Obviously, it isn’t a racing car. Yes, it has racy 20in wheels, but there’s a perfectly ordinary 1.5-litre diesel engine that turns fuel into a dribble of performance; 0-62mph takes 12.4 seconds, which would have been considered woeful thirty years ago. But which today, in health-and-safety Britain, is par for the course.
Then the salesman is going to tell you it’s capable of 72.4mpg. I don’t doubt for a moment that this is true. In the same way as I’m capable of running the 100-metre sprint in roughly the same time as Usain Bolt. In normal use you won’t get anything like 70mpg out of it, but it’s still very economical.
And practical. The rear seats, I admit, are a bit of a squash if you are burly or long, but the boot’s huge and the floor moves about to make it versatile as well. You can even buy a longer version that has seven seats.
So here we have a good-looking, well-equipped, practical and economical car that is exceptional value for money. Lovely.
Except it isn’t. Because the more you look at it, the more you realize there’s something wrong. And what’s wrong is: a lot of this car is made from plastic. And somehow you know. Which means you know it’s crap.
And I’m sorry, but all that equipment provided as standard? For twenty-five grand? It sounds tremendous, but it does make you wonder about the quality of it all.
And the more you wonder, the more you start to think that maybe the new Scénic is like one of those Korean music centres you could buy for £25.99 in the 1980s. They had the flashing lights and twin tape decks and graphic equalizers. But they were in no way a substitute for the mix’n’match alternatives from Garrard, Marsden Hall, Akai, Teleton and so on.
There’s another problem too. Look up now and say to your family, ‘I’m thinking of buying a Renault Scénic Dynamique S Nav dCi 110’, and see if anyone is the slightest bit interested …
Thought not.
12 March 2017
Not so much wild horse as mild pony
Ford Mustang 2.3 EcoBoost
The right-hand-drive Ford Mustang has been on sale in Britain for a little while now, but I’m still always a bit surprised when I see one bumbling down the street. However, I’m even more surprised when I don’t.
Every day, thousands of people take delivery of a new BMW or Audi or what have you, and I don’t doubt they’re very pleased. But the fact is that for a great deal less money they could have driven away in a Mustang. The American icon. Steve McQueen with numberplates.
The figures are remarkable because the Mustang costs less than two-thirds of what BMW charges for an M4. And it’s not like the Ford is equipped like a cave. It has rain-sensing this and dark-sensing that and electric everything and a system that lets you spin the rear wheels and make smoke while the front brakes are locked. And spin they will, because under the bonnet is a big, American 5-litre V8. It’s not the most sophisticated engine; often it feels as though it’s made from rock and powered by gravel, but it delivers the goods well enough.
When you drive the Mustang, you are left scratching your head and wondering: what’s going on here? Is BMW being a profiteering bastard, or is Ford paying its workers in beads? Because how can it possibly sell a 5-litre sports coupé for £36,000 when Jaguar – as another example – charges £90,000 for almost exactly the same thing?
Well, now we have the answer. Europe’s independent safety testing body recently gave the Mustang a two-star rating out of five, the lowest rating for any mainstream car it’s tested for nearly ten years.
It found that people in the rear would slide under their seatbelts in a frontal impact, that the airbags inflated insufficiently and that it lacked the sort of sophisticated braking system fitted to even the Fiesta these days. What’s more, it noted that safety equipment available to American customers is not offered on this side of the pond. That, then, is why the all-singing, all-dancing, bells-and-whistles V8 Mustang costs so much less than any rival: it’s just not as safe. So I guess you got to ask yourself one question, punk. What do you want? A system that lets you do burnouts at the lights? Or a head?
On the face of it, the answer is simple. You want a head. You want the safest car you can buy. But do you?
I smoke and drink and jaywalk. I try to mend electrical equipment myself. I jump off cliffs without testing the depth of the water. I fire firework rockets horizontally across lakes, and at work I put myself in tricky spots to get a laugh out of the audience.
