I am not suggesting for a moment that the government cuts the drink-drive limit. That would be barbaric and stupid. Which is why it probably will. I merely offer it up as an observation. And a bit of an excuse for what comes next.
Yesterday, and I have no idea how this happened, I became extremely drunk. I started with a cheeky beer at midday and ended up on a beach, eight hours later, asking out loud if my lawyer had ever tried lesbianism. That drunk. So drunk, in fact, that as the sun started to go down, I decided that I could drive. So I did. Into the sea.
Before you all write to the Daily Mail, again, suggesting that I be sacked, again, I should explain that I wasn’t on a road, no pedestrians were present to run over, and that the vehicle I was driving was an Argo – widely known as an Argocat. I’ve written about this amazing little vehicle before, but only in passing. Today, I am giving it the main picture. The whole caboodle. The full test.
First made in Canada forty-two years ago, the Argocat is currently available with either six- or eight-wheel drive. It skid-steers like a tank, which means that when you turn the handlebars, the wheels on one side are braked, allowing the vehicle to ‘skid’ round in its own length.
Many engines have been available over the years. Today you get an air-cooled unit from Briggs & Stratton. The motor in mine is a 26-horsepower liquid-cooled affair from Kohler. And I do mean mine. As in, I own it.
I first experienced an Argocat about five years ago and was astonished at what it would climb. So astonished that I rang the British importer and bought one to use for litter-clearing duties at my holiday cottage on the Isle of Man.
Over the years, it has never been anything other than astonishing. We talk glibly about the off-road abilities of a Land Rover. But no Defender could hope to make progress over seaweed-strewn boulders that often are twice as tall as it is. The Argocat can.
Nor would a Land Rover be much use if your lobster pot was stuck under a rock. In an Argocat you simply drive into the sea, and using the tyres as crude propellers, waddle over to the rope and pull the pot free. Then drive back to the beach, climb over the boulders, and go home via the samphire beds to get some accompanying veg.
Yes, there are drawbacks. First of all, it costs more than a Fiat 500 Abarth, which is a lot when you consider it has no windows, carpets, cruise control, sat nav or air-conditioning. All you get is a bilge pump and a cigarette lighter.
And then there’s the complexity. If you lift up the floor, which can be achieved only with minor cuts and a splash of light bruising, it is like peering into a Victorian bicycle factory. Because each of the eight wheels is driven by a chain that takes its drive from the wheel in front, there are more chains in there than you’d find in a fight between two rival gangs of Hell’s Angels. All of which, if you go in the sea a lot, are corroded to hell.
Happily, because it’s based on the Isle of Man, where there are many motorcycling enthusiasts, it’s not hard to find a man who can keep these chains working. But if you live in, say, the rest of the world, where motorcycling is reserved for a handful of homosexuals and lunatics, servicing would be a nightmare.
The only good thing is that the Argocat is one of those prehistoric mechanical beasts that can mend itself. One day it is making a terrible graunching noise in gentle left turns. The next it’s fine. Modern, electronically controlled vehicles don’t do this. They go wrong and they stay wrong until a man with a laptop comes round and charges you £8m a minute to get them going again.
Fortunately, yesterday, when I was very drunk and filled with a sudden need to drive very far out to sea, all was well with my Argocat. So brrrrm went the engine and splash went the tyres. And we were off.
It’s funny but when you actually own something, you are never prepared to test it to the limits because, of course, you will be without a car while it’s being mended. But when you are paralytic, all those worries just seem to melt away, which is why I was halfway to Belfast before I decided that what I’d like most of all was some more wine. So I killed the engine, poured myself a glass and just sort of bobbed about admiring the view with that stupid smile people have when their arteries are full of Chablis.
I have no idea what happened to the time but a lot of it must have passed, because the next thing I knew, the water had all gone somewhere else and I was on a rock, about five miles from the beach. That’s five miles of sea bed. Five miles of seaweed and boulders. Five miles of terrain so inhospitable you wouldn’t even attempt to cross it on foot.
