What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  I shall oblige. The VXR is very, very good. It goes like a scalded cock, stops with an almost cartoonish suddenness and corners with absolutely no drama at all. It isn’t quite as thrilling as a hot Mégane – it’s much heavier – but what you lose in Stowe Corner, you gain on all the other days of the year because the ride comfort is exceptional. Even though the tyres have the profile of paint, this is a car that just glides over bumps.

  There is a Sport button that firms up the suspension, and a so-called VXR button that adjusts the throttle response, adds weight to the hydraulic power steering, gives even harder suspension and makes all the dials glow red. But I don’t recommend you ever use either. Because mainly what they do is add 10 per cent to the dynamism and take away 100 per cent of the comfort.

  There are a few little niggles. Despite Vauxhall’s best efforts, the wheel does still writhe about under harsh acceleration, and there is rather more turbo lag than I’d like.

  Inside, it was the driving position that annoyed me most of all. After a while, I got cramp. And who thought it would be a good idea to fit a centre armrest that prevents the taller driver from selecting second, fourth and sixth? Also the front wheels weren’t balanced properly. Grrrr.

  Oh, and then there was the boot lid that wouldn’t open. I’m sure there’s a clever button hidden away somewhere, but finding it would have meant reading the handbook. And I can’t do that because I’m a man.

  None of these things, however, should prevent you from buying what is a well-engineered and well-executed car. But what might cause you to think twice is the bovine trinketry, the high price and the fact you have to tell people at parties that you’ve bought a Vauxhall Astra.

  If these things are too much of a cross to bear, it’s not the end of the world. Because, happily, Volkswagen can still sell you a hot hatch that doesn’t make you look a gormless plonker. It’s not as stupendous as the Astra. But it’s not as stupid. It’s called the Golf GTI.

  29 July 2012

  Kiss goodbye to your no-claims – Mr Fender-bender has a new toy

  Peugeot 208 1.2 VTi Allure

  It is obviously very bad when someone becomes so consumed with a project or hobby that they lose the ability to talk or even think about anything else. Hobbies are a bit like crack cocaine. You think that maybe you’ll just dangle a worm in some water to see if you can catch a stickleback, and the next thing you know, you’re divorced because you spent all your life savings on a carbon-fibre rod, and you’re sitting by the side of a canal at five in the morning trying it out.

  I’ve been there. Back in 1975 I became mildly interested in what we used to call hi-fis. And then, in the blink of an eye, I was very interested indeed and my girlfriend had gone off with someone who wasn’t really interested in anything very much at all.

  I barely noticed because my new Marsden Hall speakers had arrived. Some say Wharfedale made a better unit but I disagreed. The Marsden Halls were perfect for my slimline black Teleton amp. I caught a train all the way to London to buy that.

  The deck? At the time the Garrard SP25 was popular, but I took a holiday job as a milkman so I could afford the 86SB, which I teamed with a Shure M75ED cartridge. I’m not looking any of this stuff up. It was all ingrained in my head back then and it’s still there now. I actually know what sort of stylus I used, and its code name.

  While my friends were out stealing traffic cones and trying to get into Annabel’s bra, I was to be found at my desk, soldering an unbelievably fiddly seven-pin Din plug so I could connect my recently bought Akai tape deck to the school’s PA system. I was very boring.

  So you can imagine how I felt about the home-brand all-in-one ‘music centres’ that Currys and Comet started to sell in the 1980s. Oh, they looked all right, with all their flashing lights and damped cassette-release mechanisms. And I’m sure they were fine for listening to Dire Straits’ albums at suburban dinner parties. But for someone like me, they were only a forked tongue short of being the actual devil.

  And so we arrive, naturally, at the Volvo 340 DL. As we know, this was a ghastly car. Made by people in Holland who thought Jesus was coming, it was powered by rubber bands, fitted with Mr Universe steering and styled during a game of consequences.

