Round the Bend

by Jeremy Clarkson

  The speed is incredible. Mesmerizing. Intoxicating. Bonkers. And then you get to a corner.

  In a Ferrari, you feel an electronic interpretation of what’s going on through the magnetized dampers and the five-way traction control. There’s none of that in the Lambo. It’s the road. And then your arse.

  The grip is phenomenal. There is so much g that you can actually feel – and I’m not making this up – your face coming off. But you’d better not be worrying about that, because when, eventually, the laws of physics intervene, you will be doing somewhere in the region of a million. And you will need the reactions of a ninja lightning bolt to stay out of the Armco. This car, in the words of the Stig, is ‘a bit fighty’.

  And that’s it. That’s what the Lambo does. It goes very fast in a straight line. It goes very fast in the corners. And that’s it. Want heated door mirrors? Forget it.

  I’m not saying for a moment that life inside is as bad as it was in a Countach. The air-conditioning works for a kick-off and there’s nearly enough room for a human. But it’s still pretty basic. You get the impression they got the stereo from the local motorists’ discount store and that the factory manager’s mum did the stitching on the centre console. Even the seatbelts are the wrong way round.

  I like that. Sometimes, I can find a Ferrari a bit up itself. Whereas, you get the sense when you’re in a Lambo that it was all built for a bit of a laugh. The company doesn’t have a racing team. The managing director looks like a male model. And you get the impression they’d far rather sell a car to Paris Hilton than Michael Schumacher.

  Now, though, I’m a bit nervous. You see, in 1998, Lamborghini was rescued from oblivion by Audi and for a while it was a good master, keeping the wolf from the door and nothing else. But today you sense it is about to make Lamborghini a bit more – there’s no other word – German.

  I don’t doubt for a second that this will make the cars easier to drive, easier to live with, less bonkers, less zany and less prone to breaking down. But here’s the big one. Is that what we really want?

  Let me put it this way. I ran round the garden last weekend pointing at a Vulcan. I would never do such a thing if you flew over in a Gulfstream G500.

  5 July 2009

  They’ve blown the saloon’s last chance

  Mercedes E 500 Sport

  There’s a curious and extremely ugly styling detail on the rear wings of the new Mercedes E-class. It’s a crease that sets off from the back end with much purpose and drive, but when it reaches the door, it sort of gives up and, like the Okavango River, meanders about before giving up on the idea of existing in the first place.

  One thing is for sure. It serves no purpose. It will make the car no faster, no more stable at speed and no more economical. And it’s not a traditional Mercedes thing either – it’s not like the BMW Hofmeister kink in the rear window, which is present on all models.

  Mercedes says, apparently, it added the crease as a nod to some model in the company’s dim and murky past. Probably the one Hitler drove. But this makes no sense, really. When I buy a new iPod, I don’t want it to look even remotely like my grandfather’s gramophone player. So, why should I want my new car to have a feature from the days of running boards?

  And, anyway, no one is going to say, ‘Ah, so. I see you’ve hinted at the 1942 Doogleburger model with that crease on the flank.’ They’re just going to do what I did: spend hours wondering if Mercedes has the first idea about form and function.

  I dislike conspiracy theories. The smug, self-satisfied, arms-crossed demeanour of those who would have us believe that Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon or, indeed, anywhere more exciting than a sound stage in Nevada, invariably fills me with an uncontrollable need to set them on fire.

  We see the same sort of thing with Top Gear fan sites on the internet.

  Every single thing we do is analysed and then dismissed as fake. All the races are staged. Every word is scripted. Every opinion bought and paid for. Recently, a deer ran out while I was belting down the runway in a Mercedes. The shot was included in the film and, immediately, the boys were at their keyboards. ‘Aha,’ they said, ‘the car wasn’t moving. Television jiggery-pokery has been used.’

