The results of a continent-wide survey are in and it’s been announced that the Italians are the worst drivers in Europe. Apparently this is largely due to a strong showing from the Italians themselves, 28 per cent of whom said, ‘Yup. Nobody does it worse than us.’
Well, I’m sorry, but I’m incredulous about this, because the Italians are in fact the best drivers, not just in Europe but anywhere. They get to where they’re going more quickly, and they have more fun on the way. They also look good in the process.
Just last week I was driving from Turin to Milan in a car that develops 662 horsepower. It was plainly very fast and I was plainly in a big hurry. But that didn’t stop every single Italian I encountered trying to get past. The Italian driver must overtake the car in front. This is a rule. Even if the car in front is an F-15E Strike Eagle and you are in a seventeen-year-old Fiat with a two-stroke under the bonnet, you must get past or you are not a man.
They say that you never feel more alive than you do when you are staring death in the face. Which is why my drive though Rome last year in a Lamborghini Aventador was such an unparalleled joy. You can’t daydream there; you can’t take in the views. Many Roman drivers have no idea the Colosseum is still upright: they’re so busy concentrating on getting past the car in front, they’ve never even noticed it.
You can’t help but notice, though, the weeping American tourists, marooned on traffic islands, wondering through heaving sobs why no car will stop at the pedestrian crossing. Because they’re racing, you witless idiots.
However, what makes it different from any race you’ve ever seen is that no one knows where the finish line is or where the other competitors are going. That’s what adds to the sparkle.
I was once on the autostrada outside Pisa when the car behind indicated it wished to get past by nudging my rear bumper. It was quite a hefty nudge, if I’m honest. Which is why I was so surprised to note the vehicle in question was being driven by a nun. I promise I’m not making this up. I was rammed out of the way by a nun in an Alfa Romeo.
What fascinates me is that when you drive to Italy through France, you have mile after mile of belligerence and arrogance and big Citroëns being in both lanes at once. Then you go through a tunnel and on the other side everyone is stark, staring bonkers. Rude on one side of a hill. Mad on the other. It’s strange.
Other nations to do badly in the survey are the Greeks, who drive very much like the Italians, only without the panache, skill or style, and the Germans. Ah, the Germans. I don’t think they are necessarily bad, but it is the only country in the world where I sometimes feel intimidated. As if the man coming the other way really would rather die in a huge head-on smash than pull over a bit.
Apparently, the best drivers in Europe are the Finns. How can we be sure? I’m the only person I’ve ever met who’s been to Finland. The Brits come eighth, and there can be only one reason for such a poor showing: the sheer number of Audis you see whizzing about these days.
There was a time when Audis were driven by cement salesmen, but in recent years they have become the must-have accessory for squash- and golf-playing ‘winners’. And squash- and golf-playing winners don’t have the time or the inclination to let you out of a side turning, that’s for sure. Also, Audi drivers have it in their heads that the stopping distances in the Highway Code are given in millimetres. You check next time you’re being tailgated. I bet you any money the culprit is in an Audi.
This used to be a BMW problem but today BMWs are rather too restrained and tasteful for the world’s winners. The slight flashiness of an Audi goes better with the pillars outside their houses.
That said, the new S6 is really rather good-looking. The wheels are especially handsome and overall it has the look of a BMW, the look of a car whose body has been stretched to the absolute limits to cover the wheels; the look, in short, of a car that can barely contain its muscle.
The muscle in question is actually smaller than it used to be. In the old S6 you had the Lamborghini V10 but that’s gone now, a victim of the relentless drive for better emissions and improved fuel economy. So instead you get a twin-turbo V8, the same unit Bentley is using in the basic Continental GT these days.
It’s a clever engine because when you are just pootling about, four of the cylinders close down – if you really, really concentrate, you can sense that happening – which means you are using far less fuel. And then at the lights everything stops, which means you are using none at all. The upshot is about 29 mpg, and that’s pretty damn good for a car of this type.
