What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .
Page 31
You may remember the first effort. I do. Mainly because it was so very poor. Yes, it had a big price tag and a big V12 engine – made from mating two Ford V6s together. And yes, it was very fast, but only in theory. In practice it went from 0 to 6000 rpm in one clutch.
So the new car uses an old name and the same basic engine that’s been in the DB9, the DBS, the Virage and the V12 Vantage. The same basic styling, the same construction techniques and a six-speed automatic gearbox from ZF’s end-of-season everything-must-go discount bin. And the price tag for this rearrangement? Well, before you start with options, it’s a whopping £189,995.
There are other issues too. This is a car made from a clever, glued-together aluminium and carbon-fibre tub. It has aluminium side-impact beams. It should be so light that it needs mooring ropes rather than a handbrake to stop it floating away. And yet somehow it weighs more than 1.7 tons. Perhaps that’s why it’s so expensive – because the seats are filled with gold ingots.
On paper, then, this looks like a bubble-and-squeak car. At first appealing, but when you stop and think, you realize you’re eating leftovers. And yet …
While the profile may be familiar, there is no doubting the fact that the styling tweaks are extremely successful. This is a car that moons you with its beauty. The new Ferrari F12 is good-looking enough to cause a grown man to faint but the Vanquish is better still. It’s delightful on the inside too. The old Volvo satnav has been replaced with a system that tells you where you’re going rather than where you’ve been and the fiddly little buttons that plagued the short-sighted in previous models have been replaced with bigger ‘haptic feedback’ knobs that buzz slightly when you touch them. Why? Not a clue, but it’s nice.
Thanks to a smaller transmission tunnel, there’s more space than in previous models too. So much, in fact, that if you specify the optional rear seats, you can actually put people in them. People with heads, if you want, and legs.
And then there’s the upholstery. It looks like leather bubble wrap and it’s wonderful. So when it comes to practicality – it even has a big boot – and styling, this car is world class. It’s an iPhone in a sea of Bakelite.
And there’s more. The engine is a masterpiece. You get almost 11 per cent more power than you did from the DBS, and that means 565 bhp. To remind you that they are there, all of them bark every time you go anywhere near the throttle.
It’s more than just the aural effect, though; it’s the sense that this engine is not a thousand parts whizzing about under the watchful eye of an electronic overlord. It feels like one big muscle – a mountain of loud but lazy torque.
Normally I worry about V12s. I always fear that a V8 does pretty much the same job with much less complexity and much less opportunity to go wrong. But the V12 in the Vanquish is a thing of such unparalleled brilliance, I’d be prepared to forgo my worries.
It suits the gearbox too. Yes, almost all of the Vanquish’s rivals are now fitted with eight-speed manual gearboxes that are operated by flappy paddles. This is very good for the environment, as they use less fuel, and it’s also good when you are on a racetrack. But it’s not so good when you are in town and you have a millionth of a second to exploit a gap in the traffic. Because at low speeds they are dim-witted, jerky and hesitant.
That’s where the Aston scores. Yes, it has flappy paddles, but they are connected to an automatic gearbox. That may be old-fashioned, but in town it works much, much better.
But, you may be wondering, what about out of town? Can the bubble-and-squeak car really hold its own against its more modern rivals? The short answer is no. You feel the weight and that makes the car feel bigger and more intimidating than it really is. It doesn’t flow and it doesn’t really matter whether you engage Sport mode or put the suspension in Nutter Bastard mode, the Vanquish doesn’t boggle the mind quite as effectively as, say, a McLaren MP4-12C or a Ferrari California. It doesn’t feel special.
However, since it was a pre-production car, it’s probably unfair to say its boot lid broke and its passenger-side electric window was wonky.
If we assume these issues are addressed before the car goes on sale – that was never a certainty with Aston Martin in the past – then what do we have here? Well, it’s a thing of immense beauty and it does have a fabulous engine. In many ways you could call it a modern-day British take on the muscle-car idea. And that would be great.
But I fear Aston is at the point where we can all see this car for what it really is. A new car that’s not really new at all.
9 December 2012
The cocaine chintz has been kept in check
Range Rover Vogue SDV8 4.4L V8 Vogue
Helsinki airport is vast. You walk for miles and miles past hundreds of shops and thousands of commuters, through a line of passport inspection booths that stretches across six time zones. And then you are told that your luggage will be arriving at baggage carousel No. 36.
That’s what gave it away – thirty-six baggage carousels. Do me a favour. Why would you need that many in Finland? Well, I did some investigating and it turns out there are, in fact, only six. It’s just that the numbering starts at thirty-one. And once you notice this, the whole charade falls apart. All the people? Actors, plainly, employed by the government to make the country look busy and industrious.
The shops? Well, I didn’t check but I bet that behind the Dior and the Jack Daniel’s advertising, all you can actually buy are half-hunter watches, No6 cigarettes and confectionery items such as Spangles and Opal Fruits.
Lots of smaller countries do this. They know that their airport is the nation’s porch, so they make it enormous to give the six annual visitors a sense that they have arrived in a country that’s going places. ‘Look at us. We make mobile phones and cars you haven’t heard of, and Santa lives here and that’s why we need an airport that is eighteen times bigger than LAX in Los Angeles. Because we are important.’
