You’d never actually do this, of course. In the same way that you wouldn’t board a plane with no pilot. You’d assume that while the electronics are capable of doing the task they’d been given, they’d go wrong, and then a human would need to be on hand to rescue the situation.
And that raises another interesting point. It’s a far nicer and more relaxing car to drive with all the electronic nannies turned off, but what if I were momentarily distracted by something Jeremy Corbyn had said on the radio? Or if I’d dropped my lighter down the side of the seat? And the car crashed. And killed someone.
It’s a moral maze. Do you put up with the constant interference and nagging just in case? Or do you disconnect everything and have a nicer time while hoping for the best? And does having the choice make this an even better car than its predecessor?
Or is it morally reckless to turn off all the systems that could save a child’s life? Surely, you should leave them on. In which case, why would you need a car that handles so sweetly and can do 155mph? When you think about it for a while, your head starts to hurt.
So let’s move on. It’s not as masculine to look at as the old model. It looks less solid, less robust, more feminine. That’s probably a good thing.
I don’t doubt that it will be easier and therefore cheaper to make than its predecessor. And that’s definitely a good thing because savings on the production line mean greater profits for BMW, which is good for the German economy. And what’s good for the German economy is good for the economies of Greece, Italy and Portugal as well. Put simply, big profits on a 5-series mean fewer riots in Athens.
And of course, if more people buy a car like this – a car that forces you to indicate before moving, and obey the speed limits and not tailgate; well, that has to mean fewer fatalities.
So this is a car that hasn’t moved the car itself along one jot. But it has raised the bar nevertheless because it’s something you buy for the benefit of other people. That’s an idea that’s never really been tried before.
16 April 2017
So hot, you can cook breakfast in the boot
Renault Twingo GT
When Renault introduced its latest Twingo, many motoring journalists scoffed. They said it was slow, and that if you pushed it hard through the corners, it would understeer instead of settling into a nice, smoky drift.
Well, I’m sorry for gaping in astonishment like a wounded fish, but what were they expecting? It’s a city car with a rear engine that would be dismissed by coffee lovers as too weak to grind their beans. So of course it wasn’t going to be fast, and of course its tail wouldn’t swing wide in the corners, because it would mostly be driven by the sort of people who’d crap themselves if it did.
Criticizing the baby Renault for not being an out-and-out racer is like buying a record player and criticizing it for not being any good at unblocking the sink.
The problem is that Renault put the engine at the back. So everyone thought, ‘Well, if it’s there, as it is in a Porsche 911, then it must feel like a Porsche 911.’ Er, no. The engine in a small Peugeot is at the front, as it is in a Ferrari California, but the two cars feel alike only in the sense that you must sit down to drive them.
And speaking of Peugeot: a friend of mine recently bought a horrible 108 for his daughter. ‘Why have you done that?’ I wailed. ‘You must hate her. It’s a terrible car.’ He listened as I droned on about how tinny it was, and how everything inside felt cheap, and then he said, ‘Yes. But she gets three years’ free insurance, which saves me six grand.’
This is what we tend to forget in this business. While we are looking for handling anomalies as we drift through Stowe corner at 120mph, it doesn’t occur to us that most people care about safety and running costs and don’t care about tread shuffle or an ability to deal smoothly with mid-corner bumps when you’re at the limit.
Which brings me back to the Twingo. I didn’t like it either, really, because I can’t see the point of a ‘city car’. Yes, it costs about 75p, but that is hardly good value if you have to leave it at home every time you want to travel more than thirty miles.
You may sneer at this. You may say that if it has an engine, it’s perfectly capable of motorway travel. And who cares if it’s a bit bouncy and noisy and strained? Hmmm. This argument doesn’t wash, because, actually, a very small car with a very small engine is not really capable of handling a motorway.
You put your foot down on the slip road and accelerate so hard that the valves start to make dents in the bonnet, but you’ll barely be doing 55mph by the time you’re ready to join the motorway. Which is a problem, because your path to the inside lane is blocked by a lorry doing 56mph.
What do you do? You can’t pull out, because you’ll be squidged. You can’t accelerate, because the engine is giving all it’s got to give. And you can’t slow down, because it would take too long to get back up to a reasonable speed again.
Then there’s the issue of hills. In my daughter’s old Fiesta, which had a 0.00001-litre engine, you’d have to start thinking about the M40 incline over the Chilterns when you were still several miles north of Banbury. And even then you’d reach the summit huffing and puffing like me when I walk to the top of the stairs.
Off the motorway things are no better, because in a small-engined small car you are forced to drive at the speed of the driver in front. If he’s on a tractor, this is very annoying. It is so annoying that eventually you will attempt to overtake, and this will result in your death because you simply do not have the grunt to get past in much less than four hours.
Make no mistake, then. Cars designed to work only in the city are silly, because in the city you have Ubers and proper cabs and Tubes and buses and bicycle lanes. It’s the one place you don’t need a car. And in the place where you do – which is everywhere else – city cars are noisy and dangerous.