Obviously the power is down a tad from the old V10. But you still get a colossal shove in the back when you floor it, and a sense that even with four-wheel drive the tyres are scrabbling for grip, like a girl in a horror film running away from the monster in the wood.
Sometimes you think there may even be too much power, because this is not a sports saloon. It may look like one, with its silver mirrors and its fancy wheels and its V8 badges on the front wings. But the steering is not sporty at all. And neither is the ride.
Gone are the days when Audis jiggled on rough roads. Some were so bad, I often thought I was going to have an aneurysm. The new models, though, even the fast ones such as this, are extremely good at isolating occupants from the slovenliness of the British roadwork Johnny. Doubtless there will be a harder, more focused RS6 in due course, but for now what we have here is a comfortable, economical, fast and good-looking cruiser.
Inside, you get quilted seats. And I’d like to say at this point how much I hate their vulgarity. But sadly I can’t. Because they look great. The equipment levels are pretty impressive too. Put it this way: if there’s a gadget you’ve seen in another car of this type, you can be assured it’s available in the S6.
It’s a silly John Lewis-style price-promise game played by Audi, BMW and Mercedes. When one of them introduces a new toy such as a head-up display, the others follow suit. In the S6 I notice that Audi allows you to choose how long you would like voice commands to be. The others will have that feature in a year.
Jaguar should play a joke on the Germans and say its next car will have a ski jump in the boot. Or an aquarium in the glove box.
Until then, though, the S6 is a good, well-judged car that would make a great deal of sense in Italy. Here in Britain, however, it will be bought and driven extremely badly by people you wouldn’t want round for dinner. For that reason, I still slightly prefer the BMW 5-series.
30 September 2012
It’s Sunday, the sun is out – let’s go commando
Ferrari California 30
I suppose we all harbour a secret longing to buy a little sports car – a Triumph TR6, perhaps, that we can use for lunchtime trips to the pub on sunny Sundays. You can picture the scene, can’t you, as you sit outside the Dog and Feather: a pint of Old Crusty Moorhen, a hunk of Cheddar and a car park full of people cooing over your wheels. Lovely.
Well, it’d never happen. First of all, there were no sunny Sundays, either this year or last. Which means your little TR6 would now be sitting in the garage with four flat tyres and an equally flat battery. You’re going to get round to fixing it as soon as you have a spare moment. But you won’t.
And even if you do, and even if next summer is lovely, your problems are far from over because you can be assured that, moments before you set off, your wife will invite a friend along. So, with a need for three seats, you’ll end up taking the Vauxhall Astra instead.
Or she won’t invite a friend along and you can take the little Triumph. But then you will have one too many Crusty Moorhens and you won’t be able to drive it home. Which means you will have to pop round to the pub after work on Monday to pick it up, and it won’t start and the tyres will be flat again. And so it’ll sit there till next autumn.
There’s another problem, too. On the once-in-a-blue-moon occasion when you do drive your Triumph, it will be horrible and you will hate every minute of it. You will hate the heavy steering, the useless brakes and being overta
ken by vans, because what passed for power in the 1970s doesn’t cut the mustard today. Driving an old car is like watching an old black-and-white television. And you wouldn’t do that for fun, would you?
The truth is that none of us really drives for fun any more. The roads are too full; the cost is too painful. So keeping a car in the garage for high days and holidays is like keeping a fun pair of scissors. It’s stupid and pointless.
Which brings me on to Ferraris. Over the years, I’ve occasionally entertained the notion that you can use a mid-engined supercar as an everyday commuter tool. But, of course, you can’t. You’re always worried that it’ll be scratched, and it won’t go over speed bumps, and it’s always noisy, especially when you’ve had a hard day at work, and there’s precious little luggage space, and in large parts of the country it makes you look as if you have a first-class honours degree in onanism, and it chews fuel, and you can never use the power, and pretty soon you are twisted into a jealous rage every time you see someone in a diesel-powered BMW 5-series.
