So that’s that, then. In a health and safety-obsessed world where every fire, electrocution and weather event must be thoroughly investigated, no matter what the cost, because no one is allowed to die, ever, of anything, it’s obvious your next car just has to be a Volvo. There is no other sane choice.
Except of course there is, because while the authorities are obsessed with our safety and health – and the environment –we actually couldn’t give a stuff. What we want is something that we think will make us attractive to members of the opposite sex. Or the same sex, if that’s your thing. Which brings us neatly on to the Lewis Hamilton of cars. The Bentley Continental GT.
When the Continental GT was launched, in 2003, it was a rather dowdy thing that went around with its dad, being polite and happy and well mannered. Then one day and for no obvious reason it decided it didn’t want to go round with its dad any more and became quite cool. And now it’s got a big watch and a red jet and it’s gone a bit mental on the bling front #blessed.
As a general rule I don’t like bling, but I have got to be honest: the new GT’s headlamps are extremely amazing. Each one contains eighty-two LEDs, and at night they glisten like the chandelier in a rapper’s man cave. And when you climb inside, you really are dazzled, especially if the sun’s out, because it’ll be reflecting off all the chrome and burning your retinas.
I wrote last week about how on earth Volkswagen sells the Up! GTI for £14,055 when it is essentially the same as a Bentley. They both have wheels and an engine and indicator stalks and so on. But when you actually sit in the new Continental GT, you’re left in no doubt that a hell of a lot of work goes into making it feel so damn special.
As an example, you push the button marked ‘Screen’, and the whole centre section of the dash rotates to become a satnav map. You push it again and you get three conventional dials. And it takes a while for you to realize it’s like the three-sided numberplate on James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5.
Everything is completely OTT. The speaker grilles. The stalks. The vent buttons. Even the optional diamond pattern on the doors and seats, each shape of which is made up of 712 stitches. And that’s before you go behind the facade and learn that the Continental has five miles of wiring, 2,300 circuits and ninety-two electronic control units.
It is also a car. Bentley’s engineers are at pains to point out that behind the seen-it-before styling, everything is new. They say that the W12 engine is mounted further back and the front wheels further forwards, which improves the handling. I’m sure they’re right. But it still feels very much like the old model – and that’s not a criticism.
I gave it a thrash round The Grand Tour’s ‘Eboladrome’ track in Swindon and it felt big and heavy and four-wheel-driveish. Which is as it should be. If I wanted something lithe and pointy, I’d buy an Aston Martin DB11.
On the motorway it was sublime. Quiet and, even in the ‘Bentley’ mode on the adaptive suspension, extremely comfortable. It’s fast too. Despite the weight, the car will get from 0 to 62mph in 3.7 seconds. If my friends had a machine such as this, I’d spend less time on my own, looking at people crashing.
The only slight niggle is that the adjustable steering wheel doesn’t come quite far enough towards the driver. Oh, and from the driver’s seat the kink in the rear wing gives you the constant impression you’re being undertaken by another car.
And then there’s the panicky radar system that kept jamming on the brakes to avoid an accident that wasn’t going to happen anyway. These, though, are niggles. And a Volvoish attitude to my wellbeing is probably not such a bad thing, actually.
Overall, I thought this was an absolutely fabulous car. A brilliant piece of completely over-the-top styling sitting like the icing on a properly made cake. If I had to choose between this and the DB11, I’d be in what the experts call ‘a right old muddle’. But as I’m pushing sixty now, I’d probably go for the Continental.
My only real gripe is with the behind-the-scenes marketing. Bentley still hangs on to that whole ‘the right crowd and no crowding’ Brooklands scene, and a WO mentality of: ‘Let’s show Johnny Foreigner what’s what, eh?’ Maybe that’s what the Chinese want: a sense that they’ve bought the Bicester shopping village with windscreen wipers. But I don’t.
