Clarkson on Cars

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Every fortnight, Alain Prost hurls his Williams Renault around some race track or other, taking 90-degree bends at the kind of speeds that most drivers will never, ever experience, even in a straight line.

  His car, equipped with an 800 brake horsepower engine, active ride, traction control and computer telemetry back to the pits is, without any question or shadow of doubt, the ultimate driving machine.

  ABMW 316i is not. It has a top speed of 119 mph, it accelerates from 0 to 60 in a glacial 13.9 seconds and while it handles neatly, its tyres and brakes would be absolutely shattered after fifteen fast laps of a race track.

  And while that automotive blancmange they call the 850i is faster and better able to stand up to race track use, it is still a long, long way behind the Williams as a technological tour de force.

  So how come BMW is allowed to litter its advertisements with the stark and bold claim that they make the ultimate driving machine?

  A spokeswoman for the Advertising Standards Authority said, ‘Well, it’s subjective and we consider it to be obvious advertising puffery. If BMW made a verifiable claim, then that’s different.’

  So what then of Saab’s latest ‘claim’? They say that their new engines are capable of pumping out cleaner air through their exhaust pipes than they sucked in through their inlet manifolds.

  For sure, some of the nasty poisonous stuff which hangs around in places like LA and Denver is eliminated by the Saab’s clever engine management system and catalytic converter but if you attempted to live in a room full of the gases from a Saab, or indeed any car, you’d last about 45 seconds.

  Strangely, Saab seem to be a little out of kilter with current automotive thinking. We went through the so-called ‘green’ phase a couple of years ago when unleaded fuel was all the rage.

  Every single manufacturer busied itself for months, telling us how their cars would run on lead-free petrol and therefore, the days of children being born with two noses were over. Every single manufacturer except Peugeot, that is.

  Peugeots couldn’t run on unleaded so their ad department came up with the idea of getting Jack Nicholson to be photographed while pointing a gun at the head of a cute baby seal. Below it said: ‘Buy one of our cars or the seal dies – and no, they don’t run on unleaded.’ Oddly, the campaign never made it past the drawing board.

  Then we had a brief flirtation with the notion of recycling, when everyone was running around explaining that their car could be turned into something else when we had finished with it. Hmmm. I thought that’s what scrap-metal dealers had been doing since the dawn of automotive time.

  Just six months ago we moved into the baby phase. Everyone from BMW to Hyundai was using some hideous child to hammer home the point that we were into the caring nineties and that the vulnerable and adorable baby, like the vulnerable and adorable car, was symbolic of the need to go around kissing old ladies and becoming scout masters.

  Vauxhall, however, no longer feels the need to show us an infant dropping to all fours when presented with a slope, so that we’ll understand how four-wheel drive works. Peugeot has fired the kid driving a toy car round the kitchen to spell out the advantages of its advanced chassis.

  Even safety is no longer absolutely essential. No longer do you have a huge head-on shunt in your Audi and walk off smiling. Besides, Vauxhall has used research to show that if you even so much as mention the word safety in an ad, never mind show a dummy flying through a windscreen, people will assume the commercial is for Volvo.

  Today, the car you buy must give you a low profile. It must have beauty with inner strength like, say, Ford. It must be so rare that you will never see another on the road, like Rover. Renault go further. They stress, inexplicably, the importance of stealth.

  Is that, I wonder, why they made the Safrane look exactly like every other car on the road?

  Or are they just trying to distance themselves from that fantastic 1980s advertisement for the 25; the one where that idiot in a sharp suit was explaining to his wife how he was going it alone, how he had the bank and a colleague on his side and how everything was going to be a barrel of beer and skittles from now on; except the company car would have to go. Wifey was not best pleased.

  Neither was I because I simply couldn’t work out how he’d managed to set up an entire, and seemingly major business deal, without bothering to whisper a word of it to Mrs Yuppie until the very last moment.

  Perhaps she was the woman who turned up later, in VW’s ad for the Golf, smiling and laughing her way through a divorce. In the world of advertising, they may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but image and puff will not sustain an inferior product for long.

  For proof, see Mercedes. While motoring journalists and engineers will always be able to pick holes in a slick but drivel-filled 30 seconds of prime time TV – I can, for instance, easily resist the Renault 19 – we get stuck when Daimler Benz tell us their products are ‘engineered like no other car in the world’.

  Because they just are.

  Politicians and Style Motors

  Adolf Hitler set something of a trend when he decided to use a Mercedes Benz because today, every single government in the entire world owns at least one car with a three-pointed star on the bonnet.

  Indeed, in Swahili, African bigwigs are named after the cars they invariably drive – Wabenzi.

  Of course, for official functions, politicians from car-producing countries are forced to use models that are actually made by their people; thus Mitterrand has a Renault Safrane, Yeltsin has a Zil and Clinton has a Cadillac to go with his own 1964 Ford Mustang.

  At the recent London G7 summit, Mrs Major kept the trend going by arriving in a beige B-registered Montego with a dent in the door. We’re talking here, I think, about a real woman of the people. And a real patriot too.

