a funeral in a scuba suit. You wouldn’t blend at all.

  Talking of scuba suits, I recently needed one when I was filming in Barbados for my new Amazon Prime motoring show.

  I also required some wheels for this important work, and that was a problem, because every single hire car on the entire island had been rented to someone else. Which turned out to be good news, because all these people had drunk far too many rum punches to know what a car was, or that they’d rented one, or where it was, which meant I could nick it.

  The car I decided to nick was a small Japanese saloon with black wheels and extremely squeaky brakes. Each time I tried to slow down it sounded as if I was lowering a cement mixer on to a cat. Oh, and the steering wheel was loose. And the engine was so gutless that, every time I tried to speed up, literally nothing happened.

  Barbados is not a mountainous country – it can in no way be confused with, say, Bhutan or Switzerland – but there are a few gentle hills and all of them flummoxed my small, white Japanese saloon car. I’d row away desperately at the gear lever, but it was futile. The only way of getting up even the smallest incline (I nearly said ‘slope’ then) was to arrive at it doing about 100 miles an hour.

  However, on the fourth day I grew to rather like it. And I didn’t work out why until the fifth day, when I realized that I’d somehow got into another small Japanese car and was using that by mistake. This one was different from the first one, partly because it was blue and partly because it had a bullet hole in the door. But mostly because it was excellent. So excellent that I went round the back to see what it was. And – surprise, surprise – it was a Suzuki Swift.

  I know this car well. We used Swifts when playing games of car football on the Clarkson, Hammond and May world tour, so I know they are nippy and that they have a great turning circle, especially if you use the handbrake. I can also tell you, because car football is quite a violent contact sport, that they are good in a crash.

  I have crashed a Suzuki Swift probably 500 times in the past few years, so I know they can take an enormous impact without breaking. The only real problem is that the washer bottle can burst if you slam the front-left corner into James May’s door while doing about 70mph.

  I’ve even driven a Swift on the road. It was the Sport model and I seem to recall I gave it four stars. I can’t recall why I didn’t give it five, because it was fast and fun and extremely good value for money.

  The car I drove in Barbados was not the Sport version. It was the cooking model, and I should imagine that it therefore represents even better value. You could probably buy the car I had for about £1. Mainly because of the bullet hole.

  As you probably know, my every-day car is a Volkswagen Golf GTI. I drive one because it costs less than £30,000 and does everything you could reasonably expect from a car today. Well, the Swift does everything for less than £10,000. So that makes it even better, in my book.

  It has whizzy acceleration, a smooth ride, space in the back for grown-ups, a decent boot, fun handling and excellent fuel economy. No, it can’t park itself, there’s no wi-fi hub and you have to use a map if you want to know where you’re going. But it has a fuel gauge and electric windows, and that’s all you need, really.

  Best of all, though, you don’t stand out. It’s a plain-Jane, ordinary box – 12.5 feet of car. It’s the shortest poppy in the field. And it should therefore be the shape that all the future-fuel start-up businesses adopt.

  Because if a car looked like this, produced only water and could power our house at night, we’d buy it. And then the motor industry would stop fiddling about with its pointless batteries and its hybrid-drive systems and get on the only road where there is actually a future for personal mobility. The hydrogen road.

  13 March 2016

  Mix iron, wood and little boys’ dreams

  Ford Mustang Fastback 5.0 V8 GT Auto

  Plainly, someone at Ford in Detroit was given an atlas for Christmas because, after fifty years or so of making the Ford Mustang, the company has decided to put the steering wheel on the correct side of the car and to sell it in the hitherto unknown Great Britainland.

  Many of us on this side of the Pond have known about the Mustang for years. We’ve seen it in lots of films and when we go on holiday to California it’s what we rent to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. Of course it is. You can hire cars for less, but the Mustang brings out our inner line dancer. And for a couple of weeks that’s not such a bad thing.

  Because of the films and th
e fond memories we have of rumbling through Monterey with ‘The Boys of Summer’ on the CD player, we like the Mustang. However, just because something works when we are on holiday, it won’t necessarily work on a miserable Tuesday morning in November in Leamington Spa.

  I’ve always harboured a concern that the Mustang is a bit like a Greek fishing-boat captain. In Greece, after a couple of hundred retsinas, it seems perfectly natural to take him to your bed. But would you want to bring him home and introduce him to your mother?

  Or food. I was once invited by the owner of a restaurant in Hanoi to suck out the still-warm brains of a dead sparrow, and I must admit I enjoyed the experience very much. They were delicious. But in the office, when I have only a couple of minutes for lunch, I’d rather have a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

  So this is the question I must answer. The Mustang: is it a viable proposition in Britain? Or is it nothing more than a come-hither poster boy for Hertz?

  Well, first of all, we must take a long, hard look at the price. And you’ll need to sit down for this, because the 5-litre V8 Fastback GT auto coupé I’ve been using is £35,995.

  This means it costs less than half what Jaguar makes you pay for a superficially similar F-type. More incredibly, this 410bhp, 155mph American icon costs less than I paid for a Volkswagen Golf GTI. I do not know of any car that appears to offer such good value for money.

  It’s not as if you just get an engine and four seats either. Because it comes as standard with a limited-slip differential (yeah), selectable driving modes, dual-zone air-conditioning, a rear-view camera, DAB radio, and so on.

  Confused by the price tag and the sheer amount of stuff you get free, I plunged into the cabin with a raised eyebrow, looking for where Ford had cut corners. It doesn’t take long to find them. Lada would describe the plastics under the steering wheel and around the glovebox as ‘a bit cheap’, and I suspect the seat leather came from a polyurethane cow. But that, really, is it.