What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Undaunted, Mercedes called the new car the SLK 55 AMG and sent it out into the world with a simple message. ‘Now look. We’ve given you an enormous penis. Go and use it.’

  It certainly wooed me, because I bought one. Of course, my colleagues thought I’d taken leave of my senses and laughed openly in my face. So did all the nation’s van drivers, and in every petrol station people would point and suggest loudly that my salon must be doing well. The codpiece front and the baritone rear fooled nobody.

  But I didn’t care because I like small cars. I like convertibles. And I like big engines. And the SLK was the only car on the market that met all three of those requirements – and a few more besides. It had an automatic gearbox and, though it was fast and hard and brutal, it came with all the usual Mercedes refinements including a DVD player, a TV, electric seats, cruise control and so on. It was a doddle in town, brilliant on a sunny day, easy to park, as fast as a comet, good-looking, exciting, noisy and enormous fun. Who cared that it enjoyed musicals and went to bed at night in its sister’s knickers? I even ordered mine in black.

  Mercedes, though, was still not satisfied. It knew that when it wasn’t looking, its scaffolder was endlessly watching the shower scene from Top Gun, so with its replacement the company has gone mental. The car has the haunches of a hyena, the snout of a racer, flaps, ducts and claws. It’s a low-profile, full-fat, high-octane he-man. I’m surprised the advertising slogan isn’t ‘Are you a woman? Well, you can eff off.’

  Let’s start with the engine. In essence, it’s the same 5.5-litre unit that you get in other, bigger AMG cars, only without the turbocharging. Do not think, however, that the lack of forced induction means you will be bouncing up and down in your seat when leaving the lights to try to conjure up some extra wallop.

  Because of new air-intake ducting, new cylinder heads and a modified valve drive, you are presented with 416 brake horsepower. That is about 60 more than you were given in the old SLK 55, and in a car this size it means the performance is very nearly insane.

  However, because the new engine is fitted with a feature that shuts down either two or four of the cylinders when they’re not needed, it produces only 195 carbon dioxides and should be good for more than 33 mpg. The Lord giveth and then the Lord giveth even more.

  Handling? Well, now, let’s be clear on this: if you want finesse and delicacy, buy a BMW. In a straight line, an AMG car is an easy match for anything made by BMW’s M – or motor sport – division. But through the corners the Mercedes will be left far behind. This is not a criticism. Because although the Merc may not be able to tame the laws of physics quite as well as an M car, it will put a much bigger smile on your face. BMWs reward your skill. Fast Mercs make you laugh.

  And so it goes with the SLK. Mercedes may have fiddled with the camber and perforated the brake discs. The little convertible may have all the racing paraphernalia, but it’s still a car you have to wrestle if you want to get the most from it. It’s a car that’s happiest when it’s a little bit sideways.

  Inside, however, there’s no evidence of this at all. The gearbox is a proper auto. The radio is digital. The headrests are fitted with ducts that feed warm air to your neck. The car I drove was even equipped with a device that suggested when I might like a cup of coffee.

  However, while there’s one improvement over the old model – the can-of-pop-holders are no longer located in front of the heater vents – there is one step backwards. If you push the seat all the way back, the leather rubs against the rear bulkhead and squeaks every time you go over a bump. It’s very annoying.

  It sounds, then, as if this new car is much the same as the old one, albeit a bit faster and quite a lot more economical. But I’m afraid that’s not strictly accurate. Because where’s the noise? The old car crackled when you started it, roared when it was moving and ticked when it wasn’t. And without this soundtrack the excitement has gone. It means you never feel inclined to put your foot down. I spent my week just pottering about. At one point I found myself doing 60 mph on the motorway. On the Burford road in Oxfordshire the other night I was overtaken by a Fiat 500.

  Really, it should come with a cattle prod and a device that tells the driver to pull over and get some bloody Red Bull down his neck. Sometimes I’d try to go a bit faster, but there seemed to be little reward, and as soon as I stopped concentrating I went back into Peugeot mode.

