Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  At this point in the debate, earth people like Janice Long usually pipe up with the age-old argument about passive smoking and how they, full to overflowing with organic vegetables, do not wish to inhale somebody else’s nicotine.

  Well, I find football offensive. I do not see why that Paul Gascoigne person has to take up so many pages of my Sun every day and I do not see why large areas of Fulham are virtually closed off every time 22 men feel the need to charge around Chelsea kicking an inflated sheep’s pancreas at one another.

  In my opinion it would be better if they could be persuaded to indulge in this curious pastime at an out-of-town stadium. Football fans, however, point out that they enjoy the game and wonder, out loud and often, why on earth they shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in a convenient location.

  Of course they should. Nice though the concept is, I don’t have the power to ban football or socialism or lots of other things I don’t like. So who gave the likes of British Airways, LRT and Pizza Express the power to ban smokers smoking?

  Just recently, I went for three hours without a cigarette because some Finnish bus company provided a no-smoking coach which took us to a no-smoking shopping centre. From there, we went to a no-smoking airport and on to an internal SAS flight which is also no smoking. It deposited me at Helsinki which, as far as I can work out, is a no-smoking city. And people wonder why Scandinavia has the highest suicide rate in the world.

  By offering the new 3-series without an ashtray, BMW must take its share of the blame for job losses in the tobacco industry and big third-world debt problems in tobacco-producing countries. Tax lost from reduced cigarette consumption will be applied elsewhere and the NHS will be swamped with incontinent pensioners who’ll live to 150. The suicide rate will spiral and slaughter on the roads will become wholesale as people can’t find a way to keep calm in traffic jams. The Tories will be ousted, communism will take its place and how many cars do you think BMW will sell when we all have to call one another ‘comrade’.

  And what is BMW’s reasoning? Well, a spokesman said a car that has never been smoked in fetches more on the second-hand market than one which has a nicotine bouquet.

  Someone at Audi should explain to him that these days, quality of life counts for a little bit more than saving a few quid.

  S-Classy

  Privately at least, the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class has caused a murmur of discontent among certain motoring journalists.

  People who can be found running around their offices making gear change and tyre squeal noises have been heard to mutter that the S-Class in general, and the 6-litre V12 in particular, is a rather unsavoury and tasteless exercise in frivolous excess.

  Now, I don’t understand this. For years, these people, who can be distinguished from normal people by their Rohan trousers, have argued that all cars should have 5-litre turbo engines and suspension systems that are harder than washing-up a Magimix.

  So that they have something new to talk about loudly and often in pubs, they want each new car to be bigger and faster and better and more exciting than anything ever before made by anybody.

  Mercedes has done that but instead of handing out credit where credit is due, they point to its 2.2-ton bulk, saying that in a world burdened with dwindling resources, there is no place for such a monster. What’s more, you even get the impression when talking to Mercedes engineers that if they had begun to design the car yesterday rather than back in the early 1980s, it would not be as it is.

  I have never seen such a defensive press pack. Way before you get to engine specifications or that brilliant rear-axle layout there are literally pages and pages of bumph about how environmentally aware Daimler-Benz is.

  It even says, and this is the best bit, that only 80 per cent of the car is galvanised because it is trying to conserve the world supplies of zinc. That is called reactive public relations.

  So let us work out how the S-Class might have looked had it been designed in the 1990s rather than the 1980s. First, it would not have been blessed with a V12 engine – a lighter, more efficient multi-valve six would have done the job, albeit not as silently or as effortlessly.

  It may have been fashioned from thinner, lighter steel or even composites and it may have been built with less integrity to save a few pounds of both the lb and £ variety. Also, if it were built less well, the cabin would be less airtight and consequently, self closing doors would be an unnecessary waste of time. Double glazing would have been thrown out as the whim of a madman.

  Air suspension, however, may stay as this uses lightweight electronics and fluid rather than bulky and out-of-date metal. There would be no drop-down vanity mirrors in the back and surely a nice Richard Grant tail fin would do the job of those complex aerials which pop out of the rear wings to help shorter drivers see where the rear of the car is while reversing.