And that brings me to the Renault Twingo GT. It started in life as a city car, but it has been breathed on to give it some real-world poke. It still has a tiny, 0.9-litre three-cylinder engine, but it’s turbocharged, so it produces a thrummy, off-beat 108 brake horsepower. This is a car that sounds like one of those very small dogs that growl the growl of a Great Dane. I liked it. It was amusing.
And I liked the speed too. I know 108bhp doesn’t sound much, but it’s what you used to get from the original Golf GTI. And no one said that was too slow for motorways.
The power delivery is a bit weird – it comes in lumps – but it’s a hoot to out-accelerate most family saloons and then bomb along in a car that really belongs in a Hot Wheels set.
The way it handles is less impressive. The steering is done by guesswork – there’s no feel at all – and you never have any clue that the engine’s at the back. Sporty it is not. And that’s fine, because this, after all, is a car designed for the city that happens to have the poke to deal with everywhere else as well.
And it looks tremendous. It’s pretty anyway, and with a dinky rear air scoop to feed the turbo, and twin exhausts, it’s brilliant. Mine was fitted with the optional stripes, which made it feel like a soap-box racer and me feel I was nine. It made me smile.
And that’s before we get to the really impressive stuff. I went out one night with another grown-up in the front and three teenagers in the back. There was quite a lot of complaining, I admit, but the fact is that we fitted. And if I accelerated hard, the whizzy little engine drowned out the moaning.
The only problem with doing this is that the engine gets hot, which means anything you have in the boot gets hot too. This is a car that can turn your weekly shop into a delicious, piping-hot omelette before you get home.
Oh, and then there’s the turning circle: it seems to be able to turn in its own length. It makes a black cab look cumbersome.
So there we are: a nifty, practical car that looks good, goes well and makes you happy. And all for £14,000. It hasn’t won many fans with writers in the specialist press, because they still think it should go and handle like a 911. But I
liked it a lot, because the comparison never entered my head.
23 April 2017
Something for the grizzled fur traders of Woking
Škoda Kodiaq
Most people think that despite Russia and America’s wildly different political viewpoints, they have never been engaged in an actual fighty war. But that’s not accurate. In the early nineteenth century Alaska was Russian and there were a lot of bouts of fisticuffs between the locals and their masters.
Today, in these troubled times, lessons can be learnt from how the dispute was solved: America simply bought the entire territory, lock, stock and no smoking barrels.
This meant that the main settlement on Kodiak Island became a thriving fishing port where people would catch salmons and halibuts, and tourists from Texas could come to shoot bears.
Kodiak means, in the local language, ‘island’. So technically it’s called ‘Island Island’. In the 1960s it made the news because a bit of geological jiggery-pokery meant that the ground nearby suddenly rose by thirty feet. This tectonic boing and subsequent tsunami wiped out much of the fishing fleet and almost all the industry that supported it and now it exists mainly as a rugged outpost for people in checked shirts and Wrangler jeans, who I’m sure will not be best pleased that the name of their island has been nailed to the back of a Škoda people carrier.
Actually, I’ll be accurate. To avoid any legal unpleasantness, Škoda has changed the final ‘k’ to a ‘q’, but the message is clear. This is a car for the great outdoors. It’s for the people who know, when they’re confronted by a bear, what to do. Not like you and me, who would stand there thinking, ‘I know I should run if it’s a grizzly and stand my ground if it isn’t … Or is it the other way round? And what sort of bear is that anyway? And how does this gun work?’
Of course, a name on its own is not enough. You can call your son Astroflash Butch, but it’s going to be no good if he grows up to have a concave chest and arms like pipe cleaners.
This is a problem for Škoda, because we all know that behind the He Man name, this car is just a stretched Volkswagen Golf on stilts. We know it’s a seven-seat school-run special. We know it’s as suburban as pampas grass and prosecco. It’s a Volvo XC90 for women whose second-hand clothes business is not going quite as well as they’d hoped.
To try to fool us, Škoda has fitted a little button on the centre console that says ‘off road’. That sits there, serving as a constant reminder that you are a person who knows how to gut a rabbit and live on a diet of nothing but your own urine. It lets your passengers know that you may have been in the special forces. You have a Kodiaq. And it’s not just a glorified Golf. That little button says it can go over the Andes.
First of all, though, you have to pull away from the lights, and that’s not easy in the diesel version I was driving because to make sure the engine doesn’t kill any sea otters, and that it sits well inside the post-Dieselgate EU parameters of what is acceptable, the computer has been given a set of algorithms, and power is only ever a last resort.
Sensors take note of the air pressure, the incline of the road, the outside temperature, the gear that has been selected and the throttle position, and then the computer decides that, no, continuing to sit there is by far the best option for the planet.
So you put your foot down a bit more and the sensors get busy once again before deciding that moving off would cause someone to have bronchitis. So you mash your foot into the firewall, which causes the sensors to think, ‘OK. He really wants to move, so I’ll select seventh gear, which means it’s all done nice and slowly and with minimal damage to Mother Nature.’
Happily, the EU has now changed its mind on diesels and has decided they are the work of Satan, which means taxes and parking charges for such cars will rocket. Which means in turn that if you choose to buy a Kodiaq, you’ll buy one with a petrol engine. Good idea. At least that’ll move occasionally.