A Ferrari is for high days and holidays. It is a special-occasion car. Which means you need another car as well. And if you have something else, that will always be more comfortable and more practical, which means your beloved Ferrari will sit in the garage for month after month, chewing its way through your finances and then not starting on the one day you decide it would be suitable. That’s why the second-hand columns are always rammed full of ten-year-old Ferraris that have only ever done 650 miles. Every one of them is a shattered dream.
You sense that Ferrari is trying to address this. Its cars now come with 200-year warranties and e-zee financing for the servicing costs. Plus, except in the case of the 458, the company has stopped putting the engine in the middle. It has given up on the high-day-and-holiday supercar and is making GT cars you can actually use to take the dog to the vet when it has diarrhoea.
Or can you? Well, I’ve just spent a few days with what is the cheapest of all the Ferraris. It’s the California and it’s yours for £152,116. Unless, of course, you decide to spend a little more on a few extras, in which case it’s £258,972.
I particularly liked the ‘handy’ fire extinguisher that was fitted in my car. It came in a little suede fire extinguisher cosy and cost £494. I like the way Ferrari makes it so precise. If it charged £500, you’d think it was taking the mick, but because it’s £494, it looks as if it has been carefully worked out. And it’s the same story with the Ferrari badges on the front wings. They are not £1,000. They are £1,013. Of course they are.
Then there’s the new handling pack. At £4,320, this gives you faster steering and a more aggressive feel. In theory. Mainly it’s been made available to convince those who bought a California a year ago that they really should do a part-exchange deal (I wouldn’t bother).
Anyway, while the price list may be daft, the car is not. There’s a V8 engine at the front and a boot at the back into which the metal roof folds away. In terms of layout, it’s the same as a Mercedes SL. Except that in the Ferrari the rear parcel shelf can be disguised to look like a seat. It isn’t. Unless you are an amoeba.
It also goes like a Mercedes SL. Recent power upgrades mean you now get 483 brake horsepower. Which is a lot. But it’s not stupid.
Inside, it’s straightforward too. This is one model in the Ferrari line-up that has conventional controls for the wipers and lights. The steering wheel is used to house only the simple three-way mode selector, the starter button and, in my test car, a series of red lights warning you that it might be time for a gear change (an amusingly priced £4,321 option).
It has a satnav you can understand and a Bluetooth system that can play your music. There’s no lunacy at all in the way this car works, and once you’re out of town, the flappy-paddle gearbox is an utter delight.
Don’t be fooled, though, because, despite everything, this is still not an everyday car. And not just because the exhaust is like a dog that has to have the last word. It never, ever, shuts up.
No. The main reason you wouldn’t want to use a California every day is that it feels so incredibly special. It doesn’t feel like any other car. It communicates with you in a different way. It feels … like a Ferrari, which means it feels lighter, more darty and more aggressive than even the lightest, dartiest and most aggressive of its rivals.
It’s a mistress, not a wife. You know that it could cook and sew but you wouldn’t want it to do those things. It would be all wrong. If this car knew what underwear was, it wouldn’t wear any.
I loved it massively. I’d love to have one. But if I were going to buy a car I’d never use, I’d rather go the whole hog and have a mid-engined, high-day 458 Spider. Granted, it’s more expensive than a California, but there’s a reason for that: it’s better to drive, and as you walk past it every morning to get into your Range Rover, you’ll note it’s quite a lot better-looking as well.
7 October 2012
Yo, bruv, check out da Poundland Bentley
Chrysler 300C Executive
Some people can go into any clothes shop and buy any item from any shelf, knowing that when they put it on, they will look good. I am not one of those people. I’ve never even been able to find a pair of socks that don’t look ridiculous once I’ve put my feet into them.
It’s the same story with hats. Partly because my head is the same size as a Hallowe’en pumpkin, and partly because my hair looks as though it could be used to descale a ship’s boiler, it doesn’t matter what titfer I select, it ends up looking like an atom on an ocean of seaweed.
Trousers, though, are the worst. Because my stomach is similar in size, colour and texture to the moon, it’s difficult to know whether strides should be worn above or below the waist. Both ways look stupid.
