What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  You have to take the corner you have in mind at a speed that is insane. And it’s hard to convince your mind that this is possible. You know that if you lift off, you will die. But you also know that if you don’t lift off, you will die. It’s all very terrifying.

  And in a Lotus T125, no one can hear you scream, partly because your larynx has been crushed and partly because you’ve just trodden on the accelerator pedal and your head’s come off again.

  Happily, you cannot take this car on the road. But you are allowed to drive about on Britain’s highways and byways in a V8-powered Ariel Atom. This is like being licensed to drive a horse that is propelled by a Saturn V rocket. You accelerate. You hit a tree. Your head comes off.

  And it’s not alone. A modern Ferrari comes with a telephone connection and iPod connectivity and electric windows. So it’s like the perfectly reasonable-looking man at the school gates with a bag of sweets. Apparently harmless. But if you make the mistake of getting inside? Well, it’s going to be ugly.

  I cannot think of one yard of British tarmac where you could sensibly put your foot down in a modern Ferrari. Not one. Because by the time it’s gone through second gear, it’s broken even our most relaxed speed limit, and by the time you’re through third, your head is in the boot.

  A lot of people wonder why Top Gear films these really fast cars on an airfield. The reason is simple. On a road, almost all of them are borderline idiotic. And that’s why I was so pleased to climb on board the BAC Mono this morning. Because it isn’t.

  BAC is the world’s newest car company. I first heard about it last year and I must confess, I smiled. It had based itself in Cheshire and I thought, I see. So, soon we will be treated to the first car made entirely from onyx. I expected it to have gold fixtures and fittings and a stone dog by the door.

  It didn’t turn out like that at all. To get inside, you remove the steering wheel and then lower yourself into the single seat until you are completely wedged. All you can move are your feet and your hands. It’s like you’ve been tinned. You then pull on your helmet – it would be silly to drive it without one because you might be hit in the face by a bee – and start it up. It all feels very racy. And a bit scary.

  This car was designed to look like an F-22 Raptor and it’s festooned with all sorts of imagery and branding from the world of motor sport. The F3-spec gearbox is from Hewland. The brakes are from AP Racing. The pushrod suspension is from Sachs. You fear that if you even go near the loud pedal, you will die, terrified and alone.

  Its maker claims it can get from 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds and onwards to a top speed of a billion. So, with much trepidation, you start it up. There’s an explosion of noise behind you and the steering wheel comes alive with readouts that you don’t understand. You push the neutral button with your left hand and pull a paddle with your right to engage first. There’s an almighty clunk. You have just booked an appointment with your executioner.

  You engage the clutch. The car moves. You change into second. There’s another enormous clunk. The executioner is on his way. So you think you may as well get it over with and open the taps.

  What happens next is odd. You know you are moving very quickly indeed but you feel like it’s a speed you can handle. Perhaps that’s because you are always aware that while the 2.3-litre engine was made by Cosworth, it is basically the same four-cylinder unit Ford uses in its Galaxy. And there is nothing on God’s green earth less scary than a people carrier.

  Still, there’s a corner looming and you know what happens when you try to do one of those in a car that weighs about the same as a hot-water bottle. It goes straight on. So you brake, and you notice straight away that the Mono doesn’t pitch forwards. Then you turn the wheel and it doesn’t roll, either. It stays level.

  In the next corner, you try a little harder and it’s the same story. This gives you the confidence to really push and there are no unpleasant surprises at all. Because the engine and the gearbox and you are all in a line, low down, right down the middle of the car, it handles absolutely beautifully. There’s a whiff of understeer to let you know that you’re getting near to the limit, but a little more power corrects this and you end up cornering like Fangio, in a controlled four-wheel drift.

  And because the speed of the thing feels manageable, you can concentrate on what you’re doing rather than not dying. With most cars of this type – the Caterham 7 Superlight and the Atom, for example – you need to know what you’re doing or they will kill you. But in the Mono, a complete numpty could manage, no problem at all.

