What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  It’s hard, really, to think of any good points at all. I liked the fact that it is a proper off-roader with proper off-roading features. I also liked the television sets in the back, but they were a £1,940 option. I liked the reversing camera, too, but that was an extra £460. In fact, my test car was fitted with so many options, the actual price was £94,200.

  I will admit that even though this car is made by hand, it appears to be very well screwed together and, yes, the looks are appealing. But do not imagine for a moment that just because it has many modern features and is still being made today that it is a modern car. Really. It’s an Austin Seven in a fat suit.

  I would, therefore, still choose a Range Rover instead. Yes, it is more likely to drain its battery of juice when you’ve left it for two minutes outside the newsagent’s. And, yes, the new front end appeals only to jackdaws. But at least it can run over a pothole without breaking your back, you can open and close the doors without using heavy lifting gear, there’s space for a human being behind the wheel and it’s capable of getting from 0 to 60 before you do.

  28 August 2011

  Strip out all the tricks and it’s still a wizard

  Audi A6 SE 3.0 TDI

  I spent a day last week recording the voice for a new satellite navigation system. This meant sitting in a darkened room saying, ‘In 200 metres, turn right. In 200 yards, turn right. In 300 metres, turn right. In 300 yards, turn right. In 400 metres, turn right. In 400 yards, turn right …’ It wasn’t as interesting as it sounds.

  It also felt slightly ludicrous, like I was the kettle on the bridge of a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier: an old-fashioned ingredient in a world that’s not old-fashioned at all.

  Have you ever stopped and wondered how the satnav system in your car works? It’s astonishing. There are twenty-four American military Navstar satellites in space, around 12,500 miles from Earth. At any point on the planet’s surface, there is a direct line of sight to at least four of them.

  But they’re not standing still. They’re moving. Which means they are not fixed points as such. So, the little receiver in your poxy Volkswagen has to find them, and they’re only the size of wheelie bins, then work out precisely how far away they might be at any given moment. We’re talking major algebra here.

  And bear in mind that the device must work out how long it takes for the signal to reach an object in space that is moving at several thousand miles an hour. That means a clock that can keep up with the speed of light. Get it wrong by a thousandth of a millionth of a second and your VW will think it’s just outside Kiev.

  And then, when it has worked out where you are on the surface of Earth, it must compare the information with an onboard road map. And it still isn’t finished because you’ve just asked it to get you from where you are now to a postcode just outside Pontefract. This means it must analyse the 246,000 miles of tarmac in Britain and work out the fastest route. And if it takes more than five seconds, it knows you will be sitting there saying, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Come on. You useless piece of junk.’

  In the early days of satellite guidance, mistakes were common. The first time I ever used such a system, it tried to direct me through Leicester Square, which had been pedestrianized by the Iceni. And only recently, the systems fitted in BMWs absolutely refused to acknowledge the existence of the M40.

  I spent a lot of time thinking, Crikey. This whole thing was designed so the Americans could post a cruise missile through a letter box 7,000 miles away and it can’t even find a sensible route from Beaconsfield to London. Now, though, I have to say, mistakes are extremely rare.

  Which is why I’m always surprised when an old lady driver tells hospital staff the reason she drove her car off a cliff, or through a river, or into a cave full of wolves, is because the satnav system in her car told her to.

  You hear these stories all the time. People who turn left at a level crossing, straight into the path of the four fifty from Paddington, or left at a crossroads that isn’t there, and into the saloon bar of the White Horse in Tiverton. I’ve always assumed that people like this must be stupid. However …

  Earlier in the summer, while filming in the south of France, I set off in a large convoy of camera cars and crew vans to a pre-determined location. We were being led by a man whom we shall call Rod. Which is a bit annoying for him because I’ve just remembered that is his actual name.

  Anyway, Rod had programmed his portable satnav to where we were going and off he set. Alarm bells began to ring in my car when we turned onto a very small country lane. And they became very loud indeed when the lane became a track. And then it stopped.

  Rod was absolutely perplexed. His satnav system was saying we were just 500 metres from our destination, which may well have been true, but the only way we could have got there on the route it had in mind was if we’d turned ourselves into goats. Many people blamed Rod for this. Me? I blamed the French.

  Satnav was fitted to the all-new Audi A6 I was driving last week. But it could do something other than find wheelie bins 12,500 miles away and get you to Pontefract. It could also operate your headlights, altering the shape of the main beam, depending on whether you were on a country or urban road or a motorway, and even switch everything on at junctions so other road users could see … that you’ve apparently gone mad.

  And this is just the flake on the tip of the iceberg. Because there is also a device that can spot bikes and suchlike in the blind spots, and another that flashes up a warning message on the windscreen via a head-up display if it thinks you are travelling too close to the car in front. Then you have night vision, which puts a Blair Witch Project image of the road ahead on a screen in the dash.

  You can even drive this car when you are fast asleep. Citroën was the first car manufacturer in Europe to introduce lane assist, a device that buzzes if it thinks you’re drifting out of lane on the motorway. Audi, though, has gone one better. Providing you are travelling at more than 40mph, its system will actually steer you back in line. And if you have the active cruise control switched on, it will even brake on your behalf if there’s an obstacle ahead. All that’s missing is an alarm clock to wake you up when you arrive at your destination.