Bentley also says the car was handcrafted from scratch at its factory in Crewe. It says that 93 per cent of the workforce is British, and I’m sure that’s so. But there’s no getting round the fact that the company was until recently run by a man called Wolfgang Dürheimer and that underneath all the British stitching sits the same platform as you get in a Porsche Panamera.
So. It’s time Bentley forgot about what it was and concentrated on what it is. The maker of what my American friends still call, and quite correctly, an MFB.
The ‘B’ stands for Bentley. I’ll let you work out the rest.
15 July 2018
It’s easy on the nose, but who’d pick it?
Dacia Duster
There are many things I would not like to buy second-hand. A pair of underpants. A laptop computer. A mattress. A toothbrush. Those cotton wool buds on sticks that people use to get wax out of their ears. The list goes on and on.
But what about a car? Sure, you may think that if you get a team of Albanians to make merry with the Pledge and the pine-fresh cleaning products, all traces of the previous owner and their disgusting habits can be removed, but I’m afraid it simply isn’t so.
A few years ago I did a CSI-style test on the interiors of various well-valeted used cars, and the findings from the men with the ultraviolet lamps, swabs and hazmat suits were grim. All the vehicles were coated in a thin veneer of mucus, and two had large amounts of semen on the back seat. One had significant traces of faecal matter in the driver’s footwell, and another contained enough dried blood to suggest that someone had been beheaded in there. After being sick.
This is what you have to remember when you buy a used car. It may look and feel and smell factory-fresh, but behind the sheen it is not. Because everyone – even Prince Philip and Joanna Lumley – picks their nose. And everyone rolls what they find into a small ball. And everyone drops that small ball into that crack at the side of the seat into which not even the most delicate Dyson attachment can reach. So using your new second-hand car as a tool to take you to work is the same as using second-hand lavatory paper to wipe your bottom. Revolting.
All of which brings me neatly to the door of the latest new car I’ve been driving. The second-generation Dacia Duster.
Let’s get to the point of this car straight away. It is a medium-sized, light-duties off-roader with a big boot and space in the cabin for five fully grown adults. And yet it costs less than £10,000. That’s about a third cheaper than any of its rivals.
This is not good value in the way that a McDonald’s Happy Meal is good value. Or this newspaper, for that matter. It is way beyond that. A brand-new car with a three-year warranty and a bogey-free interior and that new-car smell for less than 10 grand. You assume the whole thing must have been made from recycled CD boxes in a Vietnamese sweatshop by child slaves.
Not quite. In fact the Duster is made by the few people who still live in Romania, using tools and parts no longer needed by Dacia’s owner, Renault. Underneath, then, the new Duster is basically an old Clio. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The old Clio was quite a nice thing. Safe, too, for the time.
The engine? This is where things start to go a bit wrong, because in the car I tested it was a 1.6-litre four-cylinder petrol-powered affair that came at you from the days before turbocharging. The result is 113 brake horsepower, which doesn’t sound too bad, and 115 torques, which sounds acceptable also. But it isn’t.
In sixth gear, on the motorway, this car will not accelerate at all. Unless you are going downhill, but then only because of gravity. What you happen to be doing with your right foot is irrelevant. To get round the problem, you must drop down to fourth, which hands some control back to your foot, but the noise goes
from being annoying to being Grateful Dead deafening.
In town the car has an even bigger problem. Mine had four-wheel drive, but instead of fitting a low-range gearbox, which would have been expensive, Dacia has tried to give a low-range feel to first and second. This means you need to be changing up into third when you’re doing about 4mph.
I learnt after a little while to start in second, get it right up to the red line, until blood was spurting from my ears, and then go for third, where normal service was resumed. Fourth was normal too. But from there it made sense to go straight to sixth, which meant fifth was pointless. No one is ever going to drive a Duster smoothly. Or quietly. Or with their dignity intact. And it has the personality of a street lamp or a washing machine. Let me put it this way: no one is going to give their Duster a cute name.