  Honestly, chaps. If we were going to spend a fortune CGI-ing something onto the screen, we’d blow Richard Hammond’s head off. Or detonate Belgium. Certainly, it’d be something a bit more exciting than a horned rat running about on an airfield.

  Nevertheless, despite all this, I don’t believe the crease in the E-class was there from the get-go. I may be wrong, of course. But in my mind the stylists did the car and then thought, ‘Oh dear. That’s a bit boring. Let’s put a styling detail on the rear wings to distract people from the tedium.’ Think of it, then, as one of Jon Snow’s ties.

  There are more problems with this car. I tested the E 500, which has a 5.5-litre V8 engine. That means 382 horsepowers and 391 torques. It means 0 to 62mph in 5.2 seconds and, you’d think, plenty of excitement. However, there is none. I have experienced more interesting drizzle.

  No matter how brutal you may be with the seven-speed gearbox, it is extremely reluctant to put down its paper, extinguish its pipe, change out of its slippers and actually go. Kick-down provokes a reluctant surge of sorts and if you go right to the bottom of the throttle pedal’s travel, right through the carpet and into the firewall itself, the surge becomes a bit more meaty. But if this car could talk, and you did that, it would say, ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  Seriously, asking this car to behave like a 5.5-litre V8 super-saloon is like asking a man to empty a dishwasher. It’s technically possible but only if you are prepared to put up with a lot of harrumphing. I wouldn’t mind, but the engine – the only one in the line-up not changed from the previous model – is either silent or making a strained noise you don’t want to hear.

  There are other things, too. The steering is inert. The brakes feel as uninterested as the engine, and the ride, on air suspension, is disappointing at low speeds. On the move, it’s fine, or even good, but around town, which is where this car will spend most of its time, picking up Cilla Black from functions, it’s as jittery as the Jag XF I recently tested (of which, more next week).

  There is, then, absolutely no point in buying the 500 version of this car. You may as well have the diesel, which is less powerful but much more economical and, in the real world, every bit as fast. But if you are going to buy a mid-range diesel saloon, then the E-class simply doesn’t hold a candle to the Jag.

  Normally, with a Mercedes, you feel that everything is there for a reason. With the E-class you have that crease on the rear wing – which isn’t – and a lot of things on the options list that border, I suspect, on being a bit gimmicky.

  Certainly, if you specified everything, you’d have a car that would buzz and beep and bong more than Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank exploded.

  This is a car that can read speed limits and alert you if you break them, that uses radar to decide how much braking force you should use, that spots pedestrians in the dark, that knows about traffic jams ahead and cars that are overtaking in your blind spot and walls that you are about to reverse into. This is a car that shouts at you if you take your seatbelt off or open the door or leave your key in the ignition. And if you shout back, it will respond without fuss or murmur. Individually, some of these things are interesting. Some might even be worth specifying. But combined, they’d drive you mad.

  The upshot is that the new E-class is not as good as the Jaguar XF or the BMW 5-series. It doesn’t look good, it’s boring and, worse than that, it probably signals that the end of the road for the four-door saloon car is not very far away.

  Mercedes has always been the company to which we turn for the next bright idea. It was first with internal combustion and first with anti-lock brakes and first, frankly, with everything in between. But all I see on the E-class is a rounding-off of the edges. A bit of fiddling with an idea that’s out of steam.

  In the olde
n days, the four-door saloon was the only real choice for the consumer. It sat in our lives like fish and chips and the Post Office and British Rail tea. What do you mean, you want a skinny latte? Or an Earl Grey? Or a curry? Or O2? Or a Mac? Choice hadn’t been invented. So you had a Cortina.

  Now, though, the family man or woman can have an MPV or a mini MPV or an SUV or a drop-top or an estate or a four-seater coupé. And every single one of these alternatives is better than the traditional three-box idea.

  It’s very difficult, as Porsche has just proved with the Panamera, to make a four-door car sexy. And it’s very difficult to think of any new way of making the drive feel different or better than it was in the previous model. Yes, you might find an extra 2mm of legroom here and a slight cut in carbon dioxides there. But, really, the genre is advancing like world records in athletics. A tiny bit at a time towards a moment when going any faster or making things any better will be simply impossible.

