So there we are. Mercedes is back, doing what it does best. Making tools for algebra enthusiasts. If that’s you, this is a very good car.
8 January 2017
From A to bliss in the Rolls flotation tank
Rolls-Royce Wraith
I was pounced on by a gay man in a restaurant lavatory last night. He said his friend didn’t know which to buy, a Porsche 911 or a Jaguar F-type. Ordinarily, I would have fixed him with a steely-eyed stare and explained that I didn’t come to him for free advice on what sort of sunglasses are in this season, so why should he come to me for free advice on cars?
Instead, however, I decided to bore him to death, so I went into a lengthy spiel about how the GTS is probably the best of the standard Porsche 911s but the GT3 variants, and in particular the GT3 RS, are outstanding. I then took a perch on the sink as I explained in great detail that the F-type convertible is better-looking than the coupé and that the V6 S is by far the best bet when it comes to a combination of power, noise and handling …
His eyes began to glaze over at this point, so I put a comforting arm round his shoulders and said: ‘Look. Your friend. The best thing he can do is buy whichever of the two cars he likes more.’
I mean this. Telling a stranger what car to buy is like telling someone what film to go and see. You can explain that One Woman’s 30-Year Search for Her Hat is a brilliant biopic with a powerful and subtly hidden message, but if the person you are talking to turns out to be a northern bare-knuckle cage fighter, it’s likely he will prefer The Terminator 6.
‘Experts’ haven’t been useful in the car-buying process since Humber went west, although, with the new pure-electric cars and hybrids coming on stream, that may change in the near future. We are entering a new era, and the ghost of Raymond Baxter may be called upon.
That’s then, however, and this is now, and we are talking this morning about the Rolls-Royce Wraith. No one is going to accost me in a lavatory and ask if they should buy one of those, or a Bentley instead, because that’d be like asking if you should buy an ice cream or a shotgun. The two things are very different.
Rolls-Royce may say that the Wraith is tuned with the driver in mind, but I think we are talking here about degrees. It’s like saying that God tuned Mars to be more hospitable than Venus. You’re not going to have much fun on either, if we’re honest.
A friend of mine visited Los Angeles last month, and, because he is important, his hosts sent a chauffeured Wraith to pick him up from the airport. He was invited, as you’d expect, to sit in the back for the drive into town, but as the Wraith is a two-door coupé with limited rear space, he felt extremely silly.
And that raises a question: if the Wraith isn’t really tuned for driving pleasure and it doesn’t work as a limo, then what’s the point?
It’s a question I found myself asking as I arrived at a very beautiful pheasant shoot in the north of England the other day. I had packed, as instructed, a smoking jacket for dinner and various bits of tweed for the next day. I also had my guns, my bullets, my wellies and all the other flotsam and jetsam necessary for wasting a few birds. And the boot lid wouldn’t open.
No amount of pressing or holding the remote button caused it to budge. Neither did any amount of rummaging around in the grime to try to locate an actual catch; nor did the remote switch in the cabin. It was locked shut. Dinner was due to start in fifteen minutes. I was one of only two untitled people present. And I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
Eventually, after I’d been through the handbook, which is available on the satnav screen, I discovered that if you disassemble the remote control locking device there’s a key inside that can be used to open the boot in the old-fashioned way. So I did that and made it to dinner properly dressed – in time to hear someone say: ‘Whose is that vulgar car outside?’
So there we are. An unreliable and vulgar car that doesn’t work as a proper Rolls-Royce because it’s been tuned to be as sporty as a 1974 Volvo. Plus it isn’t very good-looking and it’s extremely expensive. They say it costs about £235,000. But by the time you’ve added a bit of garnish, it’ll be a lot more than that. Despite these not insignificant issues, though, I thought it was tremendous.
Underneath, it is fundamentally the same as the four-door Rolls-Royce Ghost, which means that, contrary to what James May told you on The Grand Tour recently, it is fundamentally the same as a BMW 7-series. The two cars have in essence the same platform and the same engine.
