And how clever is all that? Because here we have a car with rally seats and grippy Dunlop SportMaxx RT2 tyres and go-faster stripes. But that will do nearly 60mpg and be cheap to insure even if you are seventeen and have a bad temper. However, there is a problem. This is a car that does not work at all. It’s hard to think of the right word. But ‘horrible’ is close enough.
The first problem, of many, is the stiffened suspension, which enables the car to go round corners at the sort of speed its soggy engine can only dream about. But on the downside the bumpiness beggars belief. It’s so uncomfortable around town that you’d be better off walking.
And then there’s the way it doesn’t really move off properly. Unless you give it a bootful of revs, it pulls out of side turnings like a twig stuck in an oxbow lake. Some of this is down to ridiculously tall gearing, which creates another problem on the motorway: making it go up a hill. Unless you’re prepared to stir the gear lever as though you’re making scrambled eggs, you’ll be confined for all of time to what Michael McIntyre always calls ‘the loser lane’. And even here you’ll be a nuisance to lorries.
I don’t mind an underpowered car if it feels fizzy and alive and if it responds to some spirited driving, but the Mini just won’t. It feels slovenly, like a fat kid on a cross-country run. He may have all the right kit and the best training shoes, but it makes no difference in the end. He’s going to come last.
I can’t imagine you’re still reading at this point, because this is not a car you’d want to buy, but, just in case, I should also mention the satnav, because obviously, in a car costing nearly £17,000, it’s going to be fitted as standard. Except it isn’t. What you get instead is a clip in which to store your phone.
I know that if you squint this makes sense. I know all young people use their phones to get about and mate and so on. But I prefer a proper satnav, because if I use my phone, everyone thinks I work for Uber and people get in the back when I’m waiting at a red light and tell me to go to Hornchurch.
There’s more, I’m afraid. The big front seats. Yes, they’re nice to sit in, but they rob nearly all the legroom in the back. And if someone back there needs to be sick – and this is a car aimed at young people who go to festivals, so it is likely – there is no way he or she will be able to get out before the pavement pizza arrives.
Apparently, the 1499 GT is a limited-run special edition. Just 1,499 will be made. This is probably because Mini knew full well it wouldn’t be a big seller. But, either way, it’s going to be left with all of them when the production run ends.
The only real solution, if Mini wants to save face, is to go for the full 1970s authenticity and ask the workforce to go on strike as soon as possible.
So far as you’re concerned, though, I shouldn’t worry, because there are many alternatives to this woeful car. First there is the standard Mini One, which doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t and won’t shake your hair out and doesn’t have silly seats.
Then there’s the Volkswagen Up! GTI. It’s not as practical as the Mini, but at £13,755 it’s more than £3,000 cheaper, unless of course VW has made that price up.
Then there’s the Ford Fiesta ST-Line. It has only a 1-litre engine, but that delivers 138bhp, which means it can handle gentle gradients with ease. And finally, a left-field choice: the Citroën C3 Aircross. This is a car that’s much, much better than you might imagine. Sweet, too.
In short, there are many options if you want a small, sporty-looking car. The Mini 1499 GT, however, isn’t one of them.
17 June 2018
Keep your powder, gin and 12-bore dry
Twisted Land Rover Defender
I have never been a fan of the Land Rover Defender and cannot understand the dewy-eyed sentimentality of fully grown beardy men who shed beery tears when it finally went out of production in 2016.
It may have been very clever and important when Land Rover copied the Willys Jeep back in the 1840s. But by the time Queen Victoria died, it was already starting to look cramped and stupid. Even the army eventually gave up on it, but still, at real ale festivals and murderer conventions in the heathery bits of Britain, people with muddy fingernails wailed and gnashed their teeth when the life support system was finally turned off.
It was, to me, the red phone box of cars. It worked only because it had always been around. But the truth is that it’s better to make a call from an iPhone than from inside a draughty red box that smells of a tramp’s underpants. And it’s better, if you work in the countryside, to drive a pick-up than a badly made, slow, evil-handling Defender.