  However, it was perceived to be strong and safe, so it attracted all the people who were not very good at driving and thought they may crash. This was unbelievably useful for the rest of us. If you saw a Volvo 340 DL coming the other way, you knew to be on your guard.

  Eventually, however, Volvo decided to stop making bad cars for useless drivers, so the incompetent and weak decided en masse to switch to Rover. And again, this was good: see a 45 in the left lane, indicating left, and you knew not to assume it was actually going to turn left.

  But then Rover went west and the bad drivers were suddenly hard to spot. Some were in Hyundais and Kias. Some were in Volkswagen Golfs. It was a dangerous period, but luckily Peugeot rode to the rescue. For many years this French company had made excellent cars but one day it decided to make a lot of very cheap rubbish for people with hearing aids, hats and a tendency to hang something from the rear-view mirror.

  The other day I saw a Peugeot upside down at the entrance to the Hanger Lane underpass in west London. It is physically impossible to roll a car here, on what is a dead-straight piece of road. But Mr Pug Driver had managed it. And I recently saw another, balanced in pretty much the same place on the Armco.

  Last week I came as close as I’ve been for years to having a head-on with a 308 that was on completely the wrong side of the road. It is uncanny this: Peugeots are invariably driven by someone who finds every single motoring event a complete surprise. ‘Oh my God, look. Those lights have just gone RED!’ ‘Holy cow. There’s another CAR!’

  If I were running the police force, I would ask my officers to pull over all Peugeot drivers just to make sure they aren’t driving under the influence of Vera Lynn. Because they’re sure as hell driving under the influence of something.

  To find out what it might be, I’ve just spent a week with a 208, or to be specific, the mid-range 1.2-litre VTi Allure. It’s a good-looking little thing and at £13,495 it’s well priced, too, especially given the amount of equipment provided as standard.

  The only slight oddness is the steering wheel. It’s the size of a shirt button and it’s located very low down. So low that in the event of a crash, your testes would get such a thump from the airbag you’d wish you had died.

  There were many nice things, though. For a 1.2 the engine delivers a surprising lump of punch. At one stage I was doing 70 mph, and that’s faster than a Peugeot has travelled for twenty years. I also liked the central command system that is used to operate everything.

  The 208 is actually smaller on the outside than the car it replaces – the dreadful 207 – but inside, it’s bigger. So big, in fact, that there was space in the back, with the rear seats folded, for three dogs, one of which was larger than a diplodocus. Other things? Well, it was quiet and comfortable and the visibility was good.

  All the time, though, I had a nagging doubt. On the face of it all was well, but every time I started the engine there was a beat before the electric power steering woke up. It was only a moment, but it told me that behind the flashing lights and the nice design touches, the engineering wasn’t quite as thorough as you might have hoped.

  There’s more evidence too. It’s never an annoying car but it’s not what you’d call delightful, either. You don’t get the little shiver that you sometimes experience in a Fiat, or even a Volkswagen. This, then, to a car enthusiast is what those music centres were to me back in 1981. An attractive package with many features that is fine for playing Dire Straits as you drive to the shops. But not much else.

  It is, therefore, a car for people who are not that interested in cars. And that explains everything. Because if you are not interested in something, you will be no good at it.

  Perhaps that’s why Peugeot says in its advertisements that the 208 is a car that l
ets your body drive. It does, leaving your mind free to think about stuff that matters to you: the Blitz and how it used to be all trees around here.

  I suppose, however, we can draw an interesting conclusion. If you – as a good driver – do buy a 208, you will find that all the traffic parts as you motor along. They will assume you are about to crash into something.

  It might, therefore, be a faster and safer way of moving around than almost anything else on the road.

  5 August 2012

  The nip and tuck doesn’t fool anyone, Grandma

  Jaguar XKR-S

  A man was apprehended by the constabulary recently for turning around to admire a girl on the pavement. He’d seen her bottom as he drove by, and officers spotted him looking through his rear window to see if the front was as good as the back.

