Really?

by Jeremy Clarkson

  The fact is that the Mazda and its chief rivals – the Ford Mondeo and the VW Passat – are seen as worthy and dull. People would far rather buy an SUV of some sort.

  The figures bear this out. In the past ten years SUV sales have risen in the UK from 161,000 annually to at least 817,000 last year. That’s a fivefold increase. Meanwhile, the sales of four-door saloons have plummeted from a 15 per cent market share in 1999 to a miserable 6 per cent, according to data published in 2017.

  And of that 6 per cent, BMW had 22.8 per cent, Audi had 17.9 per cent and Jaguar had 13.4 per cent. The Mondeo? The big boy? Well, the number actually sold last year to private buyers for cash was measurable in the hundreds.

  Nobody wants a four-door saloon with a low-rent badge on the back. Not even if it’s a five-door estate version. Not even if it looks nice, has tons of standard equipment, costs just £31,695 and shares its name with a lightbulb.

  But I’m willing to bet that when you see the Soul Red Crystal paintwork, you’ll be sorely tempted. However, here’s the thing. That colour is an £800 option, which brings me on to an idea I’ve had …

  The other day I bought an Alfa Romeo GTV6. It’s a one-owner, low-mileage gem that is let down by just one thing. It’s red. I’d already decided I was going to spray it another colour but couldn’t choose between black and silver. Well, my mind is made up now: it’s still going to be red. But it’s going to be Soul Red Crystal.

  You should do the same. Buy any car you like and then pay Mazda to make it the right colour. Because in the modern age that’s the only bit you’d really want from the Mazda6, a likeable but otherwise quite grey car.

  25 November 2018

  A bit on the dim side, but still a total belter

  Aston Martin Vantage

  The owners of a restaurant near where I live in the countryside have obviously decided that many of the rural customers may be so ugly, they wouldn’t want to look at one another while eating. So they’ve fitted extremely low-level lighting.

  It works well. You can make out the vague shape of your dining companion – enough to know it’s a person rather than a dolphin or some kind of dog – but you can’t see any of their warts or skin diseases. However, there are drawbacks. It’s so dim in there, the only reason you don’t crash into all the tables while you’re searching for the lavatory is that most customers are using the torches on their iPhones to read the menu.

  There’s a hotel in Amsterdam with a similar problem. There’s just enough light to pick out the reception desk but there isn’t quite enough to pick out the footstool just in front of it. ‘Everyone does that,’ says the receptionist as you arrive, chin-first, on her cracked and blood-speckled keyboard. In my mind there’s a time and a place for darkness. When you are star gazing, for instance, or trying to get to sleep. But at all other times I like to see what I’m doing and where I’m going, especially when I’m at the wheel of Aston Martin’s latest Vantage.

  Sadly, this is not possible because it’s the first car I’ve driven with ‘mood’ headlamps. They provide exactly the right amount of light for a candlelit bath, or if you’re at the cinema, but nowhere near enough if you are coming up to a tricky left-right switchback and it’s November and it’s raining and it’s ten o’clock at night.

  And God help you if something is coming the other way because on dipped beam they give off less light than the fourth star along in the Plough.

  It’s been a while since I moaned about poor headlamps. It’s one of those things – like wipers lifting clear of the windscreen and wind noise from door mirrors – the car industry gets right these days. But something’s gone awry with the Vantage because they are abysmal.

  There’s another issue too. The interior is nowhere near as horrible as it is in the DB11, or the DBS, for that matter, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the Mercedes switchgear and display screen are from the generation before last. And the steering wheel is still squared off, like it was on the Austin Allegro.

  And that’s it. I have no more bad news. Because apart from the steering wheel, a satnav that says ‘There be witches ahead’ and lousy headlamps, this new Aston is as heartachingly desirable as a dark chocolate Bounty when you’re queuing to pay for petrol at a motorway service station. You know you don’t want it. You know you don’t need it. But it’s sitting there winking at you.