  Wi-fi? Well, as we know, this doesn’t work in a house if the walls are more than 2mm thick, but somehow, Audi has made it work in a car. Which means that actually you could drive down the motorway, catching up on your emails, safe in the knowledge that the steering, braking and navigation are all being taken care of by electronics.

  Of course, you might think that this veneer of mostly optional electro-trickery has been fitted to mask the shortcomings of a fairly dreary car. But no. It’s lighter than the old A6 and, even though it’s shorter, it’s more spacious inside. It is also extremely well made and finished beautifully. It is a wonderfully nice place to sit, and thanks to absolutely fantastic seats, comfortable too.

  Until you set off. Yes, you can adjust the way the gearbox, the throttle and the suspension behave, but the simple fact is that no matter what settings you select, this new car does not ride quite as well as the BMW 5-series. It doesn’t handle as well, either. And the entry-level 2-litre turbodiesel engine is not quite as refined as the unit that BMW uses. But that said, it should be capable of averaging 57 mpg, which is remarkable.

  So. Yes or no? Well, I much prefer it to the overstyled Mercedes E class, which was designed mostly to take Carol Vorderman to the airport. And I think for a number of reasons it is better than Jag’s XF, but what about the 5-series?

  Tricky one. Taken in their base forms, there’s no way to split them, really. The Audi matches the 5-series for economy and the Beemer is slightly nicer to drive. They really are Manchester City and Manchester United.

  For sure, if you fit a few options to the Audi, you will have something that is mind-bogglingly good. But if you’re not careful you could end up spending more than BMW charges for the bigger-engined 530d. And that’s better than mind-bogglingly good. All things considered,
that’s probably the best car in the world right now.

  4 September 2011

  Open up them pearly gates …

  Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Spyder Performante

  A man died recently. He was called Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss and he began his career, quietly, as a tea taster for Brooke Bond. Then, in 1939, he joined the Fleet Air Arm where, as a carrier pilot, he had much success in the Mediterranean, earning a Distinguished Service Cross and bar.

  In 1943 he came back to Britain and switched to the twin-engined Mosquito, in which he spent a great deal of time bombing France and generally shooting down German Junkers 88s. Before the war ended, he left for America where he became Tom Cruise, testing naval fighters.

  After the war ended he became a test pilot with Fairey Aviation and on 6 October 1954, he took the experimental Fairey Delta 2 on its maiden flight. I had a model kit of one of these as a child and thought it to be the most beautiful thing in the world. For Twiss, though, it was more than just that.

  He became convinced that the delicate little jet with its Concorde-style drooping nose could fly faster than anything else in the skies at that time. And so, five months after a US air force Super Sabre had set a new record of 822 mph, Twiss climbed aboard his beloved FD 2 and headed for a course that had been laid out along the south coast near Chichester.

  Flying at 38,000 foot, he did indeed break the record. Although actually what he did was smash it. Because the average speed of his two runs was 1,132 mph. Twiss, then, had become the first man ever to beak the 1,000-mph barrier. And for his services he was awarded the OBE and the threat of several lawsuits from market gardeners in Sussex who claimed his sonic boom had smashed all the glass in their greenhouses.

  You might imagine that after he retired from test flying, he’d put his feet up and do a spot of gardening. But no. After 4,500 hours in the big blue, in 148 types of aircraft, he appeared at the helm of a Fairey Marine speedboat in the Bond movie From Russia With Love and features in Sink the Bismarck! at the controls of a Fairey Swordfish torpedo plane. And he developed cruisers. And flew around in gliders and was married five times.

  This is what I call a proper life. A full life. The life of a man who could lay on his deathbed and think, Good. I didn’t waste too much time in the ninety years I was awarded.

  This brings me neatly on to a track called ‘Time’ from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which is about how we waste and fritter our days away, waiting for someone to show us the way.

  This is how most people live. Life is long and there is time to kill today. But, actually, there isn’t. Life is desperately short and no matter how much you do, there’s always a twang of regret that you didn’t do more. No matter how much you see, you always think that if only you’d gone round one more corner and over one more horizon, you’d have seen something else. I bet when Tom Jones is summoned by the grim reaper, he’ll think of a girl that he could have slept with but didn’t, and that will make him a bit sad. I bet that even Peter Twiss spent at least some of his life wishing he could have shot down one more German bomber and gone 1 mph faster in that Fairey Delta.

  I’m in the same boat. God knows, I’ve travelled over the years, but instead of reflecting on all that I’ve seen and all that I’ve done, I will go to my grave thinking, Shit. I never went to Pontefract.

  This is why, if you have the wherewithal, it’s very important that you go out tomorrow morning and buy a supercar.

  I’ve had my share of them over the years and they are all stupid. Impractical, ruinously expensive, difficult to park and they leave you with dirty fingers every time you open the bonnet to retrieve your (very small) suitcase.

  However, that said, supercars are to cars what jet fighters are to the Airbus that took you to Corfu this year. They are built to excite the speed gene that lives in us all; they are designed to release the cocktail of chemicals that is titillated when we are small and we are pushed higher and higher on the swings.