I’m told the problem can be masked with a well-tailored jacket, but this simply isn’t true. Attempting to mask my physical shortcomings with carefully cut cloth is like attempting to mask the shortcomings of a boring play by serving really nice ice cream in the interval.
This is why I have cultivated my own look over the years. It’s the look of a man who has simply got dressed in whatever happened to be lying by the end of the bed that morning. I pull it off very well. Mainly because that’s what I actually do.
I’m not alone, of course. Many people obviously struggle to find clothes that work, but, unlike me, they continue to make an effort. Pointlessly. That’s why you see fat girls in miniskirts, and men in Pringle jumpers, and Jon Snow’s socks.
We see the same problem with cars: people drive around in stuff that is really and truly wrong. Yesterday, for example, I saw a very small woman getting into an Audi RS5. And when I say small, I mean microscopic. It’s entirely possible that while her mum may have been diminutive, her dad was an amoeba. And she was getting into a super-fast Audi. A car that only really works if you look like the chisel-jawed centrepiece of a watch advert.
Let’s take Nicholas Soames as a case in point. He is a somewhat large – and larger-than-life – Conservative MP with very little time for … anyone, really. Can you see him in a Nissan Micra? Or even a Volkswagen Golf? No. It would be all wrong.
Can you see Stella McCartney in a Kia Rio or Mick Jagger in a van? James May drives around in a Ferrari, and I’m sorry, but that’s as hysterical as the notion of Prince Philip turning up to open a community centre in a Mazda MX-5. With Jay-Z on the stereo.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We all pretend that we pay attention to the cost of running a car and how much fuel it will consume. We tell friends that we made our choice on our particular needs and the needs of our family. But the truth is that we buy a car as we buy clothing. With scant regard for how it was made, or by whom, because we’re too busy looking in a mirror thinking, Would this suit me?
I, for example, like small sports cars. But I know that driving around in such a thing would be like driving around in a PVC catsuit. It would be absurd. I also like the BMW M3. As a car, it ticks every box that I can think of. But I could not hav
e one because Beemers have not quite managed to shake off an image that is at odds with the one I’d like to portray.
Ever wondered why you see so few big Jaguar XJs on the road? Is there something wrong with them? Not that I know of. Except that, among the people old enough to be interested in such a car, the memory of Arthur Daley is still vivid. They don’t want a Jag for the same reason they don’t want a sheepskin coat.
And all of this brings me nicely to the door of the Chrysler 300C that is parked outside my house. And my neighbour’s house, too. And the one after that. Other places that it is parked include Hammersmith, Swindon, Bristol and the eastern bits of Cardiff. It is very big. More than 16½ feet long and almost 6 feet 3 inches wide, in fact.
Naturally, it is also extremely large on the inside, which would make it ideal for anyone with many children. A Catholic, for example. Or with children who are very fat. An American, perhaps.
And yet, despite its size, prices currently start at less than £30,000. About half what you’d be asked to pay for a similarly large and well-equipped Mercedes S-class.
A bargain, then? Well, yes, but every single thing you touch in a Mercedes feels as if it has been hewn from rock and assembled in such a way that it will last for a thousand years. Whereas everything you touch in the Chrysler feels like a bin bag full of discarded packaging.
It feels American. But actually it’s made in Canada, and on the Continent, thanks to a flip-chart-and-PowerPoint meeting somewhere, it’s sold as a Lancia Thema.
Under the bonnet you have a choice of engines. One is a 3-litre V6 diesel and the other is a 3-litre V6 diesel. They produce the same power, though it’s not what you’d call quite enough. And you can’t expect eye-widening fuel economy either – not from a car that weighs more than Wales.
The old 300C handled terribly. And I’m here to report that the new one handles terribly as well. It responds to all inputs from the wheel with what feels like casual indifference. Imagine asking a French policeman in a rural town for help. Can you picture his uninterested face? His nonchalant shrug? Well, that’s how the big Chrysler responds when you ask it to go round a corner.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . Page 28