I had some more wine while thinking what to do and calculated that by the time the tide came in again, it’d be dark. And the wind was picking up. And at sea, an Argocat has a top speed of one, which is not much use if you’re trying to headbutt a strong northeasterly and a nine-knot tide. What happens is that after about a month, you end up reversing into Brazil.
I therefore concluded, after some more wine, that I would have to drive over the sea bed. I wish you could have seen the scale of the challenge. Because the fact that the Argocat made it without even so much as a moment of wheelspin would leave you as dumbfounded as it did me.
The thing is that so long as one wheel has grip, you have drive. And with eight squidgy balloon tyres tentacling out there for a foothold, there’s a good chance one of them will meet with some success. All you have to do is use the bike-style twist grip to keep the tyres fed with a dribble of power.
I look often at farmers and rock stars who have quad bikes for tootling about on their estates and I’m a bit confused. Because they must know that eventually they will end up in hospital with a fractured skull. With an Argocat, there’s no danger of that. It only does about 20mph. And only then if you are lucky. You couldn’t roll it over if you had a crane.
Sure, a quad bike is very good at cross-country travel. In the same way that a horse is a fine way of getting across a desert. It’s just not as good as a camel.
2 August 2009
Cheer yourself up in a …
Mazda MX-5 2.0i Sport Tech
There’s a farm shop near where I live. Actually, it isn’t really a farm shop at all, because the floor is made from oak rather than fertilizer bags and all of the staff look like supermodels instead of burst walnut trees.
Inside, you can buy jumpers made from exotic goats, bread that would make a Frenchman faint and apples so shiny, they could double up as disco balls. It’s called Daylesford and it’s the subject of much mockery, principally because everything is so bleeding expensive. As a friend of mine said recently, ‘I went to Daylesford to get some cheese this morning. But I only had £162 on me.’
The thing is, though, it is excellent value for money. When I go there on a Saturday morning, I always meet someone who invites me round for dinner that night. This means I don’t have to buy supper, or cook it.
What’s more, without Daylesford I’d have to go to London to buy my groceries, which would cost £50 in petrol, £8 for the congestion charge and £100 to get my car back from the pound. So, all of a sudden, twenty-five quid seems the bargain of the century. Especially when you consider that Daylesford has started to affect house prices. People will pay considerably more to live near it, which means that every time someone buys a loaf of bread, I’m earning about £500,000.
And on top of all this, without Daylesford I’d have to go to a local supermarket to buy my ham. Yes, the ham there is only 4p, but it’s Barbie pink and about as nutritional as the plastic bag it’s sold in.
We see the same sort of thing with cars. I recently drove something called a Perodua Myvi, which sells for £7,600. That’s cheap when you consider it has the same number of wheels and glove boxes as a Rolls-Royce Phantom. But it is extremely expensive when you work out how miserable and dreary it makes you feel. It’s a car built utterly without joy. Buying one of these would be like buying a nylon dog simply because it’s cheaper to keep.
There are lots of cheap cars on the market, but only a very small number offer truly excellent value for money. The Fiat 500 is one, for sure,
because just seeing it makes you happy. And the Skoda Roomster is another, provided you avoid the three-cylinder diesel version. Yes, you will save money when you buy it, but the savings will be offset by the cost of the funeral you’ll need shortly after you first try to build up enough speed to join a motorway.
The Jaguar X-type is perhaps the best example of cost having nothing to do with value. Yes, it was very cheap for a Jaguar. But since it was nothing more than a Mondeo in a rented suit, it was extremely poor value for money. That’s why it never sold well. And that’s why 300 poor souls at the Halewood plant are now facing the dole queue.
And then there’s the new Vauxhall Insignia VXR. On the face of it, this looks excellent value. The Insignia is a good-looking car and the hot version is even better. What’s more, it has a long list of standard kit, a 321bhp twin-turbo engine and four-wheel drive and, since prices start at a whisker over £30,000, it is way less than its rivals from Audi and BMW.