  What’s more, supercars are the last great division of the global motor industry where engineers and stylists can try out new ideas and new ways of thinking. When you build a car that can travel at two hundred and something miles an hour, you need to make the brakes from exotic materials and think carefully about what effect the air has at those sort of speeds. Anyone can make a saloon. It takes a genius to make a supercar.

  At present, there are two standout examples of the breed. The McLaren MP4-12C, which is science and maths, and the Ferrari 458, which is also science and maths. With a bit of Renaissance art thrown in for good measure. Both use brute force to give you the go, the periodic table to give you the stopping power you need and Palo Alto electronics to give you a level of grip in the corners that beggars belief.

  And yet, if I were in the market for such a car, I’d buy neither. I’d buy the Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Spyder Performante.

  Let me talk you through the name. LP says that the V10 engine is longitudinally positioned in the car; 570 is the metric horsepower that Lamborghini claims it delivers – it’s equivalent to 562 bhp. The -4 signifies that it has four-wheel drive. Spyder tells us that it’s a convertible, and Performante that it’s the performance version of something that’s pretty damn fast in the first place.

  The extra oomph comes mainly from a raft of weight-saving measures. Carbon fibre, for instance, is used to make the huge engine cover, the door panels, the seats and even the bits that shroud the door mirrors. It sounds, then, like this is another example of science and maths. But it isn’t.

  Ferrari and McLaren, first of all, are racing teams and Lamborghini isn’t. Lamborghini therefore feels no need to give its customers a taste of Formula One, a taste of all that behind-the-scenes trickery. Lambos are designed mainly to make a lot of noise and cause small boys to clutch at their private parts in excitement.

  So, while the Ferrari howls and a McLaren hums, the Lambo bellows. And while the racers were styled by aerodynamicists, the Lambo was designed to make people say, ‘Wow!’ Which it does.

  What’s more, with most serious supercars, you would never buy a convertible version, because you’d know it wasn’t quite as good, dynamically, as the stiffer, more rigid hard top. But since you don’t buy a Lambo for the last 0.01 of a g it can generate in the bends, who cares? Best to have no roof, really. That way you can hear the engine more clearly more of the time.

  And anyway, it’s not like the Performante dawdles. The acceleration is savage, the braking is fierce enough to tear off your face and, unlike most four-wheel-drive cars, it does not resort to chronic understeer when you exceed the limit. Plant your foot into the carpet mid-bend and it’s the tail that lets go in an almost cartoonish fog of tyre smoke and noise. In a Ferrari or a McLaren, you concentrate when you are driving quickly. In the Gallardo, you can’t. You’re too busy laughing.

  Oh, and there’s one more important point. Ferrari recently started to offer a seven-year warranty, which suggests that it has great faith in the quality. But in the past few years, since Audi took over the factory, I’ve never experienced any mechanical malfunction at all in a Lambo.

  Go on. Buy one. You may think it’s a stupid idea now, but trust me on this. On your deathbed, you’ll remember a drive you took in it. And you’ll go through the Pearly Gates smiling.

  11 September 2011

  Oh, grunting frump, you looked so fine on the catwalk

  Jaguar XF 2.2 Diesel Premium Luxury

  Back in 1995, Ford toured the world, showing off an exciting new concept car – a small two-seat roadster that was made from carbon fibre. Yum, yum, we all thought. We shall be very interested in buying that should the bigwigs in Detroit decide to put it into production.

  Sadly, though, by the time it reached the showrooms, it had sprouted a roof, a hatchback and acres of pleblon upholstery. Furthermore, it was made from steel instead of carbon fibre and it looked like a teapot. It was called the Ka.

  Ten years later Ford did it again, showing us a fan
tastic-looking concept called Iosis. It said at the time that the next version of the Mondeo would look very similar. And it did, except for every single detail.

  This is the trouble with concept cars. They do not have to adhere to pesky EU rules about how high the headlamps must be from the ground and how much of the tyres’ width must be covered by bodywork. They don’t have to be crash-tested, and neither does every single piece have to pass through the company’s accounts department. They are freestyle cars. Flights of fancy.

  They don’t even have to work. Many years ago Peugeot turned up at the British motor show with a concept car that looked like a cross between an America’s Cup catamaran, the glider Pierce Brosnan used in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and a sex toy. However, on the downside, it didn’t have an engine. It didn’t even have a space where an engine could go.

  In recent times concept cars have started to look a bit more like the cars you and I do buy. But even so, all of the little details – the fat tyres and the funky lighting and the weird door handles – are still rejected by the bean counters for being too expensive, or by the production line manager for being too complex to fit. This means the car that finally makes it to the showroom never looks quite as good as the car that appeared under a sea of girly flesh at a motor show. Concept cars, then, are the font of disappointment.

  By far the worst offender in this is Jaguar. Almost without exception, every one of its new cars in recent times has been a shoulder-sagging visual let-down because, just before it was unveiled, the company had produced a concept to show how brilliant it could have looked if only there were no rules. In short, Jag’s designers have spent the past twenty years writing cheques that the rest of the company cannot cash.