And, yes, on a frozen lake, with the traction control off, and the sun shining, and with the settings all in nutter bastard mode, it delivered the full fireworks display while wearing a cartoon catsuit. However, the rest of the time …
Part of the problem is the way it looks. You tell yourself it’s brilliant because it’s full of sharp edges and Lambo styling details. It’s also a lot lower and sleeker than the other SUVs – the Bentayga in particular. But if you force yourself to concentrate, it actually isn’t that mad-looking at all.
Then you step inside and, yes, there are all the lovely Italian styling touches. But it all feels very German. And then there’s the space. I didn’t need to put the driver’s seat fully back to get comfortable, and even when I did, there was still room for a six-footer to sit behind me. And behind him was a boot big enough for a winter week with a full-on shooting schedule.
Does it work off road? Well, yes, it has four-wheel drive, and you can raise the body to give plenty of ground clearance. So, if you have the right tyres, you can go up a ski slope. I know this because I did.
But it doesn’t have manual differential locks or a low-range gearbox. You just tell it what kind of terrain you’re on – snow, sand or mud – and it does its best to sort you out. I fear that for serious off-road work it’ll be left far behind by a Range Rover. Although it would be quite funny turning up to a shoot in a yellow Lambo. Next season I suspect lots of people will do just that.
On the road, in ordinary going-home-from-work mode, it’s very quiet and extremely comfortable. When you put your foot down, there’s a hesitation, as the turbos – the first time such things have been fitted to a Lambo – and the automatic gearbox talk to each other about who should go first. It’s very polite but not what you’d expect. Or want.
After a day, I started to feel a bit sad. I’d looked forward to the Urus because I thought it would be German engineering wrapped up in some video-game idiocy. But it felt – dare I say this? – ordinary. Yes, you can use the track mode and switch off the driver aids and create some madness that way. But you never will. Not really.
Make no mistake: it’s bloody fast. And it screams through the corners as if it weren’t on stilts at all. But, again, you’ll never do this. You’ll drive it normally and it’ll reward you by being normal. But if normal’s what you want, save eighty grand and buy a Range Rover. Or wait for the Aston. You could wait for the Ferrari, but unless you load it up with all the extras, there’s a chance you’ll be pushed down dealers’ waiting lists and then told that actually you can’t have one at all.
In the meantime, Lamborghini has made a very good car. A car that is quiet and comfortable and fast and probably super-reliable. It’s also, and I know this sounds ridiculous, quite good value for money. But, sadly, by doing all this, it hasn’t made a Lamborghini. Which is what I wanted.
15 April 2018
A jihad-mobile comes a Cotswolds cropper
Toyota Hilux
Many years ago, when I was hosting Top Gear, I was watching the news one night and, as usual, there was much footage of various people in the Middle East shooting Americans from the backs of their Toyota pick-up trucks. And I couldn’t help thinking: just how tough are those things?
So the next day we bought a Hilux and decided to see how much damage we could inflict on it before it stopped working.
I rammed it into various bits of Bristol, dropped it from a crane, set fire to it, hit it with a wrecking ball, left it under the sea for a couple of hours and then, when none of that stopped it from functioning, we put it on the top of a block of flats that were then blown up.
It was a huge risk, that film, because had the Hilux failed to recover from any of its ordeals, we’d have been forced to say, ‘Well, there you are, folks. You can’t leave a Toyota pick-up truck under the sea and expect it to work afterwards.’ And the audience would have replied with a weary, ‘You don’t say.’
Worse, the next morning the Daily Mail would have said we’d spunked God knows how many thousands of licence-payer pounds into the Bristol Channel and the Mirror would have said I was the unacceptable face of Tory Britain. Then we’d have been in an oak-panelled office, looking at our shoes while we were shouted at by a sustainable panel of gender-neutral executives.
Happily for all concerned, however, the Hilux survived all the ordeals and that film is probably the best remembered item we made. I think even Toyota itself was a bit amazed with the durability of its no-nonsense workhorse because the still-functioning wreck spent some time in the reception area of its world headquarters in Japan.