Yes, but the money you save in no way compensates for the fact that you must spend the next year or so telling your friends that you have a Vauxhall. Which is a bit like saying you have genital warts. People will raise their eyebrows and edge away.
Buying a Vauxhall to save money is like going on holiday to Northampton to save money. You will, for sure, but you will not be as happy as if you went to France.
And all of this brings me naturally to the Mazda MX-5, which I think represents better value for money than any other car on sale in Britain today. A 1.8-litre soft-top version, as opposed to the one that comes with a folding metal roof, is £16,345, and for that you get almost exactly the same amount of fun you would get from a Ferrari 430 Spider. This is the thing with convertibles. When the roof is down, the buffeting and the racket mean that any speed above about eighty is unpleasant. So you really don’t need a million horsepower or a gearbox that can swap cogs in a billionth of a blink.
With the Mazda you get the engine at the front, rear-wheel drive and skinny tyres. This, then, is a car designed to thrill and excite and put a massive smile on your face at the sort of speed that won’t mess up your girlfriend’s hair.
My old mate Tiff Needell, from commercial television, is perfectly capable of power-sliding a space shuttle, but argues to this day that the most fun he’s ever had is in a Morris Minor, because it can be provoked into some tail-out action at about 2mph. So it goes with the Mazda. In short, you don’t need to be an astronaut with titanium hair follicles to get the best out of it.
Put simply, an MX-5 feels more alive at 30mph than most other cars feel at 100.
So, every time Mazda changes something on its little sports car, I’m worried the end result will be a bit more serious, a bit more ‘driver-oriented’, a bit more anal. And that the original recipe will have been ruined.
I realize, of course, that an original can be improved, no matter how good it may have been. You have only to listen to the Hothouse Flowers’ version of ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ to understand this. But, for every original that’s improved, there are a thousand that are ruined.
That’s why I approached the recently facelifted version of the MX-5 with a heavy heart and a sense of foreboding.
Let me give you an example. Mazda has fitted the engine with a forged crankshaft, floating pistons and new valve gear. It all sounds like the wet dream of a diehard, adenoidal car bore. But don’t worry. Despite all the work, the amount of power the engine produces remains exactly as it was before. And it’s the same story with the torque. The only real change is that you can now rev to 7500rpm before you need to change gear. And it all sounds a bit more sporty.
The company has changed the front suspension, too, and that worried me as well. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the set-up in the old car, so why fiddle? Plainly, it was simply to keep the engineers out of Hiroshima’s love hotels, because it is just as sparkling and brilliant as it was before. Maybe it’s a bit more focused, a bit sharper. But only if you concentrate, and that’s the thing about the MX-5. You don’t concentrate: you’re way too busy having a nice time.
Inside, you now get Recaro seats and higher-quality switches, but I didn’t notice these either.
I said recently that the BMW Z4 is the best of the open sports cars, but after a couple of days with the Mazda I realize I was talking nonsense. The BMW is excellent but the MX-5 demonstrates that its extra speed, extra grip and extra size are all a bit wasteful. In the little Japanese car you get exactly what you need, and exactly the space you need, and nothing more.
I realize that the hairy-chested among you will be scoffing and tutting and heading straight for this column on the internet so you can speak your mind. You will say ‘girl’s car’ and ‘gay’ and all sorts of other things.
Well, that’s fine. You waste your money on a Mustang or a Ferrari. The fact is that, if you want a sports car, the MX-5 is perfect. Nothing on the road will give you better value. Nothing will give you so much fun. The only reason I’m giving it five stars is because I can’t give it fourteen.
16 August 2009
Oh dear, it thinks it’s going to save the world
Lexus RX 450h SE-L
You know what it’s like when a party breaks up at two in the morning. Chaos reigns. The drunks are trying to find someone who still knows what a steering wheel does, half a dozen chatty souls are inviting you back to their places for more drinks and you have a devil on your shoulder telling you that, yes, it’d be a brilliant idea to go with them.