  Mercedes has always shown us the way forward. But with the new E-class it has shown us that we’re at the end of the line. Some day, then, all saloon cars will be this dull.

  19 July 2009

  The fastest pair of comfy slippers around

  Jaguar XF 3.0 Diesel S Portfolio

  Back in the late eighties, I was sitting outside a pub in Fulham with my old writing and business partner when someone pulled out of a side turning in a Toyota Supra and accelerated smartly down the road. As the car shifted lumpily into second gear, I remember, even today, that we each looked at the other in an eye-rolling way and said, ‘What a prat.’ He’d bought a sports car and then specified it with an automatic gearbox. Which meant he hadn’t bought a sports car at all.

  When I was a young man, I reserved a special kind of hatred for automatic gearboxes. They made all cars, no matter what they were, into convenience tools. Take away the pleasure of a well-executed downshift and you were taking away everything that mattered to the true petrolhead. Auto cars, even the Ferrari 400, were the automotive equivalent of fast food. Convenient, for sure, but no burger, no matter how easy it is to eat in the street, can possibly be a match for a blood-red fillet steak.

  Things, however, have changed. There are all sorts of moments in a man’s life when he can truly say he has become ‘old’. The moment his first child is born. The moment he buys his first pair of slippers. The moment he starts to think the world is getting worse. But, actually, the real moment is when you say to a car salesman, ‘Can I have it with an automatic gearbox?’

  Graham Norton summed it all up the other day when he appeared on a television programme. He said that changing gear in a car is like having a remote-controlled television and getting up to change the channel yourself. It’s stupid. And, of course, he’s right.

  I like to kid myself these days that I prefer an auto because I’m busy and having something change gear on my behalf allows me to do other things while driving. Speaking on the telephone, for instance, is almost impossible if you have to steer and shift cogs as well, especially now you need to keep at least one eye out for the Stasi. But the main reason is that I simply can’t be bothered to do it myself.

  So what about flappy paddles, which give you the manual gearbox without the tiresome need to press a clutch pedal down or move a stick? Well, yes, they can change gear very quickly, but speed is not the issue – off a race track, why would you ever want to go from third to fourth in 60 milliseconds? It’s the ‘feel’ you want from a gearbox, the sense that you are controlling the machine.

  And with a flappy paddle box, that control is gone. Try to change down when the resultant revs would be too high and the system simply won’t allow it. Forget to change up and when you hit the red line, the silicon nanny will step in and do it for you. It’s like having a driving instructor along for the ride, with dual controls. It is terrible. The most pointless invention since procon-ten.

  I have a similar problem with diesel engines. Time was when I hated them. I said diesel was the fuel of Satan and that anyone who chose a car with no spark plugs had, in effect, given up on life. Choosing such a thing would be like choosing a pair of trousers with an elasticated waist simply because they were easy to clean.

  Now, though, I simply cannot understand why anyone would buy an ordinary car with anything but a diesel engine. Of course, those with petrol flowing through the injectors can rev so much more freely, but when was the last time – honestly – you went anywhere near the red line?

  The trouble is that second gear in a lot of cars these days can take you to beyond the motorway speed limit. So, in a run-of-the-mill saloon, you simply don’t need the engine, ever, to spin up to six, seven or even eight thousand revs per minute. You may as well, therefore, have a diesel, which is all out of ideas at 4500rpm.

  I can’t believe I’m saying any of this. I remember the launch of the first diesel automatic car – a Citroën BX, if you could care less – and I remember thinking that life couldn’t possibly get worse. Canal-boat noises. No go. No need to change gear. It was, I reckoned, the end of days.

  Of course, it’s not just me that’s changed in the intervening period. Diesel engines have, too. Time was when they rattled the windows in your house, gave your children cancer, made the Houses of Parliament black and had all the power of Belgium.

