What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  However, a couple of weeks ago Jaguar unveiled a concept car called the C-X16, and if you examine it very carefully you will see that there are no details that are obviously impossible to mass-produce. Maybe the sideways-opening rear window will have to go because of some obscure bit of legislation from Brussels, but other than that, it looks real. It looks possible. And, more than that, it looks absolutely sensational.

  It is quite similar in appearance to both the Jaguar XK and the Aston Martin V8, which is perhaps unsurprising since all three were styled by the same man. But it’s smaller than both of those, and cheaper, too. They’re talking about a price tag in the region of £55,000. For that, you would get a supercharged V6 engine, which would then be boosted further by a Formula One-style KERS, or kinetic energy recovery system. Engage this by pushing a little button on the steering wheel and the 375 horsepower coming at you from the petrol engine would be increased momentarily by 94 more from an electric motor. Will that be a showroom feature? Who knows? Price Waterhouse Coopers, probably.

  I’ll be honest. I’m very excited about this car and especially the convertible version that’s bound to follow. There’s just one request, and I’m directing this at Jag’s chassis people, who have been a bit hardcore of late. While it is very important to keep the oversteer-crazed helmsmen at Autocar happy, can I please remind you that most of the people who’ll want to buy this car will be middle-aged with bad backs? They will want, therefore, a decent ride. This has to be your priority.

  Anyway, that’s then, this is now and we have a new Jaguar XF to think about. Recently, when reviewing the new Audi A6, I said the Jag was not as good for a number of reasons. And then, in a shoddy piece of journalism, didn’t go on to say what they were. Truth is, I couldn’t remember. It’s just that the XF is a bit like Cheryl Cole. I recognize that she blows up many frocks, but I don’t see what the fuss is about, frankly.

  Now, however, there’s a revamped model. It has a restyled bonnet and tweaked front end and new gills in the front wings. It looks fine, but outside a red carpet event it doesn’t look quite as fine as the BMW 5-series or the Audi A6. Somehow they look more modern and more expensive.

  It’s the same story on the inside. I like the minimalism Jaguar’s designers tried to achieve, but it would have been better if they’d succeeded. I’m loath to say this, but it all looks a bit cheap. The headlamp switch, for instance, is on the indicator stalk. There’s only one reason to put it there: to save money. That’s why Mercedes and BMW don’t. Because they know we know.

  Still, the most important new feature in this car is the engine. It’s a 2.2-litre four-cylinder diesel, and this is the first time Jag has ever used a four-pot paraffin stove in any of its cars. I was expecting great things because other diesel engines in the Jag and Land Rover range are excellent.

  Unfortunately, this is not a Jag engine. In essence, it’s the same unit Ford, Citroën and Peugeot use and I’m afraid it’s not very good. It’s not refined and it’s not as economical as the engine BMW fits. What’s more, these days the government – idiotically – taxes you according to the composition of gases coming out of your tailpipe. And the fact is that the Jag’s engine produces way more CO2 than BMW’s equivalent.

  There’s more. Every few thousandths of a second, the computer that runs the engine in a modern car takes stock of the prevailing conditions. It checks the temperature, the position of the driver’s foot, the gear he’s selected and the barometric pressure, and it compares its findings with a programmed map so that it knows precisely how much fuel to squirt into the cylinder to provide the perfect balance between power and economy.

  To try to get the emissions down, Jaguar has very obviously fitted a map that demands the absolute barest minimum of fuel to keep the engine alive. As a result, around town it feels constantly on the verge of stalling. You can get round the problem by switching the eight-speed gearbox (why?) to ‘sport’ mode, but that rather negates the reason you bought a diesel in the first place.

  All in all, then, this car is not Jag’s finest hour. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the BMW 5-series is better in almost every way.

  However, it has at least given me an idea. What if car companies started making concept cars that were uglier and less exciting than the actual cars they spawned? That way we’d always view a new car in the showroom with delight, rather than a tinge of disappointment.