  In addition to all this, it would have been smaller by some considerable margin. And cheaper.

  In other words, rather than being a jaw-lowering masterpiece which sets new standards in every single area, it would have been just another executive car which, in all probability, would have been no better than a Citroen XM.

  When you’re talking about the S-Class you can, in all honesty, call it the ‘best’-handling big car, the ‘fastest’ limo, the ‘most’ comfortable saloon and the only complaint you’ll get is from your computerised thesaurus which just won’t have enough superlatives in its memory bank.

  How can journalists berate Ford in one breath for letting the accountants have too much control over the engineers when, in the very next moment, they are lambasting Daimler-Benz for saying to its engineers: ‘Get on with it boys. Show those Oriental chappies that we can grind them into the dirt when push comes to shove. Sod the money, go out there and build the best car in the world.’ Or something like that.

  Had one eye been kept on the abacus or the Greenpeace newsletter, the 600SEL would have crept on to the market, as big a leap forward as the potato peeler.

  If I were in Merc’s shoes right now, I wouldn’t be crawling around, half apologising for the masterpiece my back-room boys had created. I’d be on the roof at Canary Wharf, hailing it for what it is: the best car in the world.

  The whole point is progress. No one jumps up and down with foam at the corners of their mouth when Ferrari introduces us all to another extravagant sports car. In the real world a Renault 5 GT Turbo is very nearly as fast as a Ferrari but that doesn’t mean Fiat should close Maranello down.

  Yes, an XM is very nearly as comfortable as an S-Class but that doesn’t mean the whole project should have been scrapped, as some heavily bearded people are now saying.

  No one seems to mind that we’re all expected to replace our album collections with CDs even though the qualitative difference is actually quite small and no one cares two hoots that we have to replace perfectly serviceable clothes each year because something better and more fashionable has come along.

  So why the hell should we worry that Mercedes has gone that extra mile to make a car that is head and shoulders above everything else? And damn it all, £85,000 is not expensive when you look at the price tickets in a Rolls-Royce showroom.

  I can’t help feeling that Rohan-trousered journalists are up in arms about the timing of the S-Class simply because they can find nothing to moan about the car itself. I will admit that the 600SEL has emerged at a rather inconvenient moment but I will never be party to criticism of it as a result.

  The brontosaurus met a premature end because it came along at the wrong time but let’s face it, the Natural History Museum would be an altogether duller place had it never existed at all.

  Would You Buy a Used Alfa from This Man?

  If it turns out that a Malaysian customs officer cannot be bribed, I shall renounce Christianity and move to the Orkneys, where, I’m told, everyone is Lucifer’s best mate.

  Selling a beautiful Alfa Romeo at a fair price ought to be easy even though Glass’s Guide shows a 1986 GTV6 to be worth 34p wh
ereas I know £7000 is not unreasonable.

  I chose to advertise it in one of those Classic Car magazines; written BY people with beards FOR people with beards, and the response was good, with five calls on the first day.

  Two hours before man one was due to arrive, I decided to make sure the thing actually worked, something that is never guaranteed with a GTV6 especially when it has been sitting in a vegetative state outside my house for nine months.

  I pumped up its tyres, cleaned away the cobwebs, ran a hoover over the carpets, topped it up with oil and water, attached some jump leads and crossed my fingers. And it burst into life, the exhaust signalling this emergence from hibernation with a melodious bark.

  Man one duly arrived and we stood, poring over the service history and discussing various rust spots for ooh, about ten minutes before deciding to go for a test drive. Yes, it started but no, it would not go into gear. The clutch, after such a long rest, had welded itself to the fly wheel and would not, even when enticed with a 10 per cent cut off the asking price, dislodge itself.

  Man one buggered off.