I’d love to conclude by saying that if you concentrate hard, the car will zip along quite nicely, but it won’t: 0 to 62mph takes 12.9 seconds, which in human time is a year. And the top speed is 105mph, which, as Dacia’s elderly and adenoidal fans point out, is more than enough. I can’t be bothered to argue with that. It’s got a 1956 price, so I suppose I shouldn’t be disappointed that it has a 1956 top speed.
For a whole week I told people this. They’d get in, still remarking unfavourably on the horrible gold paintwork, and then they’d stab away at various buttons and levers, laughing about the terribleness of it all. And then I’d shut them up by saying: ‘Yes. But it’s a five-seat off-road car with a three-year warranty and switchable four-wheel drive but it costs less than £10,000.’
Unfortunately, when I sat down to write this, I put on my spectacles and found that the base model with two-wheel drive is indeed less than £10,000. But the four-wheel-drive Comfort version I’d been using is £15,195. And on top of that you are expected to pay £495 for the hideous gold paint and – get this – £90 for western European mapping on the satnav. Really? So if you don’t give Dacia £90 the Duster can only find its way round Latvia?
I’m digressing, and we must get back to the fact that this painfully slow, difficult to drive and not especially attractive elderly Renault in an Ilie Nastase suit is actually not far shy of £16,000. And that is ridiculous.
There are cars from Nissan and Seat and Suzuki and Kia that you can buy for this sort of money, and all of them are safer and better in every single way.
Sure, you can stick to the entry-level two-wheel-drive Duster with its single rear bench and eastern European satnav and five-speed gearbox. And you can boast to your friends about how you’ve got a brand-new car for £9,995.
But I’m sorry: I’d rather buy a used Range Rover Evoque or BMW X3 or Audi Q5 and spend the next couple of years driving to and from work on someone’s turdy skid marks, with my feet nestling in a garden of their dried-up nose juice.
29 July 2018
It’s the nation’s Bentley and Xi’s gotta have it
The Hongqi L5, China’s presidential monster
When mealy-mouthed Britain was moaning about the recent warm spell, I was in the Chinese city of Chongqing, where it was a fairly toasty 48°C. And that’s without the humidity, which causes the air to be actually heavy. Being outside was like being under a hot dead horse.
Chinese people will tell you that Chongqing is the furnace of China. Everyone else, meanwhile, will say, ‘Chong-what?’ And that’s odd, because the city centre is home to about 9m people, which means it’s bigger than London. If you count everyone in the metropolitan area, it’s home to more than 30m, which means it’s pretty much the biggest city in the world. You don’t feel like a person here. You feel like a molecule.
It’s a forest of skyscrapers. There are more here than in Manhattan, and every morning, when you wake up, there are two more. And another bridge over the two brown rivers that meet in the city centre.
I loved Chongqing. I loved the local delicacy, ‘hot pot’ – it’s goose intestines, or congealed duck’s blood, or cow tendon, cooked at the table in a cauldron of dynamite and napalm. This causes you to sweat profusely, which means that when you leave the air-conditioned restaurant and climb back under the dead horse, you’re coated in a cooling layer of perspiration. Clever.
I loved the pace of the city too, and its hills and the way the jungle is trying hard to take it back, growing out of every crevice and crack in the forest of steel and concrete, but soon I left on the bullet train, which is capable of 311mph. It’s so punctual that if you were stepping through the door at the advertised moment of departure, half of you would be left on the platform.
When I first went to China, the train I took from Beijing to Xian was pulled by a steam locomotive, and the lavatory car was a wooden box with a hole in the floor. All the other passengers had missed it. Some by several feet. And that was only thirty years ago.
Ever heard of Anshun? Neither had I, but it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen. Set amid some geological lunacy, it’s willow-pattern Chinese with St Tropez weather – and you don’t have to go there on a train.
You can drive. Before 1988 there wasn’t a single motorway in the country. Now the Chinese have more than 80,000 miles of them, and since 2011 they have been adding at least 6,000 miles a year.