And I’m not unusual. Kids go to all sorts of stupid places on their gap years and do all sorts of stupid things. YouTube is full of people falling over on ski slopes and tripping over next to swimming pools. And have you met anyone who says, ‘No, let’s not build a swing over that river. Let’s go to the library instead because it’s safer’?
Coming back to cars, the Ferrari F40 is not even on nodding terms with the concept of safety. It doesn’t have antilock braking or airbags. And it was designed at a time when any sort of accident was simply the starting point for your journey through the Pearly Gates. So obviously you’d rather have a Volvo V70. Except of course you wouldn’t.
Which brings me back to the Mustang. Yes, it’s not going to look after you very well if you crash into a tree. So here’s an idea. Don’t crash into a tree.
There are two ways this could be achieved with the Mustang. Either you could concentrate the mind by replacing its airbag with an enormous spike, or you could buy the version I’ve been testing.
It’s the £35,845 Mustang EcoBoost convertible, so called because, instead of a stone-age V8, it has a bang-up-to-date 2.3-litre turbocharged four-pot. Yes, that’s right. A four-cylinder Ford Focus engine … in a Mustang.
The figures aren’t as bad as you might expect. There are 313 horsepowers, for instance, and 319 torques. This means a top speed of 145mph and reasonably brisk acceleration. But not so brisk that you risk finding out first-hand what a two-star safety rating actually means.
What’s more, you get a rear-view camera as standard, dual-zone air-conditioning, the burnout facility, keyless entry, DAB radio, USB and Bluetooth connectivity, selectable driving modes and every other whizz-bang you can think of, all for £35,845. Or £3,500 less than that if you go for the coupé.
To drive, it feels like a Mustang. Obviously, you don’t have the Steve McQueen offbeat burble, but, if I’m honest, you don’t really get that in the V8 either. You do get, however, a deep bassy engine sound that suits the car well.
You also get several acres of bodywork. In America this is fine, but here, especially in a city, it can be annoying. Especially as the turning circle is woeful. After a short while, you start to look enviously at bus drivers as they zip about in their far more manoeuvrable vehicles.
But then you get out of the city and the Mustang does what it does best. It lopes along, eating up the miles without any fuss. And, of course, because there are only four cylinders, you should do twice as many miles to the gallon as you would had you gone for the V8.
Best of all, though, are the admiring glances. People like Mustangs. They smile at you and let you out of junctions. And that’s because we all know that behind the shouty noises, and bigness, it’s a gentle giant. A pussycat that thinks it’s a wild horse.
It really isn’t an out-and-out racer. It leans and it wobbles and it gets awfully wayward if you ask it to behave like a Porsche. But minding this is like buying a burger and then minding that it’s not a quail’s egg dipped in a pinch of celery salt. If you want a quail’s egg, you’ll need to spend twice as much.
The only real problem, as far as I can tell, is that while there’s not much in the way of exterior badging to say this is a 2.3-litre car, you always know. And a Mustang without a V8 is like a chicken korma.
Yes, it’s less likely to crash, and, yes, it’s cheaper and more economical, which means it’s the more sensible option. But who buys a Mustang to be sensible? It’s a fun car, so you absolutely have to have it with the most fun engine.
2 April 2017
Gulp! Frankenstein’s b
een at the parts bin
Maserati Levante
As I’m sure you will have noticed, people have started wearing trousers that are deliberately torn across both knees. Does this mean that the Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes has jumped on the bandwagon and is selling suits with raggedy holes in the legs?
No. It won’t have even crossed the tailors’ minds. They have spent hundreds of years developing and nurturing their reputation and they know it would be unwise to throw it all away in the pursuit of a fast buck.
People should stick to what they know. You don’t find Mary Berry making programmes about motorcycle maintenance or Vin Diesel playing Hamlet. But in the world of car manufacturing, things are different.
There’s a fad at the moment for SUVs, and, rather than sit around saying, ‘That’s not what we do’, Aston Martin, Porsche, Bentley, Jaguar, Alfa Romeo and Lamborghini have all taken leave of their senses and thought, ‘We’ll have some of that, thank you very much.’