  So we’re left with a big question. At £54,965 the new SLK 55 costs less than I was expecting. But why pay this much for a car that doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of your neck? If you want a pottering-about, top-down cruiser, why not buy one of the much cheaper, smaller-engined versions?

  Because they’re for girls? OK, then, why not buy a BMW Z4? This is a much underrated car. At less than £40,000 for a twin-turbo 3-litre, it has the same hard folding roof as the Mercedes but is better looking and much less of a handful. Oh, and there’s one more thing. It’s the only car in the world that was designed by women. I like it very much.

  13 May 2012

  Fritz calls it a soft-roader. I call him soft in the head

  Audi Q3 2.0 TDI quattro SE S tronic

  It is extraordinary how often a room full of well-qualified adults can discuss a subject in their chosen field and arrive at a conclusion that’s completely muddle-headed and stupid.

  We see this a lot in politics. Only recently an MP called Keith Vaz went on television to say the immigration desks at Heathrow needed to be ‘personed up’. I actually went back and watched the moment again. But there was no mistaking it. This man – an MP with a first-class degree from Cambridge – had obviously been to a meeting where other sentient beings had convinced him to use words that no one else understands.

  Then there was the war in Iraq. Wise, clear-thinking people had access to all the information that the satellites could provide. And yet still they made a decision that was idiotic and wrong.

  A few years ago Coca-Cola did the same thing, albeit with less important ramifications, when it decided to make Coke taste like a used swab. BA did it with its tailfins. Gerald Ratner described a product he sold as ‘total crap’, Paul McCartney recorded ‘Ebony and Ivory’. Philips pioneered the laserdisc. Clive Sinclair decided to put his all into an electric slipper. John Prescott invented the M4 bus lane. The San Francisco Chronicle turned down the syndication of the Watergate story, saying it would only interest people on the east coast. And Top Gear made a film about an art gallery in Middlesbrough.

  I’m to blame. I brought it up in a meeting and instead of getting insects to lay eggs in my hair, the production team nodded sagely. We’d take over an art gallery, fill it with automotive-based art and prove that cars bring in bigger crowds than unmade beds and pickled sharks. Somehow, though, it didn’t occur to any of us that this would be a very long and boring film until after it appeared on the show. ‘That was very long and boring,’ we all said afterwards.

  Of course, the motoring world is rammed with more mistakes than almost any other industry. Someone at Pontiac looked at the design for the Aztek and said, ‘Mmm. Yes. Excellent.’ And there were similar noises in the Ford boardroom when the stylists mistakenly unveiled their joke plans for what became the Scorpio.

  Daimler really thought it could compete with the Rolls-Royce Phantom by putting some cherry wood in a Mercedes S-class and calling it a Maybach. Toyota launched a car called the MR2 without noticing that when said in French – ‘MR deux’ – it translates as ‘shit’, and Audi decided that it could improve on the airbag by developing a system called ‘procon-ten’, which used a fantastically complicated network of cables to pull the steering wheel forward in any frontal impact.

  I could go on, so I will. Austin made a car that was more aerodynamic going backwards than forwards, Ford made a car that blew up if a leaf landed on it and Lancia made a car from Russian steel that was as long-lasting as fruit. And only recently Volkswagen was going to call its new car the Black Up!.

  It’s almost as though every
single meeting in the car industry is specifically designed to exclude rational thought, which brings me on to a gathering of fine minds that must have happened a few years ago in Audi’s boardroom.

  They obviously decided that it would be a good wheeze to create a new type of medium-sized hatchback that looked like it might be able to go off road but couldn’t. ‘Yes,’ someone must have said. ‘That’s a brilliant idea. No one else will have thought of making such a thing.’

  And they were right. There are no other so-called ‘soft-roaders’ on the market at all. Apart from the Land Rover Freelander, the Range Rover Evoque, the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV4, the BMW X1, the Nissan Kumquat, the Nissan X-Trail, the Mitsubishi Outlander, the Volkswagen Tiguan, the Citroën Cross-Dresser, the Subaru Forester, the Hyundai Santa Fe, the Volvo XC60, the Kia Sportage, the Vauxhall Antara, the Ford Kuga, the Mazda CX-7, the Kia Sorento and the Jeep Compass.