Amid all the doorstep mayhem that ensued after a party last week, I ended up in my holiday rental car with a French supermodel. And neither of us had the first idea where anyone else had gone. So we drove around for a bit until we became thirsty.
And that’s why, last Thursday, at four in the morning, I was in a bar in Corfu with a teenage cover girl when the paparazzi rocked up. Eager for them to go away empty-handed, I left my new best friend and dashed outside, desperately trying to remember what sort of car I’d used to get there and where on earth I might have left it.
It turned out to be a grey Volvo in rental spec, which meant it had no satellite navigation. As a result, I had absolutely no idea where I was, which was bad enough. And to make matters worse, I also had no idea where I was going. Neither did my wife. When I called to say I’d been with a French supermodel for the past two hours, she said – I thought rather curtly – that she didn’t know where I was either, and that she had more important things to worry about because she was at another party and her friend Caroline had just fallen into a swimming pool.
And so that was that. I couldn’t ask a local because a) the only Greek I know is the Duke of Edinburgh and b) I genuinely did not know the name of the villa I’d rented or the village in which it was situated. All I could recall was that it was near a hotel with a stupid name, and at the top of the very long drive to it there was a wheelie bin.
So, with slumped shoulders and a heavy heart, I simply set off. And here’s the really funny thing. Twenty minutes later, having driven past about 60,000 wheelie bins, on a succession of roads that curled as though they’d been made from Michael Jackson’s Thriller wig, I found the entrance to my drive and made it home without making a single wrong turn. As a result, I think I may be a pigeon.
This raises an interesting question. We know we all have a sense of smell, a sense of touch and a sense of taste, except in certain parts of Cheshire, obviously. We know, too, that most of us have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. But do we have an in-built sense of direction? Are we salmon?
James May isn’t. In a large hotel, it can take him several hours to get from his room to reception. In a city, he can be lost for days. This is a man who claims that in London there are two Albert Halls; Britain, in his mind, is upside down, with Scotland next to France.
There are many other examples of this in the newspapers every week: people who go round and round the M25 until they run out of petrol, truckers who drive into rivers, and then there was that taxi driver who p
rogrammed Stamford Bridge into his car’s sat nav and kept right on going to Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. How could he not have known he was going north? Did the word ‘Sheffield’ not give him a clue that he was going in the wrong direction?
Perhaps we are losing our homing powers because, in a world of maps and TomTom guidance from outer space, there is no need to employ them any more. Is James May where the world is headed? If so, God help us.
And God help us, too, if the car we will all be driving when we become long-haired pedants is the Lexus RX 450h SE-L. The old version of this car was a big success, especially in London, because its hybrid drive system made it immune from the congestion charge. The exemption for hybrids is now being reviewed; if it is withdrawn it means you will need another reason for buying this £50,000 Alan Partridge-mobile on stilts.
I doubt it will be looks. The wheels appear to have come from underneath a Steinway, so the car has the stance of an elephant on a unicycle. And ease of use is not a big plus point either.
Of particular note is the sat nav, which is controlled, like the computer you use at home, with a mouse. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get the cursor where you want it to be while driving along because there are too many lurches and bounces from a suspension system that appears to have come from Steinway as well.
Then you have the eco-drive system. During each journey, you are shown by symbols that could be leaves, or windmills, how economically you are driving. And then, when you get home, you are given a score that you can compare with your past three journeys.
What’s more, the entire dash display changes colour to give you an at-a-glance clue as to how you’re doing. Dark blue and you are being heavy-footed. Light blue and it’s a pass. Green and you’re given a job at the Guardian.
I have no doubt all this would help pass the time on a long journey. But, of course, the result is that the journey will be longer still. That’s why I prefer the readout in my Mercedes, which gives a constant update of my average speed.
Round the Bend Page 28