Lamborghini, I admit, has dabbled in this area before, with the fearsome LM002. Powered by the V12 from a Countach, it was a gigantic and hilarious monster. I tried to drive one once and it didn’t go well because the gearbox was jammed in second. I sat in the back seat pushing the lever with my legs, while a burly chap sat on the dash using all his strength to pull it. Eventually, it gave in with an almighty crack and the burly man’s arse shot through the windscreen. I laughed about that for six years.
I suspect the LM002 wasn’t really built as a serious attempt to move in on the pre-Hummer military, and was just a gift from the network of Italian power to Colonel Gaddafi, who, it’s said, loved it.
Lamborghini can probably get away with an SUV today. Because we know it started out as a tractor maker and all its cars have always had a certain He-Man appeal. They’re built for doing 9mph in Knightsbridge, not ninety round the Nürburgring.
But Aston? Jaguar? Alfa Romeo? Bentley? Companies such as these making SUVs really is as odd as McDonald’s launching a watercress and kale smoothie. And that’s before we get to Maserati.
Maserati made its name in the 1950s on the grand prix circuit, and then nailed its colours to the mast in the 1960s with an impossibly beautiful succession of exotic cars that were named after the world’s winds. This is a company, then, that has no place making a jumped-up Land Rover. But that’s exactly what it has done.
The car in question is called the Levante, which sounds as though it ought to be some kind of soap for the sort of man who enjoys personal grooming.
Now. Had Maserati called a meeting to decide what this car should be like and decided it would go all-out to emphasize the ‘S’ in SUV, then it might have stood a chance. Alternatively, it could have decided to make it the last word in luxury, a car that would make the Bentley Bentayga look like a toddler’s pushchair. And that might have worked too.
But instead it called a meeting and very obviously said, ‘Right. Let’s do this for as little as possible.’
I’ll start with its clock. For as long as I can remember, Maseratis have been fitted with an elegant, oval timepiece, the sort of thing you would expect to see David Beckham advertising at Heathrow’s terminal 5. Even when Maserati was basically bankrupt and making the Biturbo, it never stooped so low as to go down the Casio digital route.
In the Levante, however, you get an ordinary circular plastic clock mounted in a plastic oval. You look at it and think, ‘Well, if they’ve cut corners there, where else have the accountants been making merry with the sandpaper?’
An answer becomes obvious when you fire up the engine. In time there will be a V6 that runs on petrol, but your only option in the UK now is a diesel. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it were a modern diesel fitted with all the latest whizzbangs and gizmos to make it quiet and refined and torquey. But instead Maserati has fitted a single-turbo engine that happened to be available. And it’s just not good enough in any area. It’s not particularly quiet or powerful or economical or clean. It’s just a tool that does a job, and in a fifty-grand Maserati, that’s nowhere near good enough.
Then you move off, and immediately the whole car has hysterics. It’s so big and so wide, its impact warning sensors are constantly convinced you’re going to have a crash. Even when you are in slow-moving traffic on the A4 coming into London, it’s screeching and squealing about the proximity of the barrier to your right and the bus to your left.
When you’re parking, it goes berserk, insisting you stop reversing when there’s enough space between you and the car behind to build a £7m house.
There’s another problem with the Levante’s size. It doesn’t translate into actual interior space. The boot isn’t that big, the back isn’t really big enough for three adults and in the front you feel hemmed in and claustrophobic. And deaf, because it’s just seen a tree that you are definitely going to hit.
You may imagine, of course, that all these quibbles melt away when you leave the city and find yourself a nice piece of open road.
Nope. Like all purists, I was delighted when I heard the Levante wouldn’t just be a leather-lined Jeep – Chrysler, which makes Jeeps, and Maserati both belong to Fiat – but instead would be a Ghibli on air-sprung stilts. But this isn’t much better, really, because the Ghibli is actually based on the old Chrysler 300C. Which in turn was based on the Mercedes E-class taxi from about thirty years ago. So the Levante is basically a taxi with a crap clock.