It’s all very lovely, I’m sure, but the problem is that by the time the visitor makes it to the taxi rank – and has hopefully not noted they’re all Singer Gazelles full of shop window mannequins – he feels like he’s done an Ironman triathlon and is knackered.
This is an especially big problem for those who visit Helsinki in the winter because unless you arrive between 12.03 p.m. and 12.07 p.m. it will be black dark. And if you do manage to arrive between these times, it will be dark grey. It’s a lovely country, Finland, but the dimmer switch appears to be broken.
That’s why, when I emerged from Helsinki airport last week, exhausted, with my stomach demanding brunch and my eyes telling me it was time for a mug of cocoa, I thought I was getting into a normal Range Rover.
Only when I arrived at the hotel and went to retrieve my luggage from the boot did I notice something was afoot. I own a Range Rover. We use a fleet of them to make Top Gear. There is no car I know better. I certainly know where the boot-release catch is. But on the car in Finland it was in a different place.
Now I know some car manufacturers make small changes to tailor their models for various markets. Cars sold in China, for example, have a longer wheelbase than cars sold elsewhere because Chinese motorists like a lot of room in the back. I’m also aware that the Americans and the French insist on having their steering wheels mounted on the left.
But changing a car in this way is expensive. And I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Land Rover would agree to move the boot-release catch just for the Finns. So I did some journalism and realized after no more than fifteen minutes that I’d just been driven from the airport to the centre of Helsinki in the new Range Rover. One of the most eagerly awaited cars of recent times. And so at dawn the next day, I broke off from breakfast to give it a closer look.
The Range Rover has to walk a fine line. Yes, the vast majority are sold within the M25, but only because the city folk are buying into the country dream. They have to know that Lord Fotherington-Sorbet has one as well. So first and foremost, the Range Rover has to appeal to him.
I was fearful that with the new model the company would go berserk and give up on the countryside altogether. But it has not done this. The chintz is kept in check. Yes, my car was black (a town colour) and had a silver roof (a Cheshire option) but in the dim Finnish light, it looked very good.
My only complaint: on the last model, the heat-extracting gills used to be on the front wings and therefore seemed to have a purpose. But on the new one, they’ve been moved onto the doors where they just look stupid because they’re obviously fake.
Inside, though, I had no complaints at all. The car I drove was a pure four-seater, with a box of electronic goodies separating the back seats. This was nice but you wouldn’t actually buy this option unless you were mad. Up front, I was amazed how similar it all felt to the last model. You have the same split-opening glovebox, the same controls. All the company has really done is redesign the buttons and fit the gear lever from a Jaguar. And thank God for that.
There are some new things, though. The stereo is quite simply the best I’ve ever encountered. The seats are sublime. And now you can choose what colour you would like the interior lighting. And I’m not talking about blue or red. I’m talking about a full Dulux colour chart. I liked the purply blue best. It made up for Helsinki’s broken dimmer switch.
Apart from this, though, it looked and felt like a Range Rover. And then the door handle fell off, which means it’s probably built like a Range Rover too.
To find out for sure, I opened and closed the door twenty times. In the last model, this would have flattened the battery because each time the car was unlocked, the computer thought, ‘Oh, we are going somewhere. I’ll power myself up.’ Then when the door closed, it would power itself down. But Land Rover has obviously fixed the problem now because the battery was fine.
On the road? Well, now this is the really clever bit. The new car may be bigger than the old one, but some versions of it are almost a staggering half a ton lighter. I was fearful this would make it feel less substantial, more Japanesey. But it doesn’t. You now get better acceleration and much better fuel consumption, and it still feels as solid and as regal and as comfortable and as imperious as ever.
Off road? I didn’t have a chance to find out but all of the features you found on the last model are still fitted to the new one. So it should be about the same. Fine on winter tyres. A bit slithery if not.
Three engines are on offer. There’s the 5-litre supercharged V8, which is fine if you are a bit unhinged, and then there’s a 3-litre V6 diesel, which offers extraordinary fuel consumption for a car of this size. And in the middle is a 4.4-litre V8 diesel. That would be my choice. Will be my choice, in fact …
My main emotion after driving this car was much the same as my main emotion during the Olympics opening ceremony. Relief that they hadn’t cocked it up. Then as time went by I started to realize that, like Danny Boyle’s effort, it’s more than not a cock-up. It’s actually brilliant. Expensive, yes. But worth it.
The company spent a billion quid on designing the new lightweight chassis. And then clothed it in a modern-day interpretation of what made the last car such a massive hit, not just with people who wear nylon shorts at work but also people who wear tweed shorts at play. It is a fantastic car. Not just the best off-roader in the world, but one of the best cars full stop.
16 December 2012
Thanks, guys, from the heart of my bottom
Audi RS 4 Avant 4.2 FSI quattro
From a road-tester’s perspective, the good thing about Audi’s RS cars is that you never quite know what you’re going to get. Some are nearly as good as their rivals from BMW. Some are forgettable. Some are dire. And then we get to the new RS 4 Avant, which has just provided me with one of the worst weeks of my entire motoring life.