  It’s the looks mainly. Not since the mid-Sixties has there been an ugly Aston and this one, this makes you actually whinny like a happy horse. Unlike the old Vantage, which was a pretty little thing, this is really quite aggressive. And it’s not little either. It’s just over 3in longer and 3in wider than before.

  You’d never think of an Aston in the same way you do a Porsche 911. Astons have always been about looks and Porsches about going round corners quickly. But there’s something about the new Vantage that says that, behind the scenes, its meat and veg have been beefed up a bit.

  The meat comes in the shape of a 4-litre twin-turbocharged 503bhp AMG V8 – Mercedes is a strategic partner these days – that sits almost laughably far back. You open the bonnet and then you have to peer under the dashboard to see it. You really can think of this then as a mid-engined car. Because it is. The advantage is a perfect distribution of weight between the front and rear axles and you can feel that – so long as it’s not at night when all you can feel is your way. During the day, though, this new car feels so much more alive and dainty and responsive than the old one. It feels serious.

  It even has a clutch-based active torque-vectoring electronic rear differential. Quite a thing for a car company that, in living memory, was making its vehicles using hammers. And quite a thing on the road too because it makes the back end ever so playful. This car is serious then. But also fun.

  And God, it goes. There seems to be some debate about how much it weighs. Maybe Aston Martin keeps the scales in a darkened room but it doesn’t really matter because when you mash the throttle into the carpet, you are suddenly a long way away.

  If you are in the Track setting when you do the mashing, you’ll be even further away and everyone within 300 yards will be staggering around in the street with blood pouring from their ears, as deaf as you are blind at night. In ‘nutter bastard’ mode this car is really, really loud and it’s not the familiar AMG rumble either. It’s just raw, naked noise. With added snaps of ballistic popping and banging from the exhaust.

  For sheer excitement the Aston is a match for the Porsche 911. And it’ll get you to your destination way faster because people like Astons. They let you out of junctions in a way that just doesn’t happen when you’re in a Porsche.

  Happily, the Vantage is not an uncouth racer all the time. In normal mode, it bumbles along quite nicely and, praise be to the Lord, it isn’t even all that crashy. When I first heard that Aston was going after Nürburgring lap times and Porsche’s jugular, I thought it would make something uncompromising and hard. But it hasn’t. On a long run, the Vantage is a proper GT car. Two seats. Useable boot. No undue stresses and strains.

  I thought this was a tremendous car. But I wonder if it isn’t a bit too tremendous.

  At the time of writing, Aston Martin’s recent stock market float is not proving to be a great triumph. The company may be enjoying one of its most successful periods in terms of sales but the Gordon Gekkos and the Jordan Belforts seem to have a problem, and share prices are slipping.

  Well, I don’t understand Wall Street or the City but I do understand the world of motoring and, as I see it, the problem Aston has is that to the untrained eye, its cars are all quite similar.

  To make matters worse, the most expensive model – the DBS Superleggera – is £225,000. And it doesn’t feel that much better than the £157,900 DB11, which in turn doesn’t feel that much better than a £120,900 Vantage.

  So with the Vantage, Aston Martin has made a car that’s not only better than any equivalent Porsche but also better, all things considered, than its own big brother. I’m no businessman but e
ven I can see that’s probably a mistake.

  2 December 2018

  A true Jag, but they forgot the engine

  Jaguar i-Pace

  A few years ago the people at Jaguar got it into their heads that they wanted to part company with their rather caddish customer base, with its gin and tonics and dodgy import-export ventures. So Jaguar stopped making comfortable, quiet and pretty cars and concentrated on small, shouty sports saloons.

  There must have been a reason for this. I mean, you don’t abandon an image built up over many careful years on a whim. But whatever the reason was, it hasn’t worked. Because if someone wants a small, shouty sports saloon, they’re going to buy a BMW. And they do. The last time I looked, Jaguar was selling about 40,000 XEs a year. While BMW was selling 100,000 more 3-series cars than that. In Europe alone.