You can’t drive on these motorways with a British licence. That’s not good enough. You must take an exam first. This involves opening and closing your hands, squatting and standing up again and passing an eye test. Which I did by answering the questions in a language the examiner could not understand. Then I was able to use the smoothest, freest-flowing roads in the world. The only drawback is that every hundred yards every car is photographed, and every picture is analysed to make sure the driver is not on the phone or speeding or ‘touching his passenger. Or himself.’
Thirty years ago Chinese people were not allowed to drive a car. Now they are buying more than 24 million a year. To try to force locals to buy cars made in China, vehicles manufactured in Europe cost twice as much as they do in the West. But that’s not stopping the new rich. You see Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys constantly. There are fakes of many cars. There are fakes of everything in China, but having the real deal – that’s what people want. It’s why Bicester shopping village is one of the top attractions for Chinese tourists in Britain.
This, however, is not much use to President Xi Jinping, because he can’t turn up to a global conference in a Bentley. That’d be admitting to the world that the Chinese car industry is no good. Nor can he turn up in a Haval or a Trumpchi, because then everyone would know for sure that the Chinese car industry was no good. He needs something that causes the world to say: ‘Wow.’ Which is why Xi uses a Hongqi L5.
It costs £550,000. You read that correctly, and it looks like a Chrysler 300C, which is how all cars look when the designer is told to make something that looks like a Bentley. Except, to set it apart, it also has hints of the Peugeot 404 and the Austin 1100. None of which you notice, because of the red flag bonnet ornament. That’s what Hongqi means: red flag. This, then, is a £550,000 symbol of communism. Chinese-style.
Getting hold of one to try was nigh-on impossible. They’re made only for top officials and priced to make sure no one else buys one. So no one has, really. But eventually, using nothing but enormous amounts of cold, hard cash, I was able to get one for a day. It was delivered by a one-legged man in a vest who spoke no English and knew nothing about what the car was. But we were able to work out that it’s powered by a homemade V12 engine that produces 402 brake horsepower. About what you got from a big Mercedes in the 1990s.
This would be fine, except the Hongqi – a hard word to say on television, by the way – weighs 3.1 tons, which is more than most road-building equipment. When you open the incredibly heavy door, you see why. It’s bulletproof. But when you lower the window, you see that, in fact, it isn’t. It weighs that much because it’s made from iron ore and granite.
This means the Hongqi is a bit slow. Actually, that’s not fair. A worn-out Austin Metro is a bit slow. This is much
slower than that. Hongqi won’t say how quickly it gets from 0 to 62mph, mainly, I suspect, because it can’t get there at all. That is a good thing, because it has no airbags.
It also has no cupholders. There is electrical adjustment for the steering wheel. But that was broken. And I didn’t mind, because, ooh, it was a nice place to sit. It wasn’t remotely comfortable: the seats were rock-hard, and the suspension had, I think, been made from the offcuts of whatever they’d used to create the doors, but, boy, does this thing have presence.
Nothing I’ve driven says, ‘Pay attention to what I have to say,’ more than this. You roll up in one to a meeting and you’re going to get your way. It is the meanest, baddest-looking son of a bitch the world has seen.
And who cares if it does only 6mph? That’s all it will ever need to do, going past the adoring crowds from the airport to the global conference. This is something built for you to get out of. Theresa May has a Jaguar. Angela Merkel has a Mercedes. Emmanuel Macron has to get out of the back of a Renault Clio.
And all of them will look feeble when Xi steps out of his Hongqi. It’s a symbol that China will take over the world. Which it will.
12 August 2018
The northern lights at your fingertips
Mercedes A-class
It’s often said that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. But that’s obviously not true, because Mercedes has launched a 1.3-litre Volkswagen Golf-sized hatchback that has a hilarious price tag – at least in the version I drove – in excess of £30,000. Oh, and here’s the punchline: it’s possible you are going to want one …
I’ve never really understood why luxurious and beautifully appointed interiors are fitted to large cars only. Who says that people who want soft leather and thick carpets must also need 16 feet of legroom in the back and enough boot space to hold all of Joan Collins’s hats?
Really? Page 43