  Man two arrived ten minutes later and buggered off five minutes after that, saying that I had wasted his time, and that I was a nuisance. Only he didn’t say nuisance. However, he DID say I should call him back when it was working.

  Over the next few days, I consulted colleagues like Jeff Daniels and LJK Setright and Citroen’s spanner-man, Julian Leyton, to see how a clutch could be unstuck without resorting to brute force or a £500 visit to Kwik Fit.

  There was a lot of umming and aahing but in effect, they said it couldn’t.

  But they were reckoning without my mop. After it had held the clutch pedal down for three days, there was a boinging noise and the GTV6 once more became a fully functional motor car.

  Man two came round again, took a test drive, and said he would very much like to buy it but could not until he had sold his own 2-litre GTV. I expect to see him again but I shall be 52 years old.

  Man three was an Australian and didn’t turn up. I now have 342 reasons for saying that Australia will be the last continent on earth that I visit. And that includes the Antarctic.

  Man four worried the life out of me. One, he sounded foreign on the telephone. Two, he was from Essex and three, he said he wanted the car for his wife.

  Face to face, things did not improve. His claim that he drove a Lotus Carlton was at odds with both his demeanour and his ‘friend’ who wore an earring. Alarm bells rang. Even if he had offered cash, I’d have been suspicious but he launched into a remarkable tale about how the piece of paper he was waving under my nose-end was a building society banker’s draft. For all I knew, it could have been a dog licence. Now, the BBC is forever getting letters from people who have been diddled when selling cars. I just knew that whatever deal I did with Mr Dodgy, I’d end up on That’s Life!

  So I refused to budge by so much as 1p on the price and he went away.

  Then I entered the Malaysian phase. It began when an Oriental chappie rang from Denmark, where he is currently engaged servicing rigs, to see if it would be all right to come over and look at the car. He arranged to catch the Friday-night flight and we’d meet on the Saturday morning.

  But on the Friday afternoon, way after it became impossible to stop the Malaysian Dane from coming over, man four turned up complete with salivating chops and a bundle of wedge. He wanted the car and would pay full price. DILEMMA or what?

  You know that scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House where the spotty youth is presented with an available, if slightly unconscious teenage girl at a party? On his left shoulder is the devil advising him to ‘go for it’ while on his right is an angel, advising him not to on account of her tender years etc.

  On the one hand was my moral fibre. On the other, was an overdraft which is not being helped by £100 a month premiums on the car I now had an opportunity to sell.

  The Devil said screw the Malay-Dane. My public-school education and sheer Britishness said don’t… and won. Man four went off in a huff.

  The Oriental Viking duly arrived and we spent the whole of Saturday with an Alfa Romeo specialist who pronounced the car to be fit and well worth £7000. This had nothing to do with my advice to the said specialist that if he wasn’t forthcoming with a result of this type, I would write about his operation in a derogatory manner every hour, on the hour.

  It transpired, after all was said and done, that you can’t import a car to Malaysia if it is more than five years old and my GTV6 is, by one poxy month.

  Our Tropical Nordic friend is, as I write, trying to grease the palm of a customs official in the hope of getting round this idiotic legislation but holds out little chance of success.

  If I had listened to the advice of Satan, the car would have been sold already and I’d be seven grand better off. Because I waited for the Malay-Dane, I feel extremely righteous.

  But I can hardly tell the bank manager that my overdraft has not been cleared due to extreme righteousness because he’ll think I’ve gone mad.

  Which I have.

  A Question of Sports

  Away from the world of motoring, just about the only thing that ranks as ‘really puzzling’ is why on earth anyone votes Labour?

  Within it, so many things are really puzzling, you’d need a whole bank of Cray supercomputers to work them out.

  For example, just what is that car on the cover of Peter Gabriel’s first album?

  Then there’s Ligier and its sponsorship deal with the French government. How come a budget that could finance a small nuclear war or a vast conventional one is not big enough to get one point in Grand Prix racing?