  Today, with the notable exception of the diesel in a Volvo XC90, which is laughably awful, they are completely different. BMW’s diesels may not be the most economical but they are unbelievably quiet and possessed of so much power, you would swear to God they were running on lightning bolts.

  And they pale into insignificance alongside the diesels now being made by Land Rover and Jaguar. The diesel in my Range Rover is unbelievably good. You’d have to be clinically insane to choose the 5-litre V8 instead. And now there’s a new 3-litre twin-turbo V6 diesel that you can specify for your XF.

  Let me put the figures on it for you. In the top-spec S model I tried, you get 275 horsepowers and an astonishing 442 torques, which means you can get from 0 to 60 in around 6 seconds and onwards to a top speed of 155.

  These are the figures you might expect from a petrol car. But now look at the ones you wouldn’t – a mere 179 carbon dioxides and the promise of 40 or so mpg. It really is a case of: here’s your cake. Now tuck in.

  But the best thing about Jag’s engine is the silence. It is astonishingly quiet, even when you start it up first thing in the morning. There are no vibrations, either, which means it feels exactly like it’s running on petrol. Except for when you put your foot down and that second turbo unleashes the monstrous torque. Then it feels like it’s running on a gallon of bloody mary.

  There is just one tiny problem, and, weirdly, it affects the Range Rover diesel, too. When you pull away from a standstill, it feels like the throttle cable has snapped. So you give the pedal a hefty shove, which means that you lunge onto the roundabout at the precise moment you decide the gap’s not big enough. Apparently, this is a software problem that can be cured. I wish it would be.

  I also wish the ride were better. I think the low-profile tyres are to blame, but, whatever it is, the car pitter-patters at low speeds and such a feel is completely at odds with the torquey diesel engine, the automatic gearbox and the sense that Jags aren’t supposed to be this way.

  I must also criticize the seats. There is so little side support that in every corner you end up on your passenger, which is fine if your passenger is Lily Allen. But I ended up on James May, and that was horrid. For me.

  That, however, is it. A hesitancy to the throttle, a seating problem that’s an issue only if you drive fast and a small but important ride flaw that could almost certainly be solved with smaller wheels and taller tyres.

  The rest of the car is brilliant. I wasn’t sold on the XF when it came out. It simply didn’t look as sharp as the concept we’d been shown earlier. But with memories of that concept fading, we are left with a genuine looker that manages to be practical and spacious as well. Plus, you can get one of these cars, albe
it not the variant I drove, for £2,500 less than the cheapest BMW 535d.

  I apologize for the rather boring, dry review this morning but, having taken this diesel car with an automatic gearbox to a friend’s fiftieth birthday party last weekend, it’s how I feel. Boring, dry and possibly in need of some slippers.

  26 July 2009

  Oops, this drunken driver is off to Brazil

  Argo Avenger 700 8x8

  Not that long ago, some racing drivers were asked to take part in an experiment to see what effect drinking would have on their lap times. The results were never published, since they showed that after five pints the chaps were much faster. And after eight, they were sensational.

  It’s not hard to see why. Alcohol gives us confidence to be witty at dinner parties, confidence to chat up girls and confidence to take Stowe corner at Silverstone flat in fourth, while laughing.

  The people who compiled the report could have explained this. But, since it was being done for television and, since the average viewer is reckoned by most television executives to be unable to grapple with anything more complex than ‘Halfwit is in the kitchen’, they simply ditched the whole thing.

  Certainly, in a soundbite world, there wouldn’t have been the time to explain that while alcohol gives you the confidence to take risks you wouldn’t normally take, it also slows down your reactions should something go wrong. That’s why it’s so lethal when combined with driving.

  Think about it. If you can’t organize your mouth to be able to say, ‘Peter Piper picked a red lorry on the seashore,’ what possible chance do you have of being able to control a ton of speeding metal?