What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  It’s a shame, because the immediacy of the thrust is intoxicating. The acceleration is as vivid as Miami’s sea front, and the top speed is about 212 mph greater than it would ever go there.

  But what about here? In the civilized world of old money and taste?

  Lamborghini is keen to stress that the engine is its first all-new V12 since that of the Miura, that the four-wheel-drive system is as advanced as technology allows, that it has carbon ceramic brakes and that Formula One-style pushrod suspension is also part of the recipe. Now the only reason you would fit this is to reduce unsprung weight. But I can’t see how that matters in a car that weighs about the same as the Empire State Building.

  I suspect the real reason it’s fitted is so that owners can feel that behind the vastness and underneath the flamboyant, mad, brilliant show-off styling, there’s some Ferrari-style cred.

  Honestly? There isn’t. This is a brute of a car. You don’t drive it. You wrestle with it. It’s more refined than Lambos of old and less inclined to want to kill you. But when you open the taps, you are no longer driving. You are hanging on.

  I drove it very extensively across Italy, and although it’s quiet and surprisingly comfortable, and although it has an Audi sat nav and Audi controls, you are never allowed to forget that it’s a raging monster. And for that I absolutely loved it.

  I loved the speed. I loved the styling – it’s probably the best-looking car ever made – and I loved the sheer stupidity and silliness of its dash and its face and its insane rear end.

  I don’t want one. I’d rather have herpes. That said, I do want to live in a world where I can sit outside a restaurant in Miami and watch some poor girl trying to get out of the passenger seat without flashing her knickers.

  20 November 2011

  Hop in, Charles, it’s a Luddite’s dream

  Mercedes C 63 AMG coupé Black Series

  It seems that a few years ago Prince Charles asked scientists to research the concept of alternative medicine to discover why acupuncture, holistic healing, leaves and sitting cross-legged on the floor can be used to cure hay fever, eczema and bowel disorders.

  Well, a British science writer did just that and, after exhaustive research, he has published a book saying that alternative medicine mostly doesn’t work and that when it does, the results are ‘dismal’.

  Naturally, you would assume that Prince Charles would read the carefully researched points and, with upturned palms, explain that, contrary to what he’s been saying for many years, the best cure for a headache is a couple of Nurofen, rather than a balm made from soil and bits of armpit hair.

  However, he appears not to have done this. Despite all the scientific evidence, it seems he continues to believe in the power of humming and peace oils. We see this a lot. People use science when it agrees with their opinion but dismiss it as nonsense when it does not.

  This is hardly surprising really since what we know as science fact today is almost always science fiction tomorrow. The earth was flat. And then it wasn’t. Matter cannot travel faster than light. And then it can. Well, maybe. Man is causing global warming … Watch this space.

  I’m glad that there are scientists. I’m glad they go to work in their laboratories with their Bunsen burners and their tweezers. It’s important that mankind strives to understand where he came from and where he’s going. But scientists should not try to explain their findings to Prince Charles. Or me. Or you. Because we’re thick and we won’t understand what they are on about.

  However, because we don’t know we are thick, we will listen to a bit of what they have to say, take away a nugget and, if we are a politician, or a prince, try to do something about it.

  Not that long ago everyone was worried that particles and gases coming out of exhaust pipes were making people who lived near motorways very stupid. This was a big concern for the residents of Gravelly Hill, north of Birmingham. Ford’s scientists decided the answer was lean burn technology, engines that ran mostly on air, and their view was shared by Mrs Thatcher, then prime minister, who had a chemistry degree.

  However, lean burn was a few years away from reality, and people who were thick demanded results immediately. So all car makers had to fit off-the-shelf catalytic converters instead.

  Sadly, what catalytic converters do is turn all the gunk that was making people in Birmingham stupid into carbon dioxide, which science now says is turning polar bears into man-eating werewolves. So, to get round that, cars are now being fitted with electric power steering and flappy-paddle gearboxes – anything that cuts the amount of fuel used and therefore the amount of CO2 coming out of the tailpipe.