Unless your foot slips off the throttle. I’m not quite sure how, or why, this has been achieved, but you drive a Kodiaq while sitting in the same position you adopt at a piano. And unless you have very long feet, your toes won’t quite reach the throttle.
Apart from that, all is well on the inside. Well, nearly all is well. My test car had been fitted with an optional glass sunroof, which would be ideal for someone who wanted to waste £1,150. I thought sunshine roofs had been consigned to the history books, and this one serves as a reminder of why that should be so. Because when you open it, you get no air, and no sense of being outside; just a lot of extra noise.
Apart from that, though, the wood on the dash was fun, the Volkswagen infotainment satnav control module worked brilliantly and the comfort at slow speed around town was nice. This is not a car that’s fazed by speed bumps.
At higher speed? I’m not sure, because every time I tried to put my foot down, the computer did some maths and reckoned acceleration wasn’t climatically wise. What I can tell you is that if your foot doesn’t fall off the throttle pedal and you accelerate very gently, it will reach 70mph on the motorway, where all is extremely quiet.
Handling? It’s no good, but that’s OK. If you wanted a car that went round corners well, you’d buy a Golf. Not a Golf on stilts.
The reason you buy this is because tucked away into the boot floor are two seats that can be used to carry very small people over very short distances. But not, at the same time, a dog.
At the weekend I went to my farm with it, as I had a number of manly jobs to do, such as padlocking the gates to stop local ruffians riding around the fields on their hateful motorcycles. The weather was extremely fine, the ground was rock hard and Chipping Norton in no way resembled the permanently wet and often icy conditions of Kodiak Island. But after just a few yards the Škoda was stuck.
And that’s OK too, because if you want a farm car, you’re going to buy a quad bike.
I like the idea of Škoda. It’s a way of buying a new Volkswagen for less. And there is no question it makes some good cars. The Yeti is fabulous, and the Kodiaq’s not bad either. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t, of course, with its ‘Off road’ button and its diamond prospector name, but when you look at it as a sensible, seven-seat school-run car, it makes a deal of sense. Especially as it costs only £35,210 – and that’s the top-of-the-range model.
Just don’t buy the stupid diesel. Partly because climate scientists have decided this month that diesel is bad, and partly because the only reason it gives good economy is because it’s programmed not to work at all.
30 April 2017
Death it can stop. Taxes are a problem
Volvo S90
Ever since I began to write about cars, people of a Jeremy Corbyn persuasion have wondered, out loud and with a lot of spittle, why on earth anyone would want to buy one capable of speeds in excess of 70mph.
This is the main reason Mrs Thatcher was able to defeat the miners. Secondary flying pickets were so consumed by the fact that speed was the preserve of the rich, they deliberately drove Citroën 2CVs, which meant they’d arrive at the pitched battle just as the last police van was closing its doors and heading back to London.
Back then, ordinary people could do whatever speed took their fancy, because there were no cameras and the police could never catch them as most of them were too busy arresting Arthur Scargill.
Today, though, things are different. The police are still too busy – with minors, mostly, and those who may have abused them back in the day when people thought miners were the real problem – but there are electronic deterrents everywhere.
If I drive from my London flat to Luton airport – not something I do a lot, if I’m honest – I am monitored by average-speed cameras on every single inch of the journey.
I could choose, if we lived in a sensible country, to break the limit and pay a sort of speeder’s tax. But for some reason the government has got it into its head that speeding is somehow a crime, and as a result I get points on my licence and the threat of actual pris
on time.
It’s not just Britain either. It’s everywhere. In Switzerland they can take away your car and put you in jail. In France they can strand young mothers at the side of the road. As a result of this idiotic, continent-wide war on speed, I’m afraid that nowadays when I’m asked why someone might want to buy a car that can do more than 70mph, I have to concede that probably there isn’t much point at all.
Which brings me on to the large cars made by BMW and Mercedes and Jaguar and so on. All of them are set up to be perfectly balanced as you sweep through a lovely set of sweeping S-bends on a delightful sunlit A-road at 125mph.
Which means you are paying thousands of pounds for something that you can only do if you’re prepared to spend the next six months playing mummies and daddies in a cell with Big Vern.
And that brings me neatly to the S90 from Volvo Sponsors Sky Atlantic.
Volvo Sponsors Sky Atlantic – which I think is its actual name these days – announced that by 2020 no one need die while driving one of its products.
Yup. If you have cancer or cerebral malaria or meningitis, simply climb into a Volvo and you’ll live for ever.
And don’t worry if you are driving it around and have a crash, because the other big announcement is that no Volvo engine will in future have more than four cylinders. So you’ll never be going fast enough to get an injury that is remotely life-threatening.
To hammer the point home still further, the S90 you see here is not even available in the UK with a petrol engine. You can only have it as a diesel, which of course is a terrible mistake, because these days the government has got it into its head that people who drive diesel cars are mass murderers and must pay £500 a minute every time they want to pop to the shops for a pint of milk.
Really? Page 30