  The new Jags were lovely to drive – there’s no getting round that – but they felt and sounded wrong. Imagine going into a McDonald’s and finding linen tablecloths and a spot of Pachelbel on the sound system. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what you were expecting.

  In a Jag you want a wooden dashboard and soft leather seats. You want to start the engine and then think: ‘Wait a minute. Is it broken?’ That silence and smoothness is key. But you want good looks as well. Cast your mind back to the series 3 XJ12 on pepper-pot alloys. That, for me, was peak Jag.

  And now, I’m delighted to say, it’s back in the shape of the i-Pace, which is very pretty and can be ordered with a wooden dashboard and squidgy leather seats. And then there’s the best bit of all. It’s quiet. Really quiet. This thing: it’s a mouse tiptoeing over a bed of kapok, in carpet slippers.

  The reason it’s so quiet is that there’s no engine and only one gear. And that’s because the i-Pace is electric.

  I wondered when this would happen. When you bought a car that suited all your needs – and it turned out to be electric. Rather than buying an electric car because you’re a weirdo tree-hugger and then hoping it fitted your lifestyle.

  I drove round London in the i-Pace for a few days and it was just so relaxing. It glided over potholes and speed humps and wafted down Park Lane like a swan. On a magic carpet.

  Later I went out of town and found that on wet roads the four-wheel-drive grip was so leechy you end up looking like Snoopy, with both your eyes on one side of your face. On dry roads you have the confidence to put your foot down and, yup, it does that electric thing of accelerating so violently, your head feels as though it’s coming away. Off the line the i-Pace is Ferrari fast. And then some.

  Better than a Tesla? Yes. Definitely. The trouble with Tesla is that it’s a small and new company that simply doesn’t have the experience or the money to develop its cars as well as the big players. Teslas are fun and they’re full of amusing features, but if you go online you’ll find the message boards are full of people saying that in the rain so much water pools in the rear bumper panel that it falls off, or that in the snow the undertray gets clogged and eventually falls off as well.

  If these observations are true, it demonstrates the point that Tesla doesn’t do the cold-weather preproduction testing to anything like the same degree as Jaguar. Put simply, it’s likely the Jag’s door handles will still work when it’s -10°C, whereas the Tesla’s, by all accounts, don’t.

  The i-Pace, then, is a car you will want to buy, partly because it’s pretty and comfortable and practical and sensible but mostly because the electric powertrain makes it feel so very Jaggish. And, oh, how I wish I could leave it there. But I can’t.

  It’s claimed that the range of the Jag is almost 300 miles, and I’m sure, in a laboratory, with an electronic James May at the wheel, that’s possible. But, as with car makers’ fuel-usage figures, there’s a big gap between what’s possible and what’s achievable.

  I left London on a Friday afternoon with four passengers and a boot full of stuff. The range-ometer on the dash said I’d go 120 miles before a charge was necessary, and that, I figured, was easily enough to cover the 70 miles to my gaff in the country.

  But as we barrelled up the M40, the readout started to tumble like the altimeter in a crashing airliner. I started to wonder if it was using a unit of distance known only to Jag’s boffins. Because it sure as hell wasn’t taking a mile to wipe another mile off the count.

  And then there was a crash. Two cars. Six fire engines. The usual overreaction from the emergency services, and long queues. Down came the readout, and down and down, until by the time I got to Oxford there really was a danger it’d conk out before I got home.

  And then we’d have to download an app and find our reading glasses and fathom out the instructions at the charging point and then sit about in the cold for 40 minutes while the battery drank from the tank of power. I was panicking about having to do that, so I put everything in Eco mode to help out.

  I even turned on the system that garners battery power from braking, even though this makes the car nigh-on undriveable. Every time you lift your foot off the accelerator, it’s as if you’ve driven into a pit of glue. But I had to put up with it because I didn’t want to stop. This is a syndrome known as range anxiety. It’s a thing you’ll have to get used to.