  But it’s all hopeless because catalytic converters are made from platinum, which is fast running out. So then we will be back in 1985, in jerky cars with crappy steering, with people in Birmingham looking like jacket potatoes and Ford saying, ‘I told you so.’

  There’s a lot of science in the new BMW M5. Before setting off, you can tweak the engine, the gearbox, the suspension and the seats. And it’s all very impressive. But I much prefer the approach taken by the skunkworks deep inside Merc’s special forces division, AMG. Which is: no science at all.

  Recently AMG’s cars have started to become a bit soft. The raw, visceral engines have been muted with turbochargers to keep the emissions down, and the standard automatic gearboxes have been replaced with flappy-paddle-operated manuals that work just fine on the open road but with an epileptic jerkiness in town.

  AMG says that the new C 63 Black Series is softer, too. It says it’s listened to criticism – from me mostly – that the old CLK Black was too hard for the real world and that the new model is kinder to your spine.

  Well, you could have fooled me. It’s like being inside a fridge-freezer that’s tumbling end over end down the side of a rocky escarpment. Is it softer than the old car? Perhaps, but not in a way that the human bottom could ever detect.

  It even looks more racy. Like the old car it has flared wheelarches to accommodate the wide track, but in addition there are now nostrils in the bonnet and, if you tick the right option boxes, all sorts of carbon-fibre winglets designed to show other traffic that you are in agony.

  Of course, you may think that all of this is necessary and important at the track. You can even specify the new car with timers that measure your performance not only against previous laps, but also against professional racers. However, it’s all a complete waste of time because on a track this car is not an M5. It is not designed to post the best possible lap time. It is designed purely and simply to eat its own tyres. I got through one set in just fifteen minutes.

  This hunger for rubber is caused by the engine. It hasn’t been softened, which means you get 6.2 litres of basic, unturbocharged power and torque. The diff may come from the sort of engineering that’s used to open lock gates and the chassis from a book called How Victorians Did Things, but none of it can cope with that V8 firepower.

  Drive with the traction control on and you won’t go anywhere at all. Drive with it off and you will go everywhere sideways. This, then, is my sort of car. It’s almost childlike in its honesty.

  And here’s the best bit. Despite the madness, it is not a stripped-out racing car. Unlike Porsche, which removes even the satnav and the radio from its track cars and replaces the back seats with scaffolding, Mercedes has left pretty much everything you could reasonably expect in place. It will even, if you ask nicely and cross its palms with silver, put the rear seats back.

  If you learn, as I have with my Black, to steer round manhole covers and potholes, you can use the car on a day-to-day basis. It has iPod connectivity. It has air-conditioning. It has a boot. You just have to remember that at no point, on the road, can you ever use full throttle. Unless you’ve just found your wife in bed with your mother, you’ve lost your job and your kids have been arrested.

  This car is unique. It’s something that’s not made any more and will probably – because of the world’s poor grasp of science – never
be made again. On the face of it, it’s a German DTM racer, a road rocket from the country that invented such things. But, deep down, it’s on Telegraph Road, eight miles north of Detroit, on a Saturday night, with its cap on back to front and a bottle of Coors in its big, working-class paw. Deep down, it’s a muscle car.

  And Prince Charles will like this. Sometimes it can also be a muscle relaxant.

  27 November 2011

  It’s no cruiser but it can doggy-paddle

  Jeep Grand Cherokee 3.0 CRD V6 Overland

  Last weekend AA Gill wrote about New York in such glowing terms that I wanted to drop what I was doing and go there immediately. He admitted, of course, that in summer the humidity makes the sky feel as thick as wallpaper paste and in winter it turns slate grey and comes right down to the ground, blotting out the city’s raison d’être. But he talked of an autumn day when there’s a crimson tide in Central Park and the sky appears to have been bleached, perhaps sucked of its richness by the vibrancy of the people below.