  It’s possible they may have known all along that there are many options in this part of the marketplace. But it’s unlikely. Because if they had, they would have made damn sure their new car was better than all the others. And it isn’t.

  Let’s start in the boot, which is very small. And the reason it’s very small is that under the boot floor, apparently, there is a large subwoofer. What kind of hallucinogenic drug were they taking at the meeting where everyone agreed that this was a good idea? Who stood up and said, ‘A good bass sound is more important than an ability to carry dogs, shopping or a spare wheel’?

  Further forward, we find the rear seat, which is wide enough for three people but only if they have casters rather than legs. And then up front, at the business end, we find nothing at all, apart from some heater controls that have been designed to be annoying.

  My £28,965 quattro SE test car was supplied in loser spec with cruise control as a £225 optional extra and, er, that’s it. Every time I selected some tasty-sounding feature from the onboard computer, I was given a message saying, ‘You couldn’t afford this’ or ‘You really should have worked harder at school’. It didn’t even have satnav.

  To drive? Well, it’s hard to say because the wheels weren’t balanced properly, and trying to be rational when viewing the world through wobble vision is like trying to concentrate on the finer points of someone who’s constantly hitting you over the head with an axe.

  All I can say is that the engine is rather good. I had the more powerful diesel option that had lots of oomph and the thirst of a bee. It sounded nice, too, in a gravelly, smoky, bluesy kind of way.

  However, in the morning, when it had been asleep all night, it did take a second or two to remember what it was and what it’s purpose in life might be. You turn the key … and nothing happens. And then, shortly before it remembers that it’s an engine, you give up and turn the ignition off again. This causes a bit of swearing.

  Mind you, for cluelessness, the gearbox is worse. In Sport mode it wouldn’t change gear at all, and in Normal mode did nothing else but. Every few seconds. For no discernible reason.

  Then there’s the Efficiency mode facility that disengages the clutch every time you lift off the throttle. In theory, this fuel-saving measure sounds like a good idea. In practice, it means you simply cannot maintain smooth progress on the motorway.

  The Q3, then. Not practical. Not nice to drive. And technologically, not thought out well, either. So what’s to be done if you want a car that looks like it could go off road but won’t? Especially if you specify the sports suspension that lowers the ride height to that of a centipede.

  Well, the obvious answer is the Range Rover Evoque. But if this is too expensive for your taste and not spacious enough, don’t worry, because there is a better alternative. It’s called a saloon car.

  20 May 2012

  Cheer up – Napoleon got shorty shrift too

  Mini Cooper S roadster

  Tall people never really think about how far they are from the ground unless they are presented with an economy-class seat or a row of off-the-peg trousers. With small people, things are different. They think about their height all the time. They think that people like me are tall deliberately, that we do it on purpose just to annoy them. This gives them what doctors call SMS – small man syndrome – and what we call a bad temper.

  At parties they feel excluded from conversations as they scuttle about banging their heads on coffee tables. On crowded Tube trains they feel bullied. With girls they feel left out. And when shopping for clothes they quickly become fed up with being directed to Mothercare. This is why most bar-room brawlers and emperors are vertically challenged.

  It is quite correct to say that in evolutionary terms they are closer to the amoeba and that tall people sit at the prow of civilization. But these thoughts don’t occupy my mind all the time. I don’t feel superior to a small person just because my head is nearer to incoming weather systems. But they definitely feel inferior. Which is why they are engaged in a constant and deeply irritating battle to prove themselves worthy.

  We see the same problem with dogs. My west highland terrier is in a permanent state of rage. Because she can’t climb into the back of a Range Rover by herself or leap over fences, she bites the postman, the paperwoman and people who come to mend the computer. She bites my other dogs, too, and since we haven’t seen the milkman for months, we can only assume he’s been eaten. She barks a lot as well, making up for the shortness of her legs with volume. If she were a human she’d have been sent to Elba and the world would have been a safer place.