  Edwina Currie has tried to follow in Norma’s footsteps, opting for a Toyota, on the basis that the company’s Burnaston plant is in her constituency. Unfortunately, the factory makes a model called the Carina while she uses a sporty Corolla GTi which has about as much to do with Britain as sake.

  Not only is it important for politicians to drive something jingoistic but also, it’s important to ensure that it is safe. John F. Kennedy, for instance, probably regrets the moment he said, ‘Honey, let’s get a convertible.’

  His brother Teddy went for a saloon but should really have gone for something with better road holding. Or if he hadn’t been forced to buy a Yank tank, he could perhaps have opted for the British-made amphi-car.

  A Nigerian government minister was almost certainly as sore as hell that he hadn’t done something about Lagos’s appalling traffic problem, as gunmen riddled his car with bullets while he sat in a jam.

  In Italy, where they’re all good enough drivers to get across bridges without falling into the water, they are plagued with the nightmare cocktail of bad traffic and terrorism.

  To get round the problem, Italian manufacturers deliberately make their top models look dull and uninspiring. They believe that gunmen will expect their targets to be in something big and flash and will not dare open fire on something so ordinary as a Fiat Croma.

  Hmmm.

  Do the British Love Cars?

  In Italy, every single male, and most females, between the ages of five and seventy-five, loves cars. They love driving them, touching them, admiring them, and most of all, talking about them.

  Drive a new model around the streets of an Italian town, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Ferrari or a Fiat Punto, you will be swamped at every set of lights. They’ll want to know how fast it goes, whether it corners well, whether it’s quicker off the mark than their car.

  I have driven a great many new models in Italy and it’s always the same. You are pumped for information like you have just come back from Mars and the simple fact that I only know two Italian words – mussels and bitch – doesn’t seem to put them off.

  Things are different in England. Drive a car that no one has
ever seen outside the pages of the specialist press before and you may as well be on foot, in a grey Marks and Spencer suit with shoes to match.

  And even if passers-by are forced into conversation about the new set of wheels, the questions are quite, quite different to those that are fired at you in Rome or Milan or Taormina. In Barnsley and Birmingham, they want to know how much it costs to insure, why there are only two doors and how much fuel it uses; practical, sensible, dull things.

  Things that are intended to make you, the driver, feel decadent and extravagant and stupid.

  In Italy, if you drive a fine car, you are revered. In England, you are a parasite.

  Back in the sixties, Pinin Farina, one of Italy’s top designers, found himself driving a Ferrari through an anti-Vietnam march.

  The protesters banged on his window and roof, demanding to know how fast it could go. In a poll-tax riot here, they would set you, and your car, on fire.

  Even Britain’s more affluent road users are strangely indifferent when it comes to a new car. Keep your head pointing forwards but swivel your eyeballs to the left so far that it begins to hurt. Now swivel them a little more.

  You have just done a passable imitation of the driver of a 7-series BMW who knows that I am alongside in a Z1, a two-seater Bee Em with no doors. He absolutely will not let me see that he is interested. It is not the done thing. It is not the British way.

  And this is odd because according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, one working person in ten in this country owes his or her job to the motor industry.

  Furthermore, Britain is unique in the world for its specialist car makers. Our major players may have been decimated but AC, Morgan, TVR, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Lotus, Caterham, Westfield, Marcos and a host of even tinier outfits continue to thrive.

  Outside the UK, there are no tiny car firms. Here, there’s nothing but.

  Then there are racing cars. Take a look down a Formula One grid and count the cars not made in Britain. You’ll only need one hand.

  There is nothing so American as an Indycar race except for one small thing. Every single car in the series is made in Britain. The car Nigel Mansell used to win the title uses a chassis from Huntingdon and a Ford Cosworth engine from Northamptonshire.

  Even Ferrari, the greatest racing team of all time, has been forced, after a four-year spell away from the winner’s rostrum, to employ a Brit, John Barnard, as chief designer.

  In the world of rallying, the all-conquering Subaru Legacy upholds Japan’s honour, but it was built in Banbury.

  There must be a deep enthusiasm for cars in Britain but is it buried even deeper than the vast number of classic cars we own?

  Just the other day, I needed to borrow a Ferrari Daytona – like you do – and as I was in Italy, I figured they would be ten a penny. After two days, I gave up trying to find even someone who knew someone who might have one.

  In England, after two hours on the telephone, I had ordinary people from ordinary places queuing up to lend me one. They use a Sierra most of the time but in their barn, they have ‘just a few classics’.

  So why, against a background like this, is it considered poor form to talk cars in public? Why, when there are 132 different car magazines on sale in Britain, does the biggest seller have a circulation of just 130,000? In Norway, Norway, for Chrissakes, one car mag alone sells to a million people a month. And why are there so many people in this country who’ll gladly tell you they don’t like cars?

  I’m not talking about the bearded environmentalist types who have just cause but about normal people, like my mother, who actually says she hates cars. Is this not like saying that you hate tables, or light fittings or plants? How can you hate what, at worst, is an inanimate object?

  Any why get so hot under the collar about cars being sold for £5 or £10 million when you don’t care two hoots about someone buying a painting for £22 million?