  I would agree with Adrian that New York is one of the world’s greatest cities. Along with, in no particular order, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo and Cape Town. But last weekend, after much quiet contemplation, I decided that none of them can hold a candle to what is unquestionably the best of them all: London.

  I came to this conclusion because I was working at the ExCeL exhibition centre, which is located about 6,000 miles to the east of the City, near where they are holding the running and jumping competitions next year.

  Boris Johnson will tell you that the best way of getting there is by the Sustainable Light Railway. But he’s wrong. The best way of getting there is via the Thames, on a Fairline Targa 47 luxury yacht.

  I should make it plain from the outset that it is extremely difficult to drive a boat through the middle of London. The civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette made sure of that, separating what at the time was an open sewer from the City with the Thames Embankment. And today the authorities keep his spirit alive with an astonishingly well thought-out plan to make absolutely certain that no private individual can park their boat even for a moment, at any point, anywhere at all. You can come, but you must go away again straight away.

  Two years ago the Port of London Authority introduced a 12-knot speed limit on parts of the river and I’m not surprised, really, because out there in the chop, among the pleasure boats and the barges, which are operated by men who live by rules laid down in the 19th century, you feel completely at sea. Taking a pleasure boat into this alien world full of people who make a living there is like riding a tricycle along the Central Line. It’s going to end up with a crash. Despite all this, you must try it. It is No 1 in the things you have to do before you die. Wait for a crisp autumn day when there isn’t a cloud in the sky and go through the middle of London on a boat. And then you will realize why nowhere else gets close.

  It’s the variety, really. New York is a monoculture. It does one thing. So is San Francisco. And so is Rome. London, though, is different. You have the Tower, which is almost a thousand years old, right next to the brand new glass-and-steel cathedrals to capitalism. You peep past converted 19th-century warehouses to catch a glimpse of a 17th-century cathedral. And then it’s eyes left for the Palace of Westminster and eyes right for the London Eye. Pretty soon your head is rotating like that little girl’s in The Exorcist and you’re wishing you had compound vision like a fly.

  One minute you are gliding past HMS Belfast, a second world war battle cruiser, and no sooner have you taken stock of its rear end than it’s time to swivel round and gawp at London’s signature dish – Tower Bridge. It’s not a river cruise, really; it’s time travel.

  And I’m willing to bet that there’s no other city in the world where anyone would point excitedly at a power station. But that’s what you do in Battersea.

  However, it’s the return journey, at night, that leaves you breathless. Many cities tart themselves up for one-off events. London looks like it’s New Year’s Eve all the time. It is lit absolutely beautifully. From the laser marking the meridian at Greenwich, up past Canary Wharf and under the blue-white lighting at Tower Bridge, you arrive once more at Westminster, where the clock tower is a warm blend of vivid green and sodium orange, and, opposite, the London Eye appears to be a portal into space. There was even a gorgeous new moon to top the scene off.

  Then there’s Albert Bridge. It’s lit so vividly, and the reflection is so strong, you feel as if you’re steaming along in a vast river of custard. And to the left and right are the new blocks of executive flats, each with its floor-to-ceiling windows. No point closing the curtains. Who’s looking? We were. And that was great, too.

  There is no one-hour trip in the world in which you see so much, and so much of what you see is so wildly different. Every day I’d spot something else. Another frilly Victorian detail. Another elegant way of converting the warehouses that served the industry that built them into flats for the industry that fuels Britain today. A hundred years ago they were full of cotton and tobacco. Today they house bankers who’ve come over from New York for six months and can be seen on their balconies, gawping and not quite believing their eyes. Fifth Avenue is a modern-day wonder. But the canyon carved by Old Father Thames – that’s on a different plane altogether.

  Sadly, because the boat was so sublime and the view so moving, I used it every day to commute to the ExCeL. Which meant the new version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee I am supposed to be writing about this morning spent most of its time sitting in a lock-up garage.