Well, anyway, I came to work last week and outside the office was exactly the sort of thing that would cause a member of Camra to walk into a door. It was, or rather it had once been, a Defender 110, but someone had fitted fat tyres with the complexion of the Singing Detective, massive wheels, flared arches, a light bar with the power of a collapsing sun and, to judge by the twin exhausts, some kind of weird million-horsepower engine as well.
Further investigation revealed this to be so, as, under the bonnet, instead of a wheezing boiler that ran on an unholy mixture of cider and coal, there was the unmistakeable bulk of an LS3 V8 from a Chevrolet Corvette. Not a bad engine, actually, but it had no place in what I thought was Richard Hammond’s latest idiotic purchase. It was even called a Twisted, only with the ‘s’ written backwards. And that’s so him.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be my car for the week. And to make matters worse, the brochure was accompanied by a letter from the daughter of the man who owns Twisted. ‘Dear Jeremy,’ it said. ‘This is my favourite Twisted Defender. I hope you like it too. Please look after it for my Daddy. Love from Molly, age seven and three-quarters.’
‘Harrumph,’ I said to myself belligerently. ‘I shall not be swayed by this emotional blackmail.’ Well spelt and written though it may be. Especially as I’d just noticed the price of this particular top-spec version: more than £150,000. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought, with my Doncaster hat on. ‘This may have been made in North Yorkshire, but with that kind of price tag I can’t imagine they’ll sell many there.’
The next day I had to go to my cottage in the country and, as I set off, the weather was overcast and gloomy, but there was no sign of what lay on the other side of the Chilterns. We all occasionally say, ‘I’ve never seen rain like it’, but I really and truly had not. I’ve witnessed the monsoon in India, thunderstorms in Vietnam and the relentless downpours of southern Chile, but none of them got close to the bombardment in Oxfordshire that night. It was like driving along under a fire plane.
And there’s no other way of saying this: I could not imagine a better car in those conditions than the Twisted. It just punched its way through the lakes that had formed in every dip and the rivers on every slope. Yes, its roof-mounted lights caused a white-out every time we went through really deep water, and the spray plumed out as if a nuclear sub had just exploded beneath the surface, but the tyres, and the way this thing was set up: it made even the most manly Mercedes G-wagen look like a market-stall toy.
There’s more. It’s often the case that people who are capable of fitting front and rear air lockers, Alcon brakes and uprated suspension to what’s basically the Hay Wain are absolutely hopeless at doing interiors. Often they ask their wives to help, and while they may be just about capable of turning up a pair of trousers, they can’t trim a dashboard.
Well, someone at Twisted can, because apart from the inherent lack of shoulder room, it was a beautiful place to sit. They’d even managed to find an aftermarket satnav and control system that was sensible and not full of features no one needs. The next day the rain had gone and I had a closer look at the well-trimmed monster that had head-butted its way to the hills. And in the boot there was a big and nicely made chest for sloe gin, King’s Ginger liqueur and all the aiming juice that the nation’s pheasant-slayers need. There were even slots for your guns. Although those aren’t included in the price.
What is included is a turn o
f speed that beggars belief. The soundtrack tells you that there’s a bit of poke under your right foot, but your head is saying that you’re in a Land Rover 110 and it’d need to be a lot to move such a cumbersome old tank around at anything more than a trot.
Your head is wrong, because when you mash the throttle into the firewall, the automatic gearbox drops a cog or two, the nose rises and, with a bellow that could stun a cow at 400 yards, it takes off with acceleration that makes you burst out laughing. It is not just fast, this thing. It is hilariously fast.
And you don’t have to slow down that much for the bends. Obviously, with those knobbly Cooper tyres, it doesn’t have the grip levels of, say, Bambi, but, thanks to its reworked suspension and Recaro seats that hold you in place, you can make some serious progress. The only really annoying thing was the way people in Defenders going the other way gave me a little wave as I tore by. ‘We have nothing in common,’ I wanted to shout.