You see evidence of the parts-bin mentality all over the interior. Yes, there’s a lot of leather, and that’s nice, but many of the buttons are lifted straight from the old Yank tank.
There are many, many people of my age who would dearly love to own a Maserati. Lying in bed at night, knowing that you had one in your garage, would make you all warm and gooey. But not the Levante. It doesn’t look or feel or drive like the image you have in your head.
And, to make things worse, it doesn’t even feel or look or drive as well as its rivals. To put it simply, BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Land Rover can offer you something better. Much better.
I’m willing to bet that the new Alfa Romeo Stelvio is better as well. Even though that’s another car from the Fiat stable that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
9 April 2017
This nanny tucks you in, then hugs everyone outside too
BMW 530d M Sport
If a piece of technology remains fundamentally unchanged for more than a century, it’s inevitable that one day it will be as perfect as it’s going to get. And so it was with the most recent BMW 530d.
Every tiny lesson and shuffle forward since Karl Benz took his invention for a spin round Germany in 1888 had been incorporated. And as a consequence, the world had arrived at what might fairly be described as ‘peak car’.
That thing offered an incredible blend of economy, refinement and power. It was comfortable, it handled beautifully, it was well made and easy to use and its astonishing good looks were tainted only by a deserved familiarity.
If I’d been in charge at BMW when that car was launched, I’d have asked everyone in the research and development department to go on holiday for ever because their work was done. The car, as an entity, had been perfected. And there were no more worlds to conquer.
However, the world doesn’t work like that. The world demands change. So BMW was forced to come up with a new model that would, somehow, have to be even better. To try to achieve this, in a car that’s still propelled down the road by the age-old principle of suck, squeeze, bang, blow, BMW turned to its laptop department, instructing it to fit the new model with all the electronic whizz bangs that had been invented since the previous model was on the drawing board. Sounds good, yes?
But perhaps it isn’t. Many new cars – even my Golf – are capable of reading the road ahead and, for a few seconds, steering themselves. That’s great, unless you want to change lanes on the motorway. If you indicate first, then the system knows you’re doing it on purpose and shuts down, but if you don’t, and frankly there’s litt
le point if traffic is light and you’re moving into the middle lane to overtake a lorry, then the system tries to stop you. In some cars, you get a gentle tug at the wheel, but in the 5-series, you get a wrench. And then you end up fighting your own car, which is undignified and annoying.
Turning this facility off means plunging into the car’s computer, which means you need to take your eyes off the road all the way from London to Swindon. But eventually you find the right sub-menu and then you’re free to change lanes without letting the car know first.
But this puts it in a bad mood, so when you cross the white lines, it shudders and shakes, and to do something about this, you have to put on your reading glasses and go back into the menus, which is dangerous because now the car won’t steer itself while you’re otherwise engaged.
Mind you, it also won’t crash into anything. Sensors are on hand to prevent you from getting within about 400 yards of the car in front, and if you break the speed limit, you are reminded on both the speedometer and the head-up display that you are on the wrong side of the law.
It’s weird. You are driving along, with the engine ticking over at about 1500rpm. You are well within the capabilities of the car and you are a sentient being. But the electronic systems are behaving like you’re armed with a sub-machinegun and you’ve just entered a shopping centre with a murderous look on your face.
It takes a while to turn all this stuff off and then you are left with a car that feels pretty much identical to the old 530d. The only way you can tell that the engine has diesel coursing through its veins is by driving halfway round the world and then noticing there’s still enough juice in the tank to get you home.
Every single thing in the cabin works as well as is possible and there’s so much space in the boot and the back that you’d have to be very fat indeed to need the bigger 7-series. Honestly, as a car – four wheels and a seat – it is impossible to fault. It’s lovely when you are going quickly, and quiet and relaxing when you aren’t. And it even has a party piece when you get to journey’s end because you can get out, push a button on the (enormous) key fob and the car will park itself.
Really? Page 29