A couple of years later, when it was decided that James May and I should see if we could drive to the North Pole without killing one another, there was only one car we felt would be up to the job – the latest, newest Hilux.
‘Wrong,’ said our ice-driving contacts in Iceland. ‘It’s still tremendous if we want to shoot Americans but for going across a frozen ocean, its trunnions will have to be beefed up and it’ll need big Icelandic tyres, and a long-range fuel tank. And storage space for the gun you’ll need if a bear comes.’
It was therefore a heavily modified car we used for the journey, but the fact still remains: the cold was so severe that our cameras packed up, my phone stopped working and so did large parts of my body. Nothing works when it’s -50°C. But every morning that Hilux started and every single component on it was unaffected. Small wonder the top-of-the-range Hilux is now called the Invincible X.
There are those who say that since Land Rover pulled the plug on the Defender, and agricultural supply shops stopped selling Subarus made from corrugated iron, the nation’s hard-done-by farmers have been up a bit of a gum tree.
But the truth is that they’ve all migrated into pick-up trucks. Jihadi John and that nice Adam Henson from Countryfile weirdly have exactly the same requirements. Toughness, durability and value. And you get all that from Nissan, Mitsubishi and of course Toyota. A base model Hilux is £24,155. Whereas an all-singing, all-dancing, leather-lined, four-seat Hilux with satnav, cruise control, air-conditioning, the ability to tow 3.5 tons and a load bed measurable in acres, is £37,345.
That’s £37,345 for what, when all is said and done, is a Range Rover with a bigger boot.
I was using one over Easter in Oxfordshire and I cannot recall any car garnering quite so much attention. The fence-builders and gamekeepers and dry stone wallers have no time for supercars or the plush off-roaders used by weekenders. They like only pick-up trucks, and in the pick-up world, a luxury Hilux Invincible is more incredible than the Queen’s golden coach. I saw one gnarled and bow-legged countryman actually stroke it as he walked by.
The next day, on my farm in Oxfordshire, seeing how many trees had been brought down by the ‘Beast from the East’ and how much damage the badgers had done that week, all was going well when I arrived at a small hill. Yes, it was a bit steep and yes, the ground was wet underfoot. But this is a hill my old Range Rover can do in soggy conditions with its eyes shut. It has, in fact, on many occasions. So the Hilux – which kicked the Americans out of Afghanistan and Iraq and, as we speak, is holding the Russians at bay in Syria – would have no trouble at all …
I didn’t bother engaging any of the hardcore off-road gubbins. But wait a minute. What’s this? I’m struggling. The wheels are spinning uselessly. So I stopped, twiddled the knob to select the low-range gearbox and then pushed a button to engage the rear differential. And to my utter astonishment, there was a lot of beeping and some flashing lights to tell me that neither thing was working properly.
Had the sun risen in the west, I’d have been less surprised. So I assumed I’d make a mistake, but I hadn’t. It wouldn’t budge. So I rolled back down the hill in reverse, turned everything off, then turned everything on and still got nothing but beeps and flashing lights. I reversed some more, as this sometimes works. But all that happened was that I got more mud on the tyres, which made progress even more difficult.
I could scarcely be
lieve it. I was in a Toyota Hilux pick-up truck, in the gently rolling Cotswolds, and it was stuck. More incredibly, it was stuck because of a mechanical fault. Except, of course, it wasn’t. It was stuck because instead of the old-fashioned levers that Toyota used to fit, the gearbox and the differential are operated by electronics, and electronics in a car designed to win wars against A-10 Warthogs and Apache gunships are as stupid as electronics on a shark defence speargun.
The worst thing about electronics is that the faults are almost always intermittent. So after turning off the Hilux, walking home and coming back with another car and a tow rope, it worked fine and hauled itself out of the mire. And then the diff lock and low range wouldn’t disengage. For about fifteen minutes. Then they did. This was annoying for me; it would annoy a proper farmer even more. With Brexit coming, there’s no time for a mid-lambing season breakdown. But in the Middle East, it could prove fatal.
