It’s not just materialism, either. In Russia people are now free to say absolutely anything that comes into their heads. Talk as Russians do in Britain and you’d be hauled over the coals for racism and branded a bigot. You want to suggest the legal age of consent should be lowered to twelve? Go right ahead. People won’t call you a paedo; they’ll be interested to hear why you think that way. They went seventy years without being able to discuss anything. Now they want to discuss everything.
Of course, you are not able to write too disparagingly about Vladimir Putin, unless you want some radioactivity with your bacon and egg, but you can sure as hell say what you like – to whoever you’re with. I found it fantastically liberating.
There are other things, too. In Britain if Sir Philip Green or Lord Sir Sugar were to spend an evening at the Wolseley restaurant in the middle of London playing tonsil hockey with a phalanx of 6-foot hookers, tongues would wag. In Russia that sort of thing appears to be quite normal.
A friend texted while I was there to say, ‘Be careful. Moscow is bad for your soul.’ He’s wrong. It’s not bad for your soul, but I bet it could be very bad for your marriage, your bank balance and your gentleman’s area.
Moscow buzzes and hums. You should try the bone marrow in Cafe Pushkin and spend a few minutes at the side of the road seeing if you can spot a car that would cost less than £50,000 if you’d bought it in Britain. Then check out the pavements and see if you can find one single girl who’s fat or less than 6 foot tall or not wearing a beautifully cut pair of jeans. I have no idea what Hugh Hefner’s wet dreams are like. But I bet they’d be along these lines.
I went to the Kremlin at one point to discover it’s all been done up and refurbished. Not so it resembles how it might have looked in the past but so that foreign diplomats are blown into the middle of next week by the grandeur. Every room is like being inside the mind of a gold-obsessed four-year-old princess.
And then, just as I’d decided that Russia looked like the love child of Monte Carlo and Kuwait, with a little help from Onyx on Thames, someone leant over and told me the Lada Riva was still in production. And I’m sorry, but that’s like being told that the king of Saudi Arabia does his own washing, with a tub and a mangle.
Why would Lada still be making the Riva? What could anyone I’d seen in my whole visit want with a car as nasty as that? Or has it been improved radically since it was the staple wheeled diet of Mr Arthur Scargill’s disciples? I had to find out. So I did. And it hasn’t. In fact, I think it’s become worse.
The Riva began its life in 1966 in Turin, where it was known as the Fiat 124. Fiat did a deal with the Communists, helping to build a factory in Russia in which the company’s old design would continue to be produced. This became the Lada Riva.
Fans will tell you that much changed over the years, but I can report that actually nothing changed at all. Except that now the Riva is also made in the great car-producing nations of Ukraine and Egypt.
I don’t know where the car I drove was made. Or who made it. But I suspect he was very angry about something because it was horrific. The steering column appeared to have been welded to the dashboard so that it wouldn’t turn. The brakes caused the car to speed up a bit and turn left, violently, at the same time.
The buttons on the dash appeared to have been put in place by Janet Ellis from Blue Peter, and the engine had plainly been lifted from a cement mixer that had spent the past thirty years chewing up rebel soldiers in southern Sudan.
It would get from 0 to 60 mph. But only when it was built by Fiat. Since it became a Lada, it hasn’t really been able to move at all. And, boy, is it badly made.
When I eventually ran it over with a monster truck, it folded in half. And to put that in perspective, let me explain at this point that when the very same monster truck ran over an Indian-made CityRover recently, the car was pretty much OK afterwards.
Why, then, is the Riva still being manufactured? Why are there people in Russia still buying it? Could it be, perhaps, that behind the white-toothed, gold-capped Moscow smile, the rest of the country is – how can I put this – a bit poor?
Maybe, in other words, the chairman of BA knows something I didn’t realize: that those who can afford to fly in Russia have their own planes.
And those who can’t are stuck out in the middle of nowhere boiling swede in the hope that one day they’ll be able to afford a car that’s forty-five years old before it’s left the bloody showroom.
11 March 2012
The yummiest of ingredients but the soufflé’s gone flat
Porsche 911 Carrera
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, labour- and time-saving devices were all the rage. The Ronco Buttoneer, for instance, made putting on a button a quick and easy job. Which was just as well because the button you’d just attached often came adrift again in a matter of moments.
The top-loading washing machine had replaced the front step, and then came the remote-control box for the television, which meant we no longer had to sit through Nationwide because we couldn’t be bothered to get off our backsides. We also waved goodbye to the punka wallah with the invention of the Pifco fan. Life was very good.
But at some point in recent years someone decided to put the complication back. So now, instead of adding boiling water to a spoonful of instant coffee, we have machines that require constant attention. Every single morning mine wants more water, or more beans. Then it wants me to empty its trays and clean its pipes and decalcify its innards. Making a simple cup of coffee has become a thirty-minute palaver.
It’s much the same story with my mobile phone. Because it turns out that even when you are not using an application, it’s still open, in the background, chewing the battery. And shutting it down is a complex procedure that usually ends up with you taking a photograph of your own nose.