However, in the Rolls-Royce there are two bulkheads. This is important. They have not been fitted to improve structural rigidity so as to make the car corner more sweetly, and they certainly haven’t been fitted for lightness. They are there simply to distance the occupants from the noise and the fuss of the engine.
This is the key to the Wraith experience: the sense that you are just sitting there while it moves you about. There’s a faint hum to suggest that explosions are happening under the bonnet, and there’s a rustle of tyre noise. But even when you are travelling at 150mph, that’s about it.
Yes, there are 624 brake horsepowers on tap and, yes, there is roll-cancelling air suspension and a satellite-aided system that reads the road ahead and sets the gearbox up for the coming corner. But you aren’t aware of any of this as you waft along. What you are aware of is the weight. Especially when you are slowing down. You almost can’t believe that a light touch on the brake pedal is all that’s needed to impede the progress of the monster. It feels faintly amusing.
Autocar magazine tells us that if you go into the on-board menu and turn off the traction control, the car will drift nicely. And I’m sure it will, in the same way as you could, if you wanted to, ice-skate in a pair of army boots.
I can’t stress enough, though, that this is not a sports car or a driver’s car in the accepted sense. But it is tremendous to drive because it feels like nothing else. If you didn’t want a chauffeur, for some reason, and you therefore didn’t need a barn-like space in the back – just some lovely wood and soft leather, a few elegant controls and a little peace and quiet on your drive home at night – it’d be fabulous. Completely in a class of its own.
Aston Martins and Bentleys feel like cars. This feels as if you’re in the bath. It’s not for me, obviously; I still like to do the hairy-chested man thing when I’m driving, and I’d much rather have a two-thirds-of-the-price DB11 or Continental GT V8 S.
But that doesn’t mean you would.
22 January 2017
Fire up DCI Hunt – the quattro’s back
Audi RS 7
Even if you are in a very good mood, and you are wearing a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, you have to accept that the original Audi quattro really wasn’t much good.
Yes, it thrashed all its rivals for many years on the world rally stages, and that gave it just about enough kudos to justify its fairly enormous price tag. But under the skin it was all a bit Radio Rentals.
Turbocharging wasn’t new when the quattro came along – Chevrolet, BMW and Saab had been at it for years – but neither was it the perfected art that it is today. When you stamped on the accelerator in an original quattro, it was like signalling to the engine room on an ocean liner. Oily men had to get out of their chairs, boilers had to be ramped up, big doors had to be closed, Victorian levers had to be pulled, coal had to be shovelled and only after that would there be a difference in the speed you were going.
And then there was the four-wheel-drive system. That wasn’t new either – Jensen had been there fourteen years earlier – and neither was it perfect. But as the rallying proved, it definitely provided extra grip in snowy or gravelly conditions.
However, in reality the traction was only just about compensating for the fact that in a quattro the heavy five-cylinder engine was mounted ahead of the front axle. This meant that, no matter what Joe Normal did with the steering wheel and the throttle, he was going to plough at fairly high speed into a tree.
Later came the 20-valve version. This meant more power
, so that when you hit the tree, you were going even faster.
Nevertheless, I absolutely loved that car. It was the noise it made – an offbeat five-cylinder strum – and it was the flared wheelarches and it was the stance.
But most of all it was the idea of the thing that appealed. It may have been born in the muddy underbelly of west Wales and it may have proved its mettle in the dust of Africa and the ice of Finland but it didn’t feel like a crash-bang-wallop rally car. It felt sophisticated and grown up.
The girl the late Peter Sarstedt sang about, the one who sipped her Napoleon brandy and had a racehorse she kept just for fun, for a laugh a-ha-ha-ha; she would have had an Alfa Romeo Spider. But if she’d been born ten years later, it’d have been a quattro.
This was the car that put Audi on our radar screens. Until it came along, the company had been making vehicles for German cement salesmen. But afterwards it was the giant-killing underdog, with a weapon that – in theory – could hang on to the coat-tails of a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.