  I realize, of course, that when we are behind the wheel we are expected to become robots, immune to the ringing of a telephone, the crying of children in the back and the stupidity of other motorists. We may not talk, listen to the radio, eat a sandwich or become irritated. And all of this is ridiculous. But now we discover we may not drive while under the influence of a scrotum, and that’s worse.

  I try not to look at pretty girls on bicycles because it is probably annoying to have half the population looking up your skirt and praying for a gust of wind. But it is not possible. I have just about trained my head to stay still but my eyes are controlled by testosterone, and as often as not I don’t see the lights turn green because they’ve swung around so far I’m actually looking at my own frontal lobes.

  I’m also distracted by roadside advertisements, new shops, the amusing driving position of shorter motorists, interesting cloud formations, work matters, idiotic signs that have no meaning, a constant fear that one of the wheels is about to fall off, the mind-numbing noise of high-power motorcycles – pretty much everything. Except other cars.

  I don’t turn around when I see a Lamborghini or a Ferrari going the other way, in the same way that people who work at the chocolate factory don’t stand and salivate at the petrol station’s confectionery counter.

  That said, I can never resist a sneaky double take when I am presented with a Jaguar XK. Designed by the same man who gave us the Aston Martin DB9, and engineered by Jag when it and Aston were part of the same company, it’s always been a thinking man’s Bondmobile. No, really. It was nearly as quick off the mark and only half the price.

  What’s more, it managed to combine the rakish good looks of the Aston with more aggression. It managed therefore to be pretty and fighty at the same time. It’s such a head-turner, in fact, that whenever I see one I become consumed by one of life’s great mysteries: ‘Why don’t I have one?’

  To find out, again, I’ve just spent a week with the newest, latest version, the super-hot, super-aggressive XKR-S convertible. And straight away I could see many problems.

  There’s no getting away from the fact that this is an old car now. The dials look as though they’ve been lifted from a thirty-year-old Peugeot, the back seats are as useful as having no seats at all, the touchscreen command system, which operates the radio and climate control, is as counterintuitive as an old twist-key sardine tin, and while an iPod connection is supplied, it won’t play tunes from your iPhone – or at least it wouldn’t for me. ‘What!?’ it says, when you try. ‘Are you suggesting you can play music on your telephone? Don’t be stupid.’

  There’s more. To distinguish this new hot model from its lesser brethren, Jaguar’s stylists have seen fit to spoil the very thing that gives this car such appeal. Its looks. Up front, there’s a new nose that suggests the car is frowning. Then you have two suitcase handles on the corners – I have no idea why – and at the back a large spoiler, which is fine if you are eighteen and a yob. But not if you are forty-eight and a solicitor.

  What Jaguar has done is taken, say, Keira Knightley and ‘improved’ her looks with several nose piercings and, on her forehead, a dirty great tattoo.

  And now we get to the 5-litre supercharged V8 engine. It, like the car, is old, but that hasn’t stopped the engineers squeezing about 40 more brake horsepower out of it. Inside, it must look like a lemon that’s been run over by a bus.

  So. There we are. The looks are gone. The interior is old and the engine’s a pensioner with a new pair of training shoes. And yet …

  In two important areas, the car’s age pays dividends. First, it still uses a proper automatic gearbox, not an eco-sop flappy-paddle manual. And its roof is still made from canvas rather than steel. Normally, I’m not given to camping, but somehow, in a car, it’s nice to be protected from the elements by nothing more substantial than one of Bear Grylls’s hats.

  Not that I needed the roof up much because at the precise moment this car was delivered, the rain stopped, the sky turned blue and the temperature shot up to what felt like a million. You’re going to like driving any convertible in conditions like this, and I must say, I liked driving this one a lot.

  Foremost, there’s the speed. It’s properly fast. And for once in an XKR, the exhaust thunder is audible not just to passers-by but to occupants of the car as well. I particularly enjoyed the distant gunfire rumble it makes on the overrun. I was on the overrun a lot. In fact, I spent most of the week speeding up, just so I could slow down again.

