What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  This is a good thing because as a general rule convertibles do not ride or handle or go anywhere near as well as cars that have roofs. That’s because today the chassis of a car is its bodyshell. The front and the back ends are joined not by two huge rails, which used to be the case, but by the floor and the roof. Taking 50 per cent of that connection away means you have to add all sorts of strengthening beams that a) add weight and b) are never really a satisfactory substitute. Soft-top cars never feel stiff. Much like many of the people who drive them.

  The McLaren, however, is different. Because the spine of the original was so rigid, no strengthening beams have been added at all. That means no extra weight – apart from the electric roof mechanism – and no compromises. As a result, this car feels exactly the same as the hard-top. Which is to say, it feels magical. As if it’s being propelled by witchcraft.

  No car in the world has better steering. It’s very light, which suggests there’s no feel. But in fact there is so much that when you run over a wasp, you can tell whether it was a male or a female. This means you can feel the precise moment when grip is about to be lost. Which means you always feel completely in control.

  You’re not, though. A computer is. You can turn it off, if you are a space shuttle commander and you have half an hour to kill, but there’s no point. Because it will let you take diabolical liberties before it steps in, like a well-trained butler, with a gentle helping hand. It’s the best traction control system I’ve yet encountered.

  And it’s almost never necessary. Fitting a car this well behaved with an electronic restraining bolt is like fitting the Archbishop of Canterbury with an ankle tag. It’s pointless. Because the spine is so stiff, and because there are no anti-roll bars, there’s no physical connection between any of the wheels – it’s all done electronically – so the cornering speeds of this car are simply immense. Around a track, I know of no road car that could even get close.

  If you have a Ferrari 458, do not attempt to keep up with a McLaren 12C. You will be either humiliated or killed.

  And here’s the clincher. When you have finished tearing up the laws of physics and your neck hurts from the cornering G-forces and it’s time to go home, the 12C is as comfortable as a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Even though it will corner at Mach 3, the lack of anti-roll bars means it simply glides and floats over bumps and potholes. As I said, witchcraft.

  As a piece of engineering, then, it’s fabulous. Jaw-dropping. Mesmerizing. But as a car? Hmmm. There are one or two things that would drive you mad. For instance, every time you open the butterfly door to get in, the side window will take your eye out. I must also say that if you are tall, the cockpit is a little tight. And the satnav doesn’t work. It always thinks it’s where you were two hours earlier, but that’s not really the end of the world, because with the roof down you can’t see the screen anyway.

  There’s more too. Almost every feature is adjustable. You can even alter the volume of the wastegate chirrup. But only if you are six years old. Because when you go into the system menu, you’ll find the typeface is in 2 pt and you won’t be able to read it. Not without putting on a pair of reading glasses and peering into the binnacle, something that’s not advisable when you are in a 600-plus brake horsepower soft-top and you’re doing 200 mph.

  These things may be enough to drive you in the direction of the Ferrari. But remember, that comes with a steering wheel that’s unfathomable and electronic readouts that make the McLaren look as though it’s been made by Playmobil. I’m afraid, then, that if you buy either of these cars, it will infuriate as often as it exhilarates. It was always thus in the world of the supercar, though.

  It has been suggested by some that they are similar in other ways too and that choosing between them is difficult. But that’s not so, actually. They may look the same, cost about the same and have the same basic design parameters. But they are completely different.

  The McLaren is like a three-star restaurant. The food is immaculate, the service impeccable, the loos impressive and the temperature just so. Every detail is spot-on, and to give the place a bit of character, there’s now a maître d’ who has a twinkle in his eye.

  The Ferrari, on the other hand, is a loud Italian joint full of shouting and massive pepper grinders. They’re both restaurants, then. And they’re both bloody good. But they are not remotely similar. As a result, I cannot tell you which is better. You have to choose what you want, and don’t worry, because whichever way you go, I promise you this: you’ll end up with a masterpiece.

  23 June 2013

  Take the doors off and put them back on? That’ll be £24,000, sir

  BMW M6 Gran Coupé

  In the olden days it was jolly difficult to design a car. You had to use slide rules and pencils and guesswork. And you couldn’t simply buy in parts from Lucas, because it was usually on strike, and even when it wasn’t, the parts you’d bought didn’t fit and wouldn’t work anyway.

  It would take years – and all the money the government had – to get your new model designed, and then you’d have to make all the tooling necessary to put it into production. This is why, when a car went on sale, it stayed on sale for 200 years. It’s also why each car company made only a handful of models.

  Today, though, you just fire up your laptop and ask it to design a car, and while you go for a chat at the water fountain, it comes up with the answer. An answer that’ll be safe, economical and made from parts that will be delivered bang on time and that will work.

  What’s more, the finished product will be modular. Which means that all the expensive bits can be used on other models. It’s for this reason that Volkswagen made just three models in 1960. And about four million today. Because while an Audi A3 looks different from a Golf, underneath it isn’t.