And which – in theory again – could overtake even if it was raining at the time. In practice, of course, you’d hit a tree if you even tried, but we will gloss over that. Because everyone else did – me included.
What’s interesting is that after creating a forerunner to the Nissan GT-R, Audi decided not to replace it with something that was similar but better. It came up with the S2, but this was just a bulbous Audi 80 coupé. It had no flared wheelarches. Its strum was subdued. It never really went rallying. And then? And then nothing.
Audi continued to use the quattro name – to indicate that the car in question had four-wheel drive – but there’s never been a proper successor to that glorious, and gloriously flawed, original. Until now.
It’s called the RS 7, but picked out on a grille under the front bumper in very big letters is the quattro name. Because, really, that’s what this thing is.
It arrived at my office just before Christmas and sat in the car park for a couple of days until I realized that it would be mine for the whole Yuletide break and then a few more days afterwards. It’d be my companion for thousands of wet, soggy, damp and cold miles. We’d be going shooting together and to parties, and within half a mile I knew it would make me very miserable.
The suspension was absolutely intolerable. I thought the Nissan GT-R Track Edition was unforgiving, but this thing had all the give of granite. Every tiny bump was amplified and directed with pin-sharp accuracy directly into my coccyx. Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill – which is the bumpiest, most badly maintained road in the world – was completely unbearable.
But then I discovered, while weeping in pain, that the delivery driver who’d dropped the car off had – I presume for a joke – put the suspension in Dynamic mode. I switched it to Comfort, and in an instant my life was transformed.
This is not the best-looking car in the world – not by a long way – and it developed a terrible vibration as the weeks rolled by. Plus, whenever you employ full beam, there’s a theatrical sweep of light that is dramatic and clever but not instantaneous. Which is what you want.
And that’s it. That’s my list of things I didn’t like. Everything else is just brilliant. The acceleration is hilarious, the noise is a deep bellow, the fuel consumption is excellent, the seats are magnificently comfortable and you will not find a better-designed set of controls in any other car. It’ll also do almost 190mph.
I loved the way it just loped down motorways, often four up with a boot full of bullets and presents and all the other flotsam and jetsam that we need to survive life over Christmas. And then, later, how it would flick and dart its way along country roads like a sports car.
Does it understeer like its great-grandfather? No idea. All I can tell you is that if you are going fast enough to find out, then either you are the Finnish rally champion Kinki Wankonnen, or you have just signed up to Exit International. Or something catastrophic has gone wrong with the throttle linkage.
What I do know is that if you pull away smartly from a T-junction there is no wheelspin or torque steer. The car just sets off as if it’s been kicked by Jonny Wilkinson.
I’m never normally sad to see a test car taken away, because there’s always another one coming round the corner. But I was upset to see the RS 7 go, because it had wormed its way into my heart. In much the way the Audi TT did, not long ago.
Sadly, I could never actually buy a TT – fantastic though it is – because I’m not an air hostess. But I did find myself wondering if perhaps I could have an RS 7. And I kept on wondering right up to the point when I looked up the price. I had in my mind that it’d be about £70,000, but with a few extras it’s more than £100,000.
This car is very, very good. But it’s not that good.
29 January 2017
Pretty, well dressed and too clever by half
Honda NSX
Back in the days when you could walk from Calais to Dover and wattle was a popular building material, Honda decided it would like to build a supercar with a V10 engine. It would, the company said, be a replacement for the old NSX, and I was very excited.
Every so often I’d call Honda to see how it was coming along, and it’d say, ‘Very well’, but that there’d been a bit of a delay because of the ice age, or the eruption of Krakatoa or some other geological disturbance. I seem to recall at one point it said it’d had to change the interior because modern man was a different shape from his Neanderthal predecessor.
And then there was a wobble in the Japanese economy, and the V10 engine lost its Formula One halo, so Honda announced that the new car would be some kind of hybrid with electric motors and a turbocharged V6. That sounded pretty exciting too, especially when Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche were busy demonstrating just how biblical a combination such as this could be.