I could go on to say that the Invincible’s engine was a bit rough and that space for passengers in the rear is tight. But that’s a bit like telling someone with terminal cancer that they have an ingrowing toenail.
The fact is that there is only one reason for buying a Hilux. It’s going to be unbreakable. But mine broke.
22 April 2018
Oh deer – lucky it has roadkill warning
DS 7 Crossback
I was going to write this morning about the Volkswagen T-Roc, a small and rather funky-looking SUV that burst on to the market a couple of months ago. But then I saw, on the back page of The Times, an advertisement for the car in question. ‘The new T-Roc,’ it said. ‘With £500 towards your deposit with Solutions PCP*.’
The asterisk was plainly the point here. Obviously, that is where I’d find the snow plough and Paula Hamilton – the pithy stuff for which VW’s admen are famed. But no. It was just a load of accountancy-speak that is normally read out at high speed at the end of car ads on the radio.
So there we are. Volkswagen is making it plain that the only reason you would want to buy a T-Roc is that there’s £500 on offer towards the cost of its Solutions PCP. Do you know what a PCP is? Or how a normal PCP might differ from a Solutions PCP? No. Me neither, so let’s forget about the T-Roc, which is only for those with an interest in accountancy, and move on to something a lot more interesting: Citroën’s new DS 7.
I called a guy at our office in Chiswick and asked him to bring it to my flat. On the way, a youth in a Subaru with an exhaust the size of a Sheffield Forgemasters supergun decided to crash into it. The Impreza was damaged badly, but the DS escaped with minor cuts and bruises. This surprised me.
What didn’t surprise me, a few days later, after a visit to the sweet little Brunel museum in south London, was that the engine died. Being French, it had decided to go on strike. Citroën’s press office didn’t seem too concerned, so I said I’d leave it to be towed away and would go home in a cab.
But as I was waiting for one to appear, the AA turned up, saying it’d plug the car into its diagnostic laptop to see what was wrong. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha,’ I said, while looking for Reg Crikey to take me home. But in just a minute the Citroën came back to life, and that was another surprise because, in my experience, trying to mend a car with a laptop is like trying to do dentistry in boxing gloves.
Later Citroën called in a bit of a panic to say that there had been nothing wrong with the car, and that a faulty battery was to blame. I don’t buy that, I’m afraid, because the battery is, whether the company likes it or not, as much a part of the car as its doors, or its steering wheel. Saying the car was fine apart from a battery that wouldn’t hold its charge is like saying the patient is fine apart from the fact his heart exploded.
Whatever. You’d imagine after a breakdown and a car crash I’d write the Citroën off as a haunted Friday 13th car and move on to something else.
But there’s more. Hilariously, Citroën is trying to pass the DS off as a standalone brand. Even though the only people who can remember the original DS are wearing incontipanties in nursing homes.
And anyway the whole point of that car was the clever suspension that allowed you to drive with one wheel missing, over a ploughed field, at 100mph, without spilling your cognac. Whereas the new DS judders over the smallest speed hump as if its ankle just broke.
There’s more bad news. The basic cost of the car I tested, a Crossback Prestige, was £39,380. But it had been fitted with a night vision pack, an electric sunroof, big wheels and a few other options, so the actual cost was an eye-watering £44,855. Small wonder Citroën is saying it’s not a Citroën.
What it definitely is, is an SUV, and, as I may have mentioned a few times (No. You’ve mentioned it a thousand times – Ed), I can’t be doing with the damn things. They’re the motoring equivalent of the short-sleeved shirt. Patio furniture with brake lights. So there’s much not to like here, and yet …
Step inside and you will find the doors and the dashboard are coated in quilted leather, such as you would find in a Bentley or an Aston Martin. And the clock is like a footballer’s watch. It doesn’t tell the time very well – twenty past nine comes up as four past forty-five – but it’s a thing of ostentatious beauty. I would like such a thing in my life.
Then there are the buttons. Citroën has gone for a Porsche approach by blunderbussing the transmission tunnel with big, bold switches, and the instrument binnacle is just as stylistically out there. You can choose what it says and how the information is portrayed, but it doesn’t matter what you go for: it’s very like being in a Lamborghini. If you are in the market for an SUV – and who isn’t these days? – you’d struggle to sit in a DS and decide to buy something else. I liked it enormously.