  There’s more good news, too. It is designed so that it can handle speed bumps. It has lights and indicators and there’s even a boot that is big enough for your helmet. It’s a road car. Of course, if you use it on the road, where there are other people, you will look a bit foolish. But the fact is you can.

  Of course, it’s not cheap: £79,950 is a lot for a one-seater car that has no radio, windows, satnav or even carpets. But that said, a similarly specced V8 Atom is £146,699.

  Sadly, though, there were a few flies in the ointment. First of all, I experienced a small fire. And then the gearbox broke. And then the engine decided it wouldn’t work at all below 4000 rpm. All of this was very bad, but in BAC’s defence, this was a prototype, work-in-progress car. Deliveries don’t start for a little while so it still has time to, I dunno, move the carbon trim a little further away from the hot exhaust tail pipe.

  If BAC can get it all working properly, it’ll be great. The only really fast car that isn’t actually too fast.

  Neill Briggs, the engineering director of BAC, said, ‘The exhaust trim that started smouldering when Jeremy pushed the prototype car to its limits – and watching Jeremy put a car through its paces is an impressive thing – was temporary. It will be replaced in the final version of the car and we’re confident that the minor problems he experienced will be sorted out.’

  14 August 2011

  I thought it looked humdrum. But wow!

  Honda Accord Type S

  Don’t you think it’s strange? You buy a BMW one day and you are told that it is the ultimate driving machine, that it is all about balance and grip and immediacy. Whereas the very next day you are told that exactly the same car is all about joy. It was designed and built to be happy and to make you happy as a result. Welcome to the world of advertising.

  Volkswagen’s advertising agency told us for years that its cars were very reliable. But then the agency decided that actually you don’t buy a VW because it’s well made; you buy one because it’s cheap. Right? So. Has there been a philosophical sea change at the factory in Wolfsburg? Or has there been a meeting in Soho?

  In the olden days engineers would tell advertisers what they had made and advertisers would pass the message on. Now it’s the other way round. Advertisers tell us what the engineers were thinking. Even when it’s plainly obvious they weren’t.

  Do you really think for a moment the new BMW 5-series was built with ‘joy’ in mind? It’s German. And in Germany the word for ‘joy’ will almost certainly be 16 miles long and mean, literally, ‘the unusual and unexplained phenomenon that occurs in your inner being when someone of your acquaintance accidentally slips on a banana skin’.

  All things considered, the current BMW 5-series is possibly the best car on sale today. It is handsome and well made and spacious and economical and comfortable and fast. It is a brilliant driving machine. But it is about as joyful as a technical lecture on the inner workings of a telephone junction box.

  Things on the advertising front are particularly difficult for Mercedes. It knows that its two-seat convertible models are particularly popular among women. This seems to annoy the marketeers. So with the SL we had Benicio Del Toro hammering through the desert, and with the SLK we had a good-looking chap being chased by what appeared to be the god of thunder. And neither worked. The cars remained very popular with girls. I shouldn’t be surprised if the next ad showed a docker spitting and scratching his backside. Before
we cut to the pack shot: an enormous scrotum.

  The only ‘lifestyle’ ads that match the car they’re promoting come from Honda. ‘Isn’t it nice when things just work?’ The message is simple. We don’t do fuss. We don’t do flimflam. We are sensible. And that’s what Hondas are. Sensible.

  Because they are so sensible, my shoulders sagged quite a bit when I walked out of the house last Monday morning to find that a brown Accord with a diesel engine was sitting in the drive. I had many miles to cover that week and, frankly, I didn’t fancy doing any of them in the motoring equivalent of wholemeal bread. So I loaded up the boot of my Mercedes and took that instead.

  Sadly, the following Monday, the Accord was still there and I was overcome with guilt. So, with a heavy heart, I climbed inside, fired up the motor, pointed its sensible, car-shaped nose at the capital and pressed the accelerator.