  Strangely, at this point, I need to talk about Richard Hammond. He told me the other day that when driving his Fiat 500 he is constantly bullied by other motorists. That he’s always being undertaken and tailgated and made to wait longer than is necessary at junctions. And I sighed the sigh of a tall man and thought, It’s not the car, sunshine. It’s your inferiority complex.

  But, having spent a week with the new Mini roadster, I think he may have a point. Small cars do get bullied. Especially when they are pretending to be something that they are not.

  My youngest daughter, who is extremely tall, pointed at the little car that had come to our drive and said, ‘That is not a Mini.’

  Her views were echoed on the road. ‘That is ridiculous,’ was the most commonly expressed view.

  And the roadster is ridiculous because it is about as far from the concept of a Mini as it is possible to get. The genius of the 1950s original was packaging – fitting an engine and four people into a car that was just 2 inches long. The rallying and The Italian Job came later.

  Well, the new roadster is about as long as the Norwegian coastline but has only two seats. In terms of sensible packaging, it’s right up there with the underground bunkers De Beers uses to store a few diamonds. Or those massive boxes that contain nothing but a USB dongle for your laptop.

  Of course, the whole point is that it’s supposed to be a sports car. But despite the stripes, the lights, the William Wallace war paint and the massive Cuban wheels, it doesn’t look anything like, say, a Mazda MX-5. It looks like a Mini. That’s been beheaded.

  Inside, the news is just as grim. When the new Mini was launched, the wacky interior was interesting. Now it’s just annoying. The speedometer, for instance, is the size of Eric Pickles’s face, but you have to study it carefully for several minutes to work out how fast you’re going.

  Then you have the electric-window switches, which look great but are in the wrong place. As is the volume control for the stereo. It’s as though one hundred people – all children – have contributed an idea, and they’ve all been accepted.

  Oh, and then we get to the price. The Cooper S version I tested is £20,905. This makes it nearly £500 more expensive than the more practical, less idiotic-looking four-seat convertible. And about £5,000 more than a Mini should be.

  Subliminally, other road users know this, too, which is why I spent most of my week in a blizzard of hand gestures and cruelty. I felt like the jack in a game of boules. I felt like Richard Hammond. And t
he biggest problem with all of this is that the car itself is absolutely fantastic. A genuine gem. A nugget of precious metal in a sea of plastic and Korean facsimiles. I absolutely loved it.

  By far the best bit is the engine. It’s a turbocharged 1.6-litre that produces 181 bhp. That doesn’t sound the most exciting recipe in the world, but after a whisper of lag you barely notice, the torque is immense. It feels as if there’s a muscle under the bonnet and you never tire of flexing it.

  The only real problem is that on a motorway – and I’ve noticed this in all Minis – its natural cruising speed is about 110 mph. Because of a combination of where you sit, the angle of the throttle pedal, the gearing and the vibrations, this is how fast you go when you’re not concentrating. You need to watch it.

  Or get off the motorway. That’s a good idea, actually, because although there’s a bit of typical big-power-meets-front-wheel-drive torque steer, the chassis is mostly brilliant. It’s like an old-fashioned hot hatch: a Volkswagen Golf GTI or Peugeot 205 GTI – the sort of car you can fling into a bend at any speed that takes your fancy.

  You would expect the ride to be as awful as the handling is good, especially with all the strengthening needed to make up for the lack of a roof. But no. It’s firm, for sure, but it never crashes or shudders in even the worst pothole. It’s never uncomfortable. It’s a joy. And it’s not unduly thirsty, either.

  At this point I’d love to tell you all is just as well when you put the roof down. But I can’t, I’m afraid. Because in the seven days I spent with this car it never stopped raining even for a moment.

  I can tell you, though, the roof is only semi-electric and some of the operation has to be done by hand. That’s no biggie. I can also tell you that the boot is much bigger than you might be expecting. But the last thing I have to say is the most surprising of all: this car is worth a serious look.