Handling. Fuel economy. Performance. They’re what you’d expect from an SUV, a type of car wilfully designed to be no good at any of those things. It has a 2-litre turbodiesel inline engine; MacPherson strut suspension at the front, multi-arm at the rear; electric power steering. It’s the same recipe every bugger is using.
But on a motorway I was surprised – again – by just how quiet and unruffled it was even at what I’d say to police was 70mph. And this was an eight-speed diesel. The petrol version you’d buy, because the government’s seesaw thinking is that diesels are bad, will be even better.
I was impressed with the Apache gunship-style night vision system too. When the infrared cameras spot something organic ahead, it’s ringed on the spooky black-and-white picture feed in a yellow box.
And that’s what I saw as I drove down the A44 late one Saturday night. A yellow box, ringing nothing that could be made out, in a wood. Being a cautious soul, I slowed down, and moments later a deer leapt out in front of me … It’s likely that if the car hadn’t had night vision, I’d now be wearing Bambi as a big, maggoty hat.
So there is much to like about this car. But it is very expensive and it was fitted with a battery that couldn’t hold its charge. Yes, it’s a lovely place to sit and wait for the AA, but I’m not sure that’s what people really want. So I’m afraid that overall it has to be a no.
29 April 2018
Make way – I’m in my attack sub today
Ferrari 812 Superfast
A few years ago I drove the then new Ferrari F12 in Scotland and emerged with a white face and what looked like the onset of Parkinson’s. Ooh, it was a scary thing. Yes, the weather was being all Scottish and, yes, the road surface was not ideally suited to a car with a simply enormous amount of bang-and-you’re-on-it power. But it was the size of the thing that worried me most of all.
It felt as though I was trying to steer an aircraft carrier with an out-of-control nuclear reactor up the Kennet and Avon canal. You didn’t drive this car. On roads like that, in the rain, you hung on for dear life and whimpered like a dog on bonfire night. Some questioned my petrolhead credentials when I returned and, after some medication, said the F12 was a car with too much power. ‘Too much power’?’ they wailed. ‘That’s like saying your penis is too big. It’s impossible.’
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br /> I still feel, however, that I was correct. And I reckoned that what Ferrari needed to do next was go back to basics and make a small, 2-litre car. I drew it in my head and it was very pretty. It would have about 300bhp, a fast gearbox, the lightness of touch for which Ferrari was famous and a price tag of around £100,000.
But instead what Ferrari has done is replace the F12 with a car that’s even bigger and even more powerful. It’s so powerful, in fact, that it’s called the Superfast. And it’s so big that when you emerge from a turning, you need to stick six feet of bonnet into the road before you can see if it’s safe to pull out.
Let’s start with the little things that are wrong with it. In the night it’s as paranoid as a cokehead, because every morning it flashed up a message on the dash saying a break-in had been attempted, even though CCTV said no such thing had happened.
Then there are its seatbelts. My car was fitted with £2,000-worth of optional racing harnesses that were nearly impossible to do up properly. What’s more, there were many sharp edges, which my girlfriend said, as she sat there like the star of an S&M movie, would play havoc if you were wearing a chiffon dress. I’m not sure that’d bother most customers, but you never know …
Of rather more concern is the turning circle, which is stupidly large, and the reflection of the yellow trim in the windscreen. Then there’s an astonishingly cheap wiper switch, the usual Ferrari problem of indicator controls on the steering wheel – which means they’re never where you left them – and a curious piece of string hanging into the passenger footwell. I pulled it, of course, but nothing happened. Maybe it had something to do with the imaginary burglar.
There’s much to annoy, then, but there’s much, when you put your foot down, to make your eyes go wide and your girlfriend say: ‘As soon as I get this bondage gear off, I’m going to f****** kill you.’ This is a car that can get from 0 to 62mph in 2.9 seconds. And onwards to a top speed of 211mph. It’s really, really fast and really, really noisy.
Really? Page 40