  What happened next was alarming. We are conditioned to expect a certain level of response from a diesel engine. It’s the response you get from a fat man in a vest who’s spent the afternoon sitting in a deckchair. Not this diesel engine, though …

  Honda – the last mainstream car maker to get into diesel engines – brands this top-of-the-range paraffin stove the Type S, and that means the 2.2-litre turbocharged motor now develops 178 horsepower. That’s 30 more than you get from the standard car and, boy, oh boy, do you feel it. This car may be brown and as interesting to look at as the periodic table, but it goes like a scalded cock.

  Of course, you may imagine that by upping the power, Honda has sacrificed fuel economy. And you’d be right. It has: 1.9 mpg of it. But you should still be able to get more than 50 mpg, and that, thanks to a massive fuel tank, means you need visit the filling station only once every 650 miles. Let me just say that again. Once every 650 miles. That, all on its own, is a good enough reason for buying this car. But there’s more.

  The Type S package means an ‘aero’ body kit – which I couldn’t spot – bigger wheels, low-profile tyres and sports suspension. You would imagine, therefore, that you were in for a bone-shaking ride. But you’re not.

  At the BBC’s underground car park in White City there are speed bumps of such severity that in most cars I weave about through the bays rather than drive over them. Even at 1 mph they hurt. But with the Accord they weren’t there. I didn’t feel them at all. It was as if I was trying to park a hovercraft.

  So, it’s fast, economical, comfortable … and almost unbelievably well made. Slam the door on a Subaru Legacy – another well-made car – and it makes the sound of a shot pheasant hitting the ground on a frosty morning. Slam the door on the Honda Accord and it makes the sound of a pheasant coming in to land … after you’ve missed it. It’s almost silent.

  There’s a similar sensation of quality on the inside. This is a car that doesn’t feel assembled. It feels as though it’s been hewn from one solid block of steel. It’s a Barbour jacket. It’s a Scottish mountain. Push a button in a Honda and it feels as if you could push it a billion times and it would still be working. It’s the exact opposite, then, of an iPhone.

  Right. Now it’s time to talk about the drawbacks. Well, while this car is available as an estate, it is not available with an automatic gearbox. And that’s odd. Also, it comes with many electronic features that are understandable to only the sort of person that would switch from vodka to sherry more readily than they’d switch to a Honda Accord.

  I suppose I ought to point out as well that while the engine delivers all that you could ask, it is not quite as refined as the diesel engine you get in a BMW. And that’s it.

  The diesel Accord Type S is well priced, considering the amount of equipment it comes with as standard, it’s pretty spacious, it’s lovely to drive and – I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this already – you only need take it to the pumps every 650 miles.

  Yes, it’s boring to look at, but even that can have its advantages. It’ll never be vandalized, and I think I’m right in saying that not once in all of human history has an Accord driver been stopped randomly by the police. That’s because they know that anyone who bought a car as sensible as this will have the correct paperwork, no alcohol in their bloodstream and no sub-machine gun in the boot.

  If it were available with an automatic gearbox, I’d be tempted to give it five stars. But it isn’t, so, reluctantly, I won’t.

  Instead I’ll sum it up by saying that it’s nice to find something that just works.

  21 August 2011

  You vill never handle zis torture

  Mercedes-Benz G 350 Bluetec

  It emerged recently that the least reliable car you can buy is a Range Rover. An extensive study found that on 02-registered cars, there was a 56 per cent chance of a fault developing within a year. My own findings suggest that brand-new models have a battery issue that could put you on the bus in weeks.

  To make matters worse, the company’s designers seem to be hell-bent on ruining the quiet, restrained, tasteful looks with more and more chintz. The front end now looks like a branch of Ratners, and soon, you get the impression they will fit fake Roman pillars on either side of the driver’s door. I suspect they won’t be fully happy, though, until the whole car is made from onyx.