Except now we do. I shoot, and I’m well aware that it’s important to have the right car when you’re on one of those days that are full of businessmen with big watches and tweed that even Rupert Bear would describe as ‘garish’. A simple Range Rover, in these circumstances, is not enough.
So I’d love to turn up in this monstrous Twisted, knowing that it would get deeper into the woods and then get me home faster than anything anyone else had.
So, Molly, all is well. Even though it started out in life as a Land Rover, which I hate as much as I bet you hate some of your teachers, I did like your dad’s car. And if I hadn’t just bought one of the aforementioned Range Rovers, I’d be sorely tempted by it. Especially the drinks cabinet.
1 July 2018
A power pup to make you sit up and beg
Volkswagen Up! GTI
Forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before, but if I were charged with running an airline, I can pretty much guarantee it would be bankrupt in a week.
The main problem, after I’d organized some appropriate uniforms for the stewardesses and dealt with the strike and the public outcry that resulted, would be choosing routes.
Not that long ago I had to fly to Charlotte, North Carolina, and could not believe that British Airways had a daily direct service. I figured I’d have the whole plane to myself because there could be no way that 400-plus people, every day, would wake up and think: ‘You know what? I fancy going to North Carolina.’ But I was wrong. I haven’t been so squashed since I once said, ‘Economy, please’, buying a train ticket from Mumbai to Delhi.
At the other end of the scale, we have Corfu. This is a beautiful island that is very popular among the sort of people who can afford to pay many hundreds of pounds to get away for a long weekend. And yet for some extraordinary reason it is not possible to fly there directly from the UK in the winter.
As I write, I’m trying to get to Ulan Bator and it’s ridiculous. This is Mongolia’s capital city and the only way I can find to get there is either on an upright seat through Moscow, which is full of football supporters and airport guards who might play silly buggers with me for being English and possibly from Salisbury, or via Hong Kong. Which would mean flying halfway round the world to come three-quarters of the way back again.
These are the issues I’d address if I ran an airline. Getting people to places they haven’t necessarily heard of. It sounds great. But I’m assured by people who actually do work in the airline industry that it’s the worst business idea since someone at Volkswagen said: ‘Yes. But what if we just cheat?’
And speaking of the motor industry, I wouldn’t be much good at running a car maker either.
Last week, I was driving around in VW’s new Up! GTI. And I’ve been consumed by the fact that, before tax, it has a recommended retail price of £11,713. Now assuming VW is making 20 per cent, that means it is putting together a whole car for about £9,761.
How is that possible? It has the same number of wheels and seats and windows as a Rolls-Royce Phantom and that costs more than £360,000. It has an engine and a gearbox and miles of wiring. It has air-conditioning and electric front windows and electronic stability control. So how can it possibly cost only £9,761 to make? Obviously it can’t, so if I were running VW, I’d tell my engineers not to bother and to concentrate instead on making Bentleys, which are a lot more profitable.
Happily, though, I’m not running VW, which means you can buy this Up! GTI – including giving Theresa May a slug of VAT – for £14,055. That’s £14,055 for what is surely the spiritual successor to the old VW Golf GTI.
It’s about the same size and it has the same sort of non-threatening styling. You don’t quite say ‘Aww’ when you see it but neither do you go ‘Grrrr’. It does, though, because under the bonnet there’s a 1-litre three-cylinder engine. And these units are inherently unbalanced, which is why they sound so charismatic.
It must also be said that 1-litre engines are inherently unpowerful and that such a thing therefore has no place in a car that says GTI on the back. But to get round that, VW has fitted a turbocharger that boosts the power to 114bhp. That’s 6bhp more than you got from the original Golf GTI.