  I also liked the steering. It’s not an especially light car, but it feels nimble and agile. The only thing you have to remember is that the chassis was set up by a man who likes to go sideways all the time, so you have to be a bit careful before engaging the full enchilada.

  Not to worry. Unlike other XKRs I’ve driven in recent times, this one doesn’t bang and crash over potholes. It’s actually quite smooth. You can therefore cruise about the place, no problem at all.

  Soon, though, you start to encounter some issues again. When, for instance, you use the paddles to override the auto box, there’s no easy way of getting it back into ‘Drive’ again. Also the seats aren’t very comfortable. And I’m afraid that when you arrive at a friend’s house, they will see the blingarama styling add-ons and will not be impressed. ‘Oh dear’ was the most common reaction.

  At this point, I must get to the price. It’s £103,430. And it doesn’t matter if you squint or stand on your head or say it really fast – that is a lot of cash. Half-price Aston DB9? Not any more.

  It’s easy to see what the people at Jaguar have done here. They are busy developing the new, small sports car that many are billing as the next E-type. And over at Land Rover, finishing touches are being put to the new Range Rover. There simply isn’t the money, or the manpower, to come up with a new XK, so, to keep it alive, they’ve sprinkled a bit of mustard powder on the old girl in the hope they can sell a few in Qatar.

  Jaguar might pull that off. But here? No. It’s a lovely car to drive and it’s very fast. But it’s too expensive and too embarrassing when you get where you’re going.

  Buy a Mercedes SL instead. Or, if you’ve been swept up in that ‘Aren’t we marvellous?’ euphoria from the Olympics and you really want an XK, look in the second-hand columns of this paper and buy one from a period when it was new.

  12 August 2012

  Wuthering werewolves, a beast made for the moors

  Lexus LFA

  On a recent trip to America I maintained my 100 per cent record of never having driven though Nevada without being stopped by the police. Six trips. Six heartfelt roadside apologies to a selection of burly-looking men in beige trousers.

  I was pulled over the first time for travelling in a Dodge Stealth at a very huge speed indeed. So huge, in fact, that they’d had to use an aeroplane to catch me. So vast that it would have needed three boxes on the official form. And only two were provided.

  Seeing that bureaucracy would prevent him from recording how fast I’d actually been going, the extremely good-natured policeman said, ‘Listen, son. I know and you know how fast you were going. But, hell, it’s a beautiful evening. Let’s call it eighty-five.’ And t
hen, after I’d said I was going back to Britain in a week, he gave me two weeks to pay the fine …

  A few years later I was back and going even faster in a Chevrolet Corvette when, once again, Frank Cannon arrived on the scene with a stern face and a big piece. This time he was so staggered to find the communist host from that Limey motoring show on his patch, he saluted and let me go.

  And so we now spool forwards to last month, when, in an attempt to show my children the real America, where real Americans live, I was taking them on the state’s back roads, flashing past remote shops where signs advised us that guns were welcome on the premises. But aliens were not.

  Soon we arrived in Radiator Springs. There were a few tractor carcasses, a motley collection of trailers and one police cruiser by the stop sign I hadn’t noticed. He was very angry that some goddamn Limey had dared to breach the law in what was almost certainly a communist-made Range Rover and wanted to see my driving licence.

  Finding it turned out to be a time-consuming affair. So time-consuming that after five minutes he harrumphed and let me go, saying he had better things to be getting on with. Quite what these ‘better things‘ might be in a town such as his, I’m not sure. Almost certainly they would be alien-related. Or possibly something to do with communists.

  Despite everything, though, I like driving in Nevada. Even the back roads are so smooth, it felt like we were on a conveyor belt. You never need to accelerate or brake or steer. Cruise control was invented for Nevada. Driving there is as tiring as taking a bath.

  I also like the sense that everything is 500 miles away and that no matter how hard you try, every journey is always completed in exactly half the time quoted by locals. ‘How far’s Las Vegas?’ you ask. ‘Ooh, about eight hours,’ they say. And you get there in four.