  To the heathen, a painting is a piece of canvas with some oil on it, and a car is some metal. But to the enlightened, both are art forms. I’m amazed that rare cars, which are both art forms and tools for moving around in, don’t fetch more than paintings.

  But this is a sentiment rarely heard in Britain these days. And I have a sneaking feeling that our company-car mentality is to blame.

  Because 50 per cent of cars sold in Britain are bought by companies, people don’t bother talking about or ogling cars because they have what they’re given.

  In other countries, people buy their own cars, with their own money, so they need all the information they can lap up. They will stare at new cars in traffic jams, because who knows, next time round, they might buy one.

  But in Britain, why read a car magazine when next year you’ll get another Cavalier whether you like it or not? Why aspire to a Mercedes Benz when you just know your company will never buy you one, and you don’t need one anyway because you have the Vauxhall for free?

  Why talk about cars with your friends when all you learn is of no real importance?

  And of course, because company cars are such a huge thing in Britain, the manufacturers target fleet buyers, enticing them with things that matter most on the company balance sheet: fuel economy, residual values, insurance ratings.

  These things don’t make a car look or feel good. They don’t make it sexy or fast. They make it dull so who can blame the people who drive it for not taking an interest.

  Of course you won’t talk cars down at the pub if you have a horrid beige box parked outside. It’s a functional tool like your washing machine or fridge and such things do not make for lively conversation.

  Underneath it all, the British have a deep-seated love for motor cars; they must do because Britain, not Germany or Italy or even Japan, is the capital of cardom.

  The RAC rally is still the country’s biggest spectator event and Top Gear still pulls enormous audiences, but unless the company car culture is stamped out, the concept of watching people driving cars around, and finding it interesting, will eventually become positively weird.

  Lancia Out of the UK

  It was inevitable really, but we go into 1994 with a major omission from the list of new cars you can buy in Britain – Lancia.

  Founded in 1906, the company built up an awesome reputation with its sporty yet luxurious motor cars but by the late sixties, it was in financial trouble and had to be rescued by Fiat.

  Things got worse. In the late seventies, horror stories began to appear in the British press about Lancia rust protection and how there wasn’t any. This culminated in a much-talked about campaign on the Nationwide programme which served to decimate sales.

  In Britain in 1978, Lancia shifted 11,800 cars but from then on in, it’s been downhill all the way. In 1993, excluding December’s figures which aren’t available yet, they sold just 569.

  That isn’t enough to pay for a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Times and it certainly isn’t enough to keep the 46 dealers happy.

  ‘We just never recovered from that rust problem back in the late seventies,’ said a spokeswoman. ‘And we couldn’t because of journalists,’ she added.

  It seems that us lot always began every piece we wrote about Lancia talking about how the cars didn’t go rusty any more, thus ensuring that the words Lancia and rust remained as inexorably linked as Wimbledon and strawberries.

  Now, back in the seventies, this wasn’t so bad because after we’d finished talking about the rust, we’d go on to say how pretty the cars were, and how the engines were lusty and how the design was clever. Remember the old HPE? Half estate, half sports coupe and 100 per cent drop-dead gorgeous.

  So what if it fell apart after twenty minutes. They’d be twenty great minutes, twenty minutes you’d always remember.

  Then there was the Integrale. This was based on the old Delta and is one of the most successful rally cars of all time. With a 2.0-litre, 16-valve, turbocharged engine and four-wheel drive, it afforded the keen driver the sort of thrills that normally go
hand in hand with a Ferrari badge.

  Yes, the last time I drove one, the centre console came off and pinned my right foot to the throttle, which was a bit unnerving, but hey, until then, I’d had a great time with it.

  But this is the rub. In recent years, the Japanese have taught the world’s car-buying public to expect total reliability.

  Other car manufacturers caught on but Lancia did not. And that was fine because they had pretty, clever cars with lusty engines and there was always a band of enthusiasts who’d want one.

  Even in 1990, they sold 308,000 units throughout Europe and that was pretty good. But by then, they had stopped making pretty, clever, lustful cars and the enthusiasts simply gave up. You could have a pretty, clever, lusty CRX from Honda, the people who powered the McLaren F1 cars.

  What chance did the Dedra have? Built on a Fiat Tipo platform, and with Fiat Tipo engines, this car felt, unsurprisingly, just like a Fiat Tipo when you drove it. But it looks like the dinner of a dog and the name Dedra lacks any kind of cocktail-party prestige.

  The Thema too had its work cut out. As it was basically the same as the stunning Alfa Romeo 164, anyone after a luxurious Italian express bought the Alfa. And anyone just after a big car remembered Nationwide and bought a Toyota.

  The Y10, or white hen, as it became known, made a brief appearance and I liked its quirky charm and suede-look trim but I was alone and it was retired two years ago.

  And now the rest of the range has followed suit. Oh, you can still buy one with left-hand drive, but that’s just another reason for not buying one. And there are too many of those already.

  The really worrying thing is that in Europe, sales are now down to just 214,000 and at the present rate of decline, they’ll be below 100,000 by the turn of the century.

  Then, Fiat may just pull the plug and use the name Lancia as a badge on upmarket Fiats, like Ford do with Ghia.