That said, the Up! GTI is more than 200kg heavier than the Mk 1 Golf GTI, mainly because it’s filled with all sorts of stuff designed to keep you alive if you skid off the road and hit a tree. And you do notice this extra weight when you are on a motorway and want to pull into the outside lane …
You put your foot down in sixth and not much happens. So now the BMW that was bearing down on you is flashing its lights and you can see the driver is mouthing the word ‘Idiot’. And you’re wishing you’d dropped it down to fourth because then everything would have been fine. Unless you’re a polar bear, which you’re not.
In every other respect, the Up! is completely perfect. In a city it fits into the cycle lanes and beats everything off the lights, and can slip easily into even the stingiest multistorey car parking bay. And while it doesn’t come with a satnav, it has a handy clip above the dash where you can mount your phone and use that instead.
Other modern-day stuff? Well, it’s got a USB port where you can dock your, er, USB and it has an interface for Android or Apple devices. I have no idea what I’m talking about here but I know these things matter to under-tewnty-fives. Me, I was more taken with the cloth-seat upholstery, which was exactly the same as it was on the old Golf GTI. And the lovely-to-hold leather steering wheel.
And I was even more impressed by how this car handled itself out of town. Pick a speed. Any speed. And then it will just do that all the time. You don’t have to slow down for bumps, corners or even horses.
People don’t mind when you whizz past their nag at 60mph because the car’s sweet and it’s making the exact same noise their bicycles used to make when they put lollipop sticks in the spokes. I imagine many think as they watch the Up! fly off into the distance: ‘I must sell this horse and get one of those as soon as I get home.’
For, behind the wheel, it is tremendous. The handling and the grip and the torque combine to produce one of the funnest and funniest cars on the road today. I challenge anyone to not like it.
My mate’s mum saw it and ordered one straight away. The executive producer of The Grand Tour saw it, had a go and is now part-exchanging his BMW M3 to get one. I have no need for such a thing but I’d love to have one in my life. In that respect, it’s like a four-seater hatchback dog.
As I said, if I’d been running VW I’d have assumed no one would want such a thing and there was no money to be made on it. But there is, of course: on the finance deals everyone will make to have one.
That’s the trouble with business. It’s not interesting. Some of the things it makes, on the other hand …
8 July 2018
The Lewis Hamilton of cars #blessed
Bentley Continental GT
Because no one apart from me turns up on time these days, I spend a lot of my life sitting in restaurants or bars, scrolling through my phone, pretending to everyone else that I’m emailing f
riends and doing important business deals.
Mostly, though, I’m on my internet platform, DriveTribe, looking at hastily shot videos of Russians crashing their Lamborghinis and hilarious footage of motorcyclists slithering along the asphalt in their silly leather romper suits.
Recently I happened upon some footage of a horrific accident. Shot by a dashcam, it showed a Volvo trundling along quite normally at about 50mph and then, for no obvious reason, drifting very gently into the wrong lane and smashing head-on into a 42-ton articulated lorry.
Happily, the camera was still rolling when the utterly ruined car came to a halt, and when the dust had settled and the engine had come back to Earth after a spell in orbit, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. The driver was moving about. And then he calmly opened what was left of the door.
It was incredible that anyone could have survived such an impact, but not as incredible as the caption. This is what it said: ‘Since it was launched in the UK fourteen years ago, no one has died in Volvo XC90. Ever.’
I find this incredible because, with the best will in the world, Volvo XC90s tend to be driven by school-run mums who spend most of the time facing backwards and shouting at Toby to stop kicking his sister. They are the exact sort of car you’d expect to drift into the wrong lane, and yet not a single Brit has died in one. Not even of boredom.
Of course Volvo can’t advertise the fact, because it would be the very definition of tempting fate. It’d be like Qantas saying it has never had a fatal crash. You just know what would happen the next day. But it does give credence to Volvo’s claim, a while ago, that by 2020 no one will die in any of its cars.
Really? Page 42