  18 September 2011

  Now we’re flying

  Mercedes-Benz SLS Roadster

  With a deserved reputation for being a bit hopeless with my hands, I approached the job of building a dam very seriously. So I climbed onto my new six-wheel-drive ex-army Alvis Supacat and spent the morning driving around the farm looking for suitable stones.

  When my hands and lungs were bleeding from the effort of loading them into the ‘boot’, I headed off to my newly dredged pond to start work. Using skills I’d learnt from watching documentaries on the building of the Hoover Dam in America, I started by erecting a temporary blockage using bits of old skirting board I’d found in a skip. This didn’t work.

  So I gave up with the idea of a temporary dam and plunged straight in with the real one. And after about an hour, I realized I wasn’t making much progress at all. Even though I had many stones and some of them were quite large, they didn’t fit together very well, or they sank into the ooze. Either way, the water carried on flowing, oblivious to my efforts.

  This caused me to break out a spade. And what a stupid, terrible, ungainly thing this is. You plunge it into the ooze, and everything you pick up simply falls back into the water again. Pretty soon I was sweating like an Egyptian boilerman and my back muscles felt like they might actually be on fire. And still the water kept on coming.

  However, all the while, I’d had my eye on a mini-digger that the pond dredgers had left behind. ‘You can use it, if you want,’ one of them had said as he left for the weekend. And I’d nodded and said, ‘Sure,’ not being prepared to admit to another man, especially not a son of the soil, that I had absolutely no idea how it worked.

  Men are supposed to understand diggers like we understand testicles. But I don’t. The last time I’d used one, I accidentally pulled a seal’s head off, and damn nearly killed my son. And that was a tiny little thing. The one sitting by my pond, winking at me, was much larger and had many more levers, all of which were incomprehensible. But I decided to give it a try anyway.

  It took a while to realize that the big scoopy thing on the front wouldn’t move unless both the big red levers were pushed forwards, and that if I wanted the digger itself to move forwards, I had to pull the levers in front of me backwards. But pretty soon I had it by the water’s edge, scooping up silt like my actual name was Seamus O’Gallagher. And ten minutes after that, the dam was built. I was very proud.

  I was so brimming with confidence that after I’d celebrated with a crusty sandwich, some pickle and a cold beer, I started up the dredger man’s dumper truck and spent a little while using it to knock down various dead trees. Then I cleared a spring that was jammed with flotsam from the woods. Then I made a waterfall. I was in heaven. A man and his machines at one with nature. I was an artist and internal combustion was my brush. Later today I’m going to buy a chainsaw.

  It really is hard to think of any machine that provides more enjoyment than the tools of landscape architecture. Diggers. Bulldozers. Dumper trucks. My beloved Supacat. There’s an effortlessness to the hydraulics, which means that at tickover there’s enough power to shift in a moment what took God himself 450 million years to create. When you are in a JCB, you really are a master of the universe.

  You have much the same feeling in the new Mercedes SLS roadster, which comes with a bonnet that seems to cover a slightly larger area than Wyoming. That’s one of the many, many things I love about this car. Because you sit right at the back, in the boot almost, you have a sense that you could have a huge accident and simply not know about it for a week or two. Imperious: that�
�s how you feel.

  As I have said on many occasions, the coupé version of this car is one of my all-time favourites. But it does have a drawback: its gull-wing doors. Yes, they look very interesting at a motor show, and yes, they hark back to the original Mercedes 300, but when you are in Wolverhampton, and people are looking, you feel like a complete knob every time you get into and out of your car. The only reason doors like this are fitted is for showing off. And in this country, show-offs are held in dim regard.

  There’s another problem, too. If you roll an SLS and end up on the roof, with petrol sloshing about, life is very tricky because, of course, you can’t open the doors to get out. To get round this issue, the hinges are fitted with explosive bolts that fire when the car is upside down. That means a) you are driving around with a bomb right next to your head and b) the car is heavier than necessary.