Televisions are massively complicated now. And gone are the days when you simply loaded a VHS tape and watched a movie. Now, with Blu-ray, the machinery takes ten minutes to warm up and you have to sit through hours and hours of waivers, copyright threats and trailers.
My dishwasher is more complex than Apollo 11, my juicer has a 200-page instruction book and have you tried to use a pay-by-phone parking meter? Of course not, or you’d still be out there, in the street, asking yourself what on earth was wrong with putting a pound coin in a little slot.
Naturally, cars are now very complicated as well. It’s almost certainly true to say that the ignition key for your modern car is more complex than the whole of an Austin A35. Which means, of course, it rarely works. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a car that keeps flashing up a message saying, ‘No key detected,’ when I’m sitting there waving the damn thing in front of its dash, whimpering slightly and wondering out loud what was wrong with the old system.
Then there’s the BMW M5, which can get from 0 to 62 mph in about thirteen minutes. You spend twelve minutes and 55.7 seconds telling the on-board computer what sort of setting you’d like from the gearbox, the chassis and the engine, and then 4.3 seconds going from 0 to 62.
You might imagine that the new Porsche 911 had been spared all this nonsense – 911s, after all, are meant to be pure, clean, unfettered sports cars. And there is no place for complexity in such things.
Well, dream on, because the new 911 is a geek’s fantasy. Every component can be tuned while you’re on the move to deliver something different, and there are now two read-outs on the dash telling you what gear you’re in. Which seems a bit odd in a manual. I know I’m in third. I just moved the lever.
The thing is, though, this being a Porsche, it’s all very instinctive and commonsensical. Amazingly, since there are no buttons on the steering wheel itself, you don’t have to go into submenus or hold knobs down for two seconds to make stuff happen. I hate to admit it, but I thought it was brilliant. But that’s probably because I never bought the whole 911 sports-car thing in the first place.
There was a lot more I liked as
well. The styling may be ludicrously similar to that of the previous model. And the one before that. And the one before that as well. But the little things that have changed have given the new model some nice new curves. You could even call it good-looking.
The big debate about this car is its electric steering. Because of European Union rules on emissions, manufacturers are under pressure to introduce systems that use less energy, whether or not they are better at the job. So the conventional hydraulic power-steering setup has been ditched in favour of one that works off the battery.
In the same way as Neil Young keeps banging on about the awfulness of digital sound compared with vinyl, various 911 purists say that the classic ‘feel’ of a 911 is now gone. And I’d agree with that. But since I’m not a 911 purist, I must say I think the new system is better. For sure, you are getting an artificial sense of how the tyres are interacting with the road and, yes, on a track you can spot this. But for everyday driving, the electric system is meaty and tremendous.
Emissions regulations have had other effects as well. The engine now shuts down at the lights and Porsche has had to fit a seven-speed gearbox. In theory this is fine. You lope up the motorway at tickover, sipping fuel like a vicar sips sherry. But when you’re in seventh, doing 60 mph, you don’t get the twitching and fizzing you expect from a car of this type. It feels a bit puddingy.
Of course, when you get off the motorway and realize you’re running late and you need to make up some time, it’s not puddingy at all. It’s just delightful. That said, I would opt for the bigger-engined S model. The standard car I drove, while lovely, sometimes didn’t feel as fast as I’d been expecting.
Now normally when I’ve reviewed 911s in the past, I’d get to this point and say that while the car is jolly clever, it’s not for me. The rear-engined Porsche is like Greece and marzipan and Piers Morgan. Simply not my cup of tea.
But this one is different. Over the years, the engine has crept forward in the chassis so that it’s no longer slung behind the rear axle waiting to become a giant pendulum. It’s water-cooled, too, these days, which means the Volkswagen air-cooled clatter is gone.
Inside, the silly buttons that looked like half-sucked boiled sweets and felt about as cheap as an Albanian’s suit have been replaced with good, high-quality items. The driving position is better, the seats are wonderful and though the car is now bigger than ever, it’s still small compared with all its rivals. That’s a good thing.
Drawbacks? Two, as I see it. The boot’s at the front, which means you get dirty fingers every time you open it; and Porsche has never shaken off the City boy braces-and-Bollinger image it earned in the Eighties. Which means you are never, ever, let out of side turnings.
OK. Two and a half. The engine isn’t quite gutsy enough. But go for the S and that’s resolved. In spades. Just avoid the convertibles. Unless you enjoy looking a plonker.
I’m sure there is much that will disappoint the diehard 911 fan in the new effort. But there is so much to delight those of us who have never liked 911s. I could even see myself buying one. It’s a fab car. Really, really fab. And, all things considered, good value as well.
PS: Since finishing this piece, I’ve realized the Porsche actually gets no stars at all because it’s useless. Last Sunday the tyre went flat. There is no spare. And no depot carried anything that would fit.
Recently a friend of mind had a flat tyre in his 911 and it took Porsche two weeks to find a replacement. Unless the manufacturer can address this, there is simply no point buying its cars. Because one day you will need, say, to take your mum to hospital and you will have to phone and cancel.