Bad is a small word that doesn’t even begin to cover the misery. Misery that was so all-consuming that, given the choice of using this car or taking the Tube, I would head straight for the escalator. Not just would. Did.
Day one involved a trip to a place called Stoke Newington, which pretends to be in London but is, in reality, an hour north of the capital, just outside Hull. And straight away I knew there was something terribly wrong.
I have driven bumpy cars in the past. My own Mercedes is extremely firm. But the RS 4 was in a different league. It was like sitting in a spin-dryer that was not only on its final frantic cycle but also falling down a very long, boulder-strewn escarpment. I couldn’t begin to imagine what Audi’s engineers had been thinking of. The interior was typical of the breed. It had all the toys. All the features. So it didn’t look like a stripped-out racer. But that’s what it felt like every time I ran over a pothole or a catseye or a sweet wrapper. It was, in short, a nicely finished brogue – with a drawing pin poking up through the sole. I hated it.
I tried to test some of the features, but so vigorous was the shaking that I gave up. I’d aim my finger at a button, but by the time it got there I’d have run over a bit of discarded chewing gum so it’d bounce off course and hit something else. Usually a bit of carbon fibre that had been added … to save weight.
That’s another issue with the RS 4. It felt like it was set up to scythe round Druids with no roll at all, and yet it weighs more than 1Ç tons. Some of that is muscle from the big V8. But most of it is fat.
And then the brakes started misbehaving. This meant that every time I pulled up, they made a sound exactly like I was running a wetted finger around a wine glass. This made passers-by look at me very crossly.
But the worst thing, by miles, was the steering. There’s absolutely no feel at all when you are going in a straight line. It’s so floppy, you actually begin to think, as you bump along, that it may be broken. And then, when you get to a corner, it suddenly becomes extremely heavy.
That’s why on day two I used the Tube and taxis to get around. But on day three I had to go to Luton, and then Chipping Norton. So I slipped into the same sort of padded underpants I’d wear when being beaten at school and headed north.
You may imagine I’m going to say things got better. But they didn’t. So violent was the bumping and so alarming was the steering that I stuck to 55 mph on the M1. Listening to Radio 3. I’d wanted Radio 2 but my finger had cannoned off the roof, the wiper switch and various other bits and bobs before alighting in completely the wrong place.
What’s interesting is that wherever I went, squash-playing lunatics in other Audis and people on the street would bound over to ask what it was like – I can’t remember a car attracting so much interest – and all looked terribly deflated when I explained that it was utter, utter crap.
All weekend I didn’t drive it at all. Why would you? But then on Sunday night, with a heavy heart, I climbed back on board and set off back to London. As I drew near, it started to rain, so I reached for the wiper switch. Unfortunately I ran over a white line as I did this, and as a result my arm boinged into a button on the dash marked ‘drive select’.
And everything changed.
The steering suddenly developed some feel. The ride settled down. The revs dropped. The RS 4 stopped being a wild animal and became a car. It turns out that ‘drive select’ alters the entire character of the machine. It changes the engine, the steering, the suspension and even the noises that come out of the tailpipe.
It’s there so you can tailor your car to suit your mood. Which does raise a question: what sort of mood was the delivery driver in when he left it at my house, set up to achieve a new lap record in the Saturn V engineering shop?
I have never met anyone who would want, ever, to put their RS 4 in what’s called Dynamic mode. I can’t imagine such a creature exists. Because on all the other settings it’s a good car
. So good that I rode into town on a wave of guilt and shame, remembering what I’d been telling people about it. And how they’d be better off with a diesel BMW. Or a pogo stick. Or some new shoes.
In Comfort mode it’s quiet, the steering is light, the seats are seductive and the double-clutch gearbox creamy and smooth. And because it’s so relaxing, you can sit back and enjoy the firepower from that big V8.
Unlike the engine in most modern performance cars, this one is not turbocharged. The upside of that is crispness and lots of hectic goings-on at the top of the rev band. The downside is that a polar bear could get a bit of asthma at some point in the very distant future. This was one of the world’s best engines when it was introduced six years ago. And nothing’s changed.
Handling? Well, in the past all Audis have been determined understeerers, partly because they were nose-heavy and partly because of the four-wheel-drive system. In this one much work has been done to shift some of the weight aft. And at the back there’s a locking diff. So now you have the grip, but when you get to the end of its tenacity, it’s the rear that starts to feel light, not the front. This, of course, is better, because if you go backwards into a tree, you don’t see it coming.
You could buy one of these cars, and, provided you never, ever, put it in Dynamic mode, you’d be very happy. Your dog would also like it because in the boot there’s a bit of equipment designed, in my mind, to stop him falling over. It works for shopping too.
However, I thought pretty much the same thing when I drove the original RS 4. I liked it very much indeed. But it was not quite as good as BMW’s M3. It lacked the Beemer’s liveliness and, ultimately, its speed.
The new RS 4 bridges the gap and is therefore quite a tempting proposition. But I can pretty much guarantee that as soon as you take delivery, BMW will launch a new version of the M3 and that will once again surge ahead. It was always thus, I’m afraid.