  Happily, the roadster – for obvious reasons – has conventional doors. This means no embarrassment on the high street, no bombs and no excess weight. Yes, the car is heavier than the coupé, thanks to specially strengthened sills. But because the doors are lighter, the overall increase is negligible. Which means the performance is not affected in any way you’d notice.

  It’d be a good test of Wayne Rooney’s new barnet, the roadster, because my God it’s fast. And with the roof down it feels almost ridiculous. You put your foot down, the double-clutch gearbox responds in an instant and you are catapulted towards the horizon in what feels like a category 70 hurricane.

  Then there’s the AMG soundtrack. This is a car that assaults all of your senses. It batters you. Think of it this way. The coupé is a Gulfstream biz jet. Sleek. Fast. Comfortable (ish). The roadster is a Gulfstream biz jet, too. Only with no roof. Imagine that and you have an idea of what it’s like to drive this car down the A361.

  But it’s not all about straight-line speed. By mounting the gearbox at the back, and using a carbon-fibre prop shaft that weighs about the same as a mouse, the engineers have made sure the weight is distributed perfectly. You feel that when you hustle it and it surprises you: because you can’t really understand how something with a bonnet that vast can feel so small and agile. And you especially can’t understand when your ears are bleeding and your hair is in the slipstream three counties back.

  It’s not a Ferrari. It won’t grip like that. It isn’t supposed to. It doesn’t grip at all, if I’m honest. Turn the traction control off and it will spend most of its time sideways. But it all feels easy. It’s not a sports car, and it’s not a GT car. The ride’s too hard for that. It’s a muscle car, really.

  Bad things? Well, there is a hint of scuttle shake – you can feel it through the wheel – the lumbar support controls look as if they were bought from a motorist discount store in the 1970s and while the gearbox may work well at speed, it’s dim-witted and a bit jerky around town. Minor things, really.

  Good things? Everything else. The roof is fast, you get all the usual Mercedes trimmings and the price is about £30,000 less than I was expecting.

  I would quite understand why you’d buy a Ferrari 458 instead. It’s a better driver’s car. And I’d be stumped if someone asked why the SLS costs twice as much as the ostensibly similar Jaguar XKR. Really, it’s a question of each to his own. Some people like to play golf. Some like to build dams. Some prefer the delicacy of an Italian supercar. Some, the charm of a Jag. But if you ‘get’ the SLS, nothing else will do.

  25 September 2011

  The topless tease luring men to ridicule

  VW Golf Cabriolet GT

  You may dream of driving a convertible car through the mountains of southern France on a beautiful summer’s day. But, having done this sort of thing on many occasions, I’m able to tell you that you will arrive at your destination with a comically red nose and a shirt that appears to have spent the past few months at the bottom of a stagnant pond.

  As a general rule, you should not drive a convertible with the roof down when it is more than 70 degrees. But here’s the problem. If you try to drive a convertible when it’s less than 70 degrees, pretty soon you will notice that your fingers have frostnip, that your nose has fallen off and that you are in the advanced stages of acute hypothermia.

  It’s not just the temperature that causes problems, either. It’s also the wind. Wind is the most debilitating of all climatic phenomena. I have experienced extreme cold at the North Pole, and, while it’s extremely unpleasant, the human frame can cope. It’s the same story with extreme heat. I once interviewed a man, in December, in the Australian outback, and at no point did I feel I was suffering from the onset of madness. I’ve also been drenched without problem. But wind is different. In one hour at our holiday cottage on a peninsula on the Isle of Man in March, I became a drooling vegetable, incapable of rational thought.

  Wind is like a barking dog, or an early-morning Italian strimmer. It’s inconsistent. There’s no regularity or predictability. The noise goes away but never for very long, and you never know when it will be back. I don’t know why the CIA uses waterboarding to extract information from suspects; just put them on a boat in the Irish Sea for ten minutes and they’ll tell you anything you want to know.

  Wind also messes up a girl’s hair. This is a fact. Every girl I know loves the idea of driving with the roof down, but after just a few moments every single one wants to put it up again.