  I shall go on. Why is the standard of driving so uniquely atrocious on the M1 just near Leicester? Why isn’t there a motoring programme on ITV? Why do some people, usually those with bosoms, find it so difficult to park? Is it true the Celica was designed by a horse? How come Robin Cook is so ugly? That’s not really a motoring problem but it needs answering nevertheless.

  Then there is the small question of depreciation. Why does anyone buy a BMW 750iL knowing, with absolute certainty, that in a year’s time, they’ll be twenty grand worse off? If you really must have such a car, why not pop into a casino on the way to the dealer and plonk £20,000 on red? If it comes up trumps, you can cover the certain loss that lies ahead and if it comes up black, you can relax knowing you’d have lost it anyway and that you’ve saved £100 on road tax.

  And that’s another thing. Why do motorists have to pay £100 for road tax when 70 per cent of it is spent on ethnic lesbian theatre groups and poison to kill doggies?

  Is it true that Stevie Wonder designed Oxford’s one-way system? Why do multi-storey car park stairwells always smell of urine? Why do buses have to be so big? Why is it that whenever three men get into a van together, its throttle jams wide open and the brakes fail? Do dustbin-lorry crews get a bonus every time they knock off someone’s wing mirror? And how come Vauxhall is allowed to claim the top speed of an Astramax van is 90 mph when, in fact, it’s twice that.

  Why do the drivers of all BMWs in south London refuse to turn their headlights on at night and why do all Austin Maxis have tissues and cushions on the rear parcel shelf? It sure as hell can’t be anything to do with ‘naughtiness’ because the drivers are all old and the naughtiest thing an old person does is cheat in a beetle drive.

  I’m afraid there is no point trying to work out answers to any of the above because they’re all imponderables. It’s like trying to establish where on earth mucus comes from or why people have babies or why your toast always lands on the carpet butter-side down.

  However, the one imponderable I’ve been having a stab at just lately is why Toyota sells more sports cars in Britain than anyone else?

  And the answer I’ve come up with is that no one else actually makes sports cars. Which leads us on to another imponderable. Why not?

  Yes, I know Lotus, Morgan and TVR will be jumping around at the back now, waving their ar
ms and pointing to Elans, Plus 4s and S3S, but these, let’s face it, are small fry compared with the MR2.

  Whereas the MR2 is designed and backed up by the world’s third-largest motor manufacturer, the TVR S3, frankly, is not. It’s a lovely car, you might even call it a great one, but it will never outsell the MR2 and that’s the end of it.

  However, what I want to know is why Ford or Vauxhall or Peugeot or Fiat do not make a sports car – and I don’t mean a rebodied rep-mobile with electric windows and a spoiler that wobbles about; I mean a real, get out of my ****ing way, sports car.

  The usual answer trotted out is that there’s no demand. Oh yeah, so how come Toyota makes such a success of it? Or they’ll claim that one-off projects are not viable. Oh yeah, well how come Toyota did it not once, not twice ladies and gentlemen but, if you count the Celica as a sports car which, grudgingly, I will, three times?

  Toyota made the MR2 to be just as popular in Detroit as it is in Nidderdale or the Australian bush or Egypt or Modena or Dublin or La Paz or anywhere, for that matter, where Toyota has an important operation. Which is just about everywhere.

  Both GM and Ford are bigger than Toyota but they seem to be incapable of grasping the concept of a world car. Toyota has proved that if the car is right, it will sell everywhere. You don’t need one version for the States, one for the Far East and one for Europe. You can make the economies of scale work.

  I sometimes wonder if the Western big boys are frightened by the MR2 but I’ve just spent a week with one and I reckon there’s no need for such lilyliverishness. After all, how does anyone know whether it’s good or hopeless when no one else makes such a thing?

  Maybe, if everyone made a budget-priced mid-engined two-seater, it would be to the class what the Escort is to Euroboxes or what the Croma is to executive saloons.

  I am beginning to despair of the European motor manufacturers. Where is the investment? Where is the initiative? Where’s the bloody pizzazz?