I kept calling Honda to ask when I could drive its new offering and was always told the same thing. ‘Soon.’ It said the design and engineering team in California was ‘benchmarking’ the Chevrolet Corvette, and when this was done it would be ready.
A year later it said the team had decamped to Germany to benchmark various Porsches. And then a year after that it was in Mauritius benchmarking cocktails. I began to think the new NSX was a machine that existed only in Honda’s dreams and that it would never see the light of day.
But then last year, after a quick trip to Sydney to benchmark some surfboards and a stopover in Bali to benchmark a couple of beaches, the tanned and relaxed designers and engineers announced the car was finished.
And I must say it looked good. It’s very low and very wide – wider than almost anything else on the road, in fact. It also appeared to be very clever, since its mid-mounted twin-turbo V6 was fitted with a 47bhp electric motor that would provide power while the turbos were drawing from the well of witchcraft but were not quite ready to deliver it.
Furthermore, each front wheel was fitted with its own 36bhp electric motor, which meant this fairly conventional-looking supercar was anything but, under the skin. Can you even begin to imagine, for instance, the computing power needed simply to keep all four wheels rotating at the same speed?
When you start to consider that, you can see why it’s taken so long to get the new NSX from the doodle, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice?’ phase and into the showrooms. Especially when you step inside and realize that despite the behind-the-scenes complexity, it comes with a normal steering wheel, normal pedals, normal paddles for the nine-speed gearbox and a normal price. I’m not being flippant. At £143,950 it’s almost five times less expensive than Porsche’s hybrid alternative.
On paper, then, this car looks like a genuinely realistic alternative to Ferrari’s 488 GTB, Lamborghini’s Huracan and whatever car McLaren has just launched. However, it isn’t.
The first problem is that it’s not that quick off the mark. If you are driving in Quiet mode – which you will be most of the time, because the other settings make the car noisy, uneconomical and bumpy – and you put your foot down, there is
a very noticeable moment when you just know the computing system is having a think. ‘Right. Hang on. What gear should I select? Fourth? Fifth? We’ll have a meeting about that, and in the meantime let’s see if we can work out which wheel needs what amount of power. Front left to start with …’ Meanwhile, the driver of the Vauxhall Vectra you were trying to overtake is at home watching Game of Thrones.
So all the clever-clever hybrid tech doesn’t give you the power you were expecting, which would be fine if it gave extra economy, but it doesn’t really do that either. Don’t reckon on getting much more than 20mpg.
Then there’s the handling. You’d imagine that with its weird four-wheel-drive system it’d have a ton of grip, and that’s probably so. But you are never inclined to find out for sure, because you are aware this is a heavy car and nearly a ton of the weight is located in the rear end. So if you went over the limit of grip, it’d be like wrestling a grandfather clock back into line.
What’s more, the steering is numb, and there’s a curious wobble when the car settles into a bend, as though the suspension is having a bit of a row with itself about what it should be doing.
As a car for petrolheads, then, this is no match for its rivals from McLaren, Lamborghini and Ferrari. And then things get worse.
The sun visors are the size of stamps and feel as though they’ve been lifted from a Soviet bread van, the horn sounds as if it’s from a Toys R Us pedal car and the satnav is woeful.
I suspect it’s the same unit you get in a Honda Jazz or Civic, so on the upside it could probably find the nearest beetle drive or bingo hall, but on the downside it’s a touchscreen, which doesn’t work in any car, and the software appears to have been written by Alistair MacLean or some other author of fiction. Twice it told me the road ahead was closed. And it just bloody wasn’t.
Then there’s the stereo, which sounds like Radio Caroline did in the early 1970s, and I wouldn’t mind but the engine doesn’t compensate for this. In the old NSX there was an intoxicating induction roar when you accelerated; in the new one there’s just some gravelly noise. Which you aren’t really hearing, because you’re busy seeing if the carpet is stuck under the throttle pedal.
Really? Page 27