  It had a difficult birth, this car. Conceived when its parent firm Chrysler was married to Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, it shares many of its underpinnings with the Mercedes ML. But before it was born, its parents divorced and its mum ran off with a man from Fiat. As a result of her new liaison it has a 3-litre Italian diesel engine. No other option is available.

  The figures look quite good, and off road there is enough engineering – both electrical and mechanical – to ensure progress will be maintained long after most of today’s high-riding urban-crossover sports-utility offerings have sunk without trace into the mud. But one brief drive was enough to confirm that while the Jeep may be fine in the big outdoors, it’s a very old-fashioned Hector everywhere else. The automatic gearbox operates on geological time and the engine is about as refined as a scaffolding company’s tearoom.

  And while the interior is festooned with all manner of luxury items and electrically operated toys, there is a very real sense – as is the way with all American cars – that a million pounds has been spent at Woolworths.

  The exterior is different. It looks quite good, and, unlike Land Rover, Jeep offers a tasteful range of colours. Mostly, though, this car is big and it’s cheap and it’s simple. Which, of course, makes it absolutely ideal for someone who for some reason doesn’t want a Toyota Land Cruiser.

  4 December 2011

  Uh-oh, some fool’s hit the panic button

  Chevrolet Orlando 1.8 LTZ

  We’re told that between Christmas and the new year, 8 billion British people have defied the troublesome economy and, between them, spent £70 trillion on mildly discounted products in the sales. This sounds like good news. But if you examine the pictures of those rampaging around Oxford Street you will notice quite quickly that every single one of them was Chinese.

  The Chinese love a bargain. But what they love even more than that is a brand name. I was in Beijing last month and was told, time and time again, that local produce had no appeal at all to the country’s new rich. They want Tommy Hilfiger and Prada and Ray-Ban. And if they can get these badges at the lowest possible prices – well, that’s got to be worth the cost of a return ticket to Heathrow.

  That’s what you need these days to survive out there on the high street: a name that’s known. Because a name that’s known is a name that can be trusted. Fairy Journeyman HoneyWasp perfume may be excellent and good value but it cuts no ice with a bottle bearing the Chanel legend.

 
It’s not just the Chinese, either. I have a friend who dresses in quite the most hideous clothes you have ever seen. They look like they have been made either as a joke or by someone who was being deliberately stupid. But when I explain this to him, he always points to the label and says, with a hurt tremor in his voice, ‘But it’s Dolce & Gabbana.’

  I guess I’m just as bad really. I only buy Ray-Ban sunglasses and Sony televisions. Not because I know they’re the best but because the names have a Ready Brek aura of comfort-blanket warmth about them. And don’t claim you’re immune. Because I bet you’d rather do business with a man called Victor than a man called Vince.

  In the world of cars, a brand name is everything. While in China I drove a car called the Trumpchi. Want one? Of course you don’t, because who’s behind it? What’s it made from? And where? I could tell you that it’s hewn from a gold bar, costs six pence and runs on water and you’d say, ‘How intriguing,’ as you wrote out a cheque for a Volkswagen.

  You know where you are with a Volkswagen and you’re right. Every day, thousands of engineers work to the best of their abilities to make sure that every single car they make upholds the company’s reputation for durability and safety. Protecting the brand name: it’s everything.

  Unless you are running General Motors. Protecting all the brands it controls is nowhere near as important as making any damn thing to keep the bankruptcy wolf from eating the company’s front door. Which explains the Chevrolet Orlando LTZ in which I endured a mercifully brief drive recently.

  Louis Chevrolet was born in Switzerland and after a brief spell in Canada arrived in America where he drove racing cars for Fiat and made road cars for himself. Fairly soon, though, he sold his car company to GM and went off to have fun. In 1929 he lost every cent he had made in the stock market crash and ended up in Detroit working on the Chevrolet production line. That was sad, but worse was to come …