  By being careful I made it home with twenty-two units left on the clock. Having retrieved the cables from under the bonnet, where there is spookily no engine, I plugged the car into the power supply, and – pfff – all the lights went out. Yup. It had tripped the fuse box.

  Very annoyed, I took it into town and plugged it into a friend’s house, and the next morning, after eight hours of suckling from the grid, it had hoovered up enough electricity to go … drum roll … 29 miles. That’s pathetic.

  Now I know I could have taken it to a fast-charge point and sat while it was force-fed some joules, but I had friends staying and didn’t want to waste a precious weekend off by pandering to the whim of a polar bear. So I didn’t. Which meant that for the Sunday evening crawl back to London I used my old Range Rover.

  Of course the Jag will work if you only commute between fast-charge points at your home and office. If that’s your life, it’s a great car and you should buy one immediately. If, however, you have relatives and friends who live far away, and you have rich and varied weekends, full of spontaneity and let’s-go-to-the-seaside moments, it’s still great. But you’ll need another car as well.

  9 December 2018

  Crazy pantomime horsepower

  Lamborghini Aventador S roadster

  In the olden days nothing much happened in seven years. But now everything changes every few months: the food we eat, the way we communicate, the clothes we wear, the places we go on holiday and especially the cars we drive.

  The Lamborghini Aventador is only seven years old. It was launched in 2011, and to me that feels like yesterday. But it wasn’t yesterday. A point that’s brought into sharp focus when the big bad Lambo tries to change gear.

  In a modern car you don’t really feel or hear gearchanges. The only sign that they’ve happened comes from the rev counter. But in the Aventador it’s all very different. When it changes gear it’s like you’re in a butter churn that’s tumbling down a hill.

  All of a sudden, and with no warning, action is suspended while an electronic signalman buried deep in the software pulls one set of levers and then strolls across his electronic signal box to ram another set into place. You, meanwhile, are sitting in the driving seat wondering if something has broken.

  Seven years ago the single-clutch flappy-paddle gearbox fitted to the Aventador was considered very futuristic, but since then the much smoother double-clutch system has been invented. And then discarded in favour of conventional slushmatic units that have been made to work just as well. Today, then, the single-clutch system feels as old-fashioned as a television set that has no remote control.

  There’s more evidence of the Lambo’s age too. The command centre screen is lifted direct from an Audi, which sounds good. But it was lifted from an Audi seven years ago. Which mea
ns it was designed maybe ten years ago, and so the satnav refers to Londinium and Persia and German West Africa, and instead of traffic reports you get warnings that ahead ‘There be witches’.

  Then there’s the four-wheel-drive system. When it’s cold, waking the front differential up is like trying to get a teenager out of bed. There’s a lot of banging and thumping and bolshiness and a wilful refusal to do any sort of slow-speed manoeuvring.

  The car I drove was the new S roadster, which comes with a roof that can be stowed under the bonnet. Sounds appealing, yes. But there are one or two problems, such as that there’s no room there for anything else.

  Worse, when it’s in place, it is nearly impossible for someone of my size to get into the car. And things are even worse when you want to get out. I had to push my legs down into the footwell and then twist my arse into the passenger’s face before emerging from the tiny gap head first. This meant putting my arms on the pavement for balance and then pulling myself on to my hands and knees. It’s not a dignified look, if I’m honest.

  Oh, and when it’s raining and you crack the window for whatever reason, a great deal of water gets into the cabin, which makes everything damp, which means that the windscreen is permanently steamed up. Before setting off, you need to spend at least ten minutes sitting there with the fan on.

  Eventually there’s a hole big enough to see through, so with a lot of banging and juddering from the teenage front diff, you judder out of the parking space and into the traffic. And then you wait while the gearbox rummages around looking for second, and then you’re at a roundabout and you cannot see what’s coming because there’s not enough headroom to turn your head.

  And your knee has turned off the indicators by accident. And then you go straight through a red light because one of the things you can’t do when you’re sitting that far from the windscreen is look up. It’s like driving a postbox.