  I don’t doubt for a moment that it is all very lovely if you live in Alderley Edge, but in the rest of the country, where showing-off is considered poor form, it’s all just too vulgar and horrid for words. Small wonder, then, that we are starting to see a re-emergence on the streets of the Mercedes G-wagen.

  It’s been on sale in Britain before but now it’s back in two versions. Both are long wheelbase but one is from AMG and therefore has a supercharged V8, and the other is the one I’ve been driving for the past week, the G 350 Bluetec diesel.

  It is extremely handsome. Restrained. Dignified. And cool in a menacing sort of way. If it were a gun, it would be an AK-47. It is, then, the complete opposite of the modern-day Range Rover, which is like a gangsta’s diamond-encrusted Colt. Small wonder that in Notting Hill many media types even stopped pedalling for a moment to give the big beast an appreciative nod. People like looking at this car. It feels, therefore, worth the £81,700 asking price. Driving it, however, is a rather different story.

  You may remember that recently on Top Gear I brought news of a half-million-pound E-type Jaguar. Built by a company in East Sussex called Eagle, it was the most beautiful man-made thing I’d ever seen. Better than the Humber Bridge. Better than the Riva Aquarama, even.

  However, it was nothing like a modern car to drive. Yes, many of the components were brand new, but you couldn’t get away from the fact that the basic architecture came from a time when people would travel miles to gawp at a top-loading washing machine.

  Then there was the Jensen Interceptor that I reviewed earlier. The idea was brilliant. You had the beautiful Italian styling from the days of the loon pant and the tie-dye T-shirt, but you got a modern engine, modern brakes and modern suspension. Sadly, you did not get antilock braking or airbags or a satnav system. Or wipers that could wipe the windscreen.

  I can see why you would be interested in buying an updated Jensen or an Eagle E-type. They are approximately 18,000 times more interesting than the modern-day equivalents from Jaguar or Aston or Mercedes-Benz. But for every point you score on the kudosometer, you will lose one when you run over a manhole cover. Or into a tree.

  The G-wagen is much the same. It was originally designed for the German army in the 1970s, which means that, underneath, it is made from 1970s technology. This means that on roads you know to be perfectly smooth it will pitch and writhe about like one of those bucking broncos you can now rent for children’s parties.

  It’s amazing. I remember driving a G-wagen in the early Eighties and I thought back then that it was extremely refined and that it rode very well. By today’s standards, though, it is absolutely woeful.

  And the steering is worse. You need a block and tackle to turn the wheel, and even if, by some miracle, you do manage it, the car w
ill stubbornly refuse to actually go round the corner.

  In an attempt to make the interior feel modern, the car is sold as standard with things such as cupholders and climate control and a rear-view mirror that dims automatically when it’s being blinded by the car behind. But all of these things have been shoehorned into a cockpit that was designed before electricity was invented.

  This is particularly noticeable when you try to operate the command and satnav centre. It is very difficult, because the only place it could be fitted was right down at the bottom of the dash, next to your left ankle.

  And even if you could read what the buttons do, there is absolutely no chance of pressing the one you want because as you extend your left arm into the footwell, you will run over another piece of grit and the whole car will leap about as if it’s been hit by an RPG.

  Then there’s the driving position. Because people in the army like to be extremely uncomfortable at all times – this is why all British military equipment comes with as many sharp edges as possible – Mercedes decided that the seat should be mounted only 2 inches away from the steering wheel. You drive this car like you sit at a kitchen table.

  And yet you pray the journey will never be over because you know that when it is, you will have to get out and close the door. This is not actually possible unless you have just won a competition to find Britain’s strongest man. And even if you have, you will still need the silver and bronze medallists to give you a hand. The tailgate is even worse. To open this, you need a JCB. And there’s no point because the boot is nowhere near as big as you might have been expecting.

  Yes, the engine is modern, and as a result it produces very little by way of oxides of nitrogen – wow! However, it also produces very little power, and certainly not enough for a car that weighs more than Scotland. The result is a top speed of 108 mph, which is what most automotive experts call ‘strolling’.