18 March 2012
I ran into an EU busybody and didn’t feel a thing
BMW 640d (with M Sport package)
After the recent and very sad deaths of six British soldiers in Afghanistan, questions were immediately asked about the worthiness of the Warrior armoured vehicle in which they were travelling when the bomb went off.
And equally immediately they were answered. The Warrior fleet in Afghanistan was upgraded last June at a cost of more than half a million quid a pop, with armour better able to deal with an explosion and improved seating to protect those inside from the shockwave.
The trouble is, of course, that the men who go to war in beach footwear and skirts know full well that this has happened and are now using bigger bombs. This means the Warriors will have to be upgraded again, which will mean more explosives are needed to blow them up. It’s a problem that’s faced military commanders since the dawn of time. And it’s a problem that will never end.
Each time there’s a tragedy, coroners can point the finger of blame. They can accuse defence chiefs of penny-pinching and the engineers who design these vehicles of incompetence. But the reality is very simple. If a bomb is big enough, it will tear through anything. And there’s nothing that can be done to change that.
Or is there? Because the truth is that man is constantly faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, and we have a habit of working out a solution. We devised ways of getting iron to float and to fly. We developed antibiotics to combat disease. We are clever. And nowhere is this truism more evident than in the car industry.
Every year, the European Union erects a set of ecological fuel-saving goalposts through which it demands car makers must pass if they want to continue doing business. And every year the motor manufacturers squeal and whimper and claim it can’t be done. Then they do it. And then the EU responds by moving the goalposts further away.
The most recent move was a big one, and it’s having a profound effect on how cars feel. You may wonder, for instance, why the easy-to-use automatic gearbox is now being ditched so eagerly in favour of a robotized manual system. These gearboxes invariably make town driving jerkier and I hate them with a passion. But an engine sending its power to the wheels through this system uses less fuel than an engine sending its power to the wheels through a torque converter.
And the car makers that are sticking with the traditional auto are now offering a setup with eight speeds. This means the car is constantly changing up or down. It’s very annoying. But with more cogs, the engine has to work less hard. And that means more mpg, which means the oil supplies will last a little longer.
It gets worse. Even Porsche has now started to use electric power steering, which means you only get a digital interpretation of what’s happening up front rather than the real deal.
And then we get to the starter motor. That now has to be the strongest component in many cars because their engines shut down when you stop at a set of lights. Then start again when you want to set off. I don’t know why this irritates me so much, especially as usually you can turn the system off, but it does.
Not half as much, though, as the trend towards dashboard read-outs telling me what gear I should be in. You’re behind a Peugeot on an A-road and are waiting for an opportunity to overtake. This means you are in third. ‘You should be in fifth,’ it says. It’s wrong. It doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. It doesn’t know I’m being delayed by an old man. It even has an opinion on changing down for a corner. ‘Nope,’ it says as you slide it into fourth for a long left. And this is a system you can’t turn off. Unless you have a hammer to hand.
Another effect of the legislation is the trend for engine designers to replace cubic capacity with turbocharging. A turbo engine uses waste exhaust gases to spin a fan, which is then used to force air and fuel into the engine under pressure. Sounds great. But a turbo engine cannot have the immediacy of a free-breather. There has to be a delay between putting your foot down and actually going, as you wait for the exhaust gases to gather enough force to spin that fan.
These, then, are just some of the tricks being used by car makers to shoot their cars through the EU’s goalposts. And every single one of them makes a car a little bit worse.
Which means it’s now the job of car makers to mask the problems with the Elastoplast of ingenuity. And that brings me on to the
diesel engine under the bonnet of the BMW 640d.
Yup. It’s a diesel in a BMW sports coupé, and if that isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is. But it’s a BMW diesel, which means it hums rather than clatters. And it’s fitted with two turbochargers. A small one that gets going almost immediately, and then a bigger one to give you some oomph on the open road. Clever, eh?
Less clever is the name. Why is this called the 640d when the 535d has exactly the same engine? Not very logical for a company famed for its obsessive-compulsive nomenclature.
Naturally the engine is mated to an eight-speed box but to make sure you don’t notice the constant cog-swapping, the changes are so smooth, you don’t feel anything at all. It’s like being on a never-ending helter-skelter of torque.
This car is like an old house. It’s riddled with cracks but because of some extremely skilful plasterwork, you can’t spot them. BMW has addressed the problems presented by the EU and, in less than a year, has masked the efforts it made to overcome them with the silky smile of German efficiency.
But what of the car itself? Well, there are plenty of other coupés on the market, but none has so much space in the back and none is anything like as squidgy Slumberdown-soft.
There’s a misplaced line of thinking in the car industry that anyone who buys a good-looking two-door coupé must therefore want a bone-shaking sporty ride. Some do, for sure, but plenty don’t. And that’s where the 6-series is brilliant. It is good-looking. It is a two-door coupé. It is stylish. And yet it rides like a hovercraft. Fit the optional £1,485 Comfort seats and it’s like driving around in a cloud.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . Page 19