  Even if you are impervious to heat, cold and the constant pounding from Uncle Hurricane, you still have the problem of embarrassment. This is very real. You may think, as you cruise about in your convertible, that you look good. But unless you are Angelina Jolie or Pierce Brosnan, which you are not, I can assure you that actually you look a tool.

  What message are you giving out? That you are carefree? That you are young at heart? That you are available? But you aren’t. You’re middle aged and a bit pathetic. Driving with the roof down when you are paunchy and balding is like having a sign on your desk that says, ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here …’ There is a rule we devised on Top Gear. Once you are past the age of twenty-seven, you can drive alfresco only when it is safe to drive naked. In other words, when no one is looking. Because if people are looking, they will laugh at you.

  To sum up, then, driving a convertible is uncomfortable and will cause other road users to think that you are a prat with manhood issues. And yet, despite this, we buy more convertibles in Britain than any other country in Europe. And we are certainly the only country where you will find people going to work dressed as Scott of the Antarctic simply so they can get the roof down. We are all mad.

  Perhaps this is why Volkswagen is now offering two versions of the Golf convertible. There’s the Eos, which is a Golf with a folding metal roof, and the Golf, which is a Golf with a folding canvas roof. I’ve always rather liked the Eos, but I will concede that it is quite expensive. The new Golf is not: £25,000 for the GT version I drove is really not bad at all. And the diesels cost considerably less.

  The roof on the new car is a triumph. Even though it’s the size of a family tent from Millets, it can be raised or lowered in less than ten seconds. And, what’s more, even if the lights turn green before the manoeuvre is completed, you needn’t worry. Because it all still works provided you keep your speed below a precise and Germanic 18 mph.

  When it’s up, the refinement is genuinely astonishing.

  You can drive at motorway speeds and there is absolutely no sense at all that you’re separated from the slipstream by only a pac-a-mac. And things are similarly amazing when you fold it away. Gone is the hysterical, hair-whipping madness you endured in the original Golf cabrio. Provided you use a sturdy hairspray, you have no worries at all.

  Another thing that’s gone from the original is the rather awkward-looking roll-over hoop. That car was built by Karmann, but you would have been forgiven for thinking that actually it had been constructed by Silver Cross. The new car, built by VW itself, also has a roll-over hoop, but it’s hidden away and will burst forth only if it thin
ks you’re about to turn the car over.

  Sadly, however, there’s something else that has gone missing: any sense of joie de vivre. Those early Golf drop-tops were joyously raucous and wonderful, with their peppy 1588 cc injected engines. The car I drove may have been badged as a GT and it may have developed 158 horsepower – nearly 50 more than the original – but it’s not what you’d call peppy.

  It’s an interesting engine. Although it’s small – just 1.4 litres – it is fitted with a supercharger, which you don’t notice, and a turbocharger, which you do. On a motorway, if you caress the throttle pedal, you feel it working, girding its loins, preparing extra boost for when you stop the foreplay and dive right on in.

  However, when you do dive in, it pulls up its knickers and won’t deliver. I suppose the fact is that the Golf cabrio is a heavy car and a 1.4-litre engine simply can’t deliver enough oomph to make you nod appreciatively.

  That said, it’s refined and economical, and the moderate power sort of suits the comfy ride. This is a car for cruising rather than blasting about.

  The interior? Well, although the boot’s quite small, the car’s fairly spacious. However, like all Golfs, it’s a bit like the inside of Eeyore’s head. Gloomy and dark. You even have to pay £130 extra for what VW calls the ‘luxury pack’. Although, as far as I can see, all this does is give you fancy door mirrors.

  There is one stupid thing. The radio tells you what song you are listening to at any given moment, which is a nice touch, but it relays the message by scrolling huge flashing letters across the screen. It’s as if you’re sitting in Times Square.

  It’s actually quite easy to sum this car up, though. In the olden days the Volkswagen Golf was a fun, lively little thing, and the original cabrio was an extension of that. Today the Golf is a byword for common sense and dour practicality. And the new soft-top is a reflection of that.