  This is good news, of course, but because it’s now easy to make a new model, car makers are going a bit mad. Which brings me to the subject of this morning’s column …

  In the beginning there was the BMW M5. Then BMW made a two-door version of it called the M6. And now there’s a four-door version of the two-door M6 that is called the M6 Gran Coupé.

  It’s going to be a tester for BMW’s showroom salespeople, that’s for sure. Because they will have to say to prospective customers, ‘Yes, it has the same engine and running gear as the M5. And the same number of doors. But here’s the thing, sir. It’s £24,000 more expensive and there’s less space inside.’

  A car maker can get away with that when a coupé is dramatically and noticeably better-looking than the saloon on which it is based. People will always pay for style. But when the coupé isn’t dramatically different? Hmmm. As I said. It’s going to be tough for the hair-gel-and-Burton boys.

  However, let us be in no doubt that the M6 Gran Coupé is extremely good-looking. It’s better-looking, weirdly, than the two-door M6. And while there is a hefty price premium, it does come with some things the M5 doesn’t have, such as a carbon-fibre roof for a lower centre of gravity.

  There’s more too. While I like the M5, it does come with a whiff of the enthusiast about it. Every one you see has been bought second-hand on the internet, fitted with private plates to disguise that fact and then polished to within an inch of its life. Then you have the driver, who always looks exactly like the sort of person you don’t want to sit next to at a dinner party. The sort of person that refers to his car by its manufacturing code, not its name. With an M6 Gran Coupé you don’t get that association. Yet.

  Plus, I’m a sucker for pillarless doors and rear seats that are separated by an (optional) console full of knobs and dials. Sitting in the back of this thing is like sitting in a private jet, and no one’s complained about that. Even though your knees are in your nipples, your head’s on the ceiling, it’s deafening and there’s no lavatory.

  So, yes, I will say that there is just enough in this car to warrant the price premium over both the M6 and the M5. Right now it’s the M car to have. Provided that’s what you want. But is it?


  Well, not the first time you drive it, that’s for sure. God, it’s complicated, and there is an electric German on hand to stop you doing anything out of sequence. Or that feels natural. Or sensible. It won’t let you do anything without ordering you to do something else first. This means that soon you will be screaming at it, ‘I own your arse! And if I want to put you in Drive without pressing the switch first, I will!’

  Sometimes, though, it asks you to do things that you can’t do. Such as putting it in Park before getting out. Which is tricky because there is no Park button. ‘Bong,’ it says. And then ‘bong’ again. And then ‘bong’. You feel like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, constantly being asked if it’s safe, and you panic because you don’t know the answer.

  Eventually, when you are mad and drooling, you will get out anyway, hoping the bloody thing does roll into a river. And this is the good bit. When you get out, it goes into Park all by itself. I wanted to kick it.

  Some of the electronics, however, are very good. The satnav is huge and brilliant. The ability to choose settings for the suspension and the steering and the powertrain and then store your preferences for future reference is wonderful. And … I’m sounding like a stuck record. Because I said exactly the same thing when I reviewed the M5 last year.

  There’s another similarity too. A great sense of weight. When you push down on the accelerator, you sense that the 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 is really having to gird all of its 552 loins to get the car rolling, and it’s the same story when you turn the wheel. You feel as though you are asking the suspension to deal with something that’s heavier than most monasteries.

  And yet strangely it weighs less than two tons. It’s not a lightweight, by any means, but by today’s standards it’s not a porker either. And, anyway, some people enjoy the sense of driving about in a hill. Rather than rolling down it while inside a balloon.

  However, you won’t be thinking about weight when you really mash the throttle into the carpet, because this car absolutely flies. It’s really, properly fast, and, better still, it doesn’t make much of a song and dance about it. There’s a trend these days for fast cars to let you know they’re fast by barking every time you go near the throttle. The BMW doesn’t. It just gets on with its speed, efficiently and with no fuss.

  Cornering? Yup, it does that too. And from memory it does it better than the two-door M6, which feels woolly and soft. Sadly, though, I’m not going to ring the man in BMW’s suspension control department (electronics subdivision) and ask why this is so. Because undoubtedly he’s the sort of chap who would enjoy telling me for hours.

  It didn’t take me long to work out that this car is special and unusual. An M5 with a hint more style. A genuinely nice place to sit. And, all things considered, it’s not a bad price tag. Yes, its value will depreciate like a fat man falling off a tower block, but £97,490 in the showroom isn’t bad. Not when you see how much Aston Martin wants for a Rapide.

  Mercedes, of course, does the CLS 63 AMG, which is similar, and Audi has its RS 7 in the wings. But for now I think the BMW makes the most sense. If it had sensible controls and a Park button, I’d even consider giving it four stars, but it hasn’t, so …

  30 June 2013

  Thunderbird and Mustang have gone, so what’ll we call it, chaps?

  Vauxhall Adam

  This morning a man in a chunky-neck jumper and corduroy trousers is sitting down to his plate of kippers, blissfully unaware that he’s the last person in Britain to have been christened Malcolm. It’s much the same story with his wife, Brenda, and his friends from the lodge, Neville and Roger.

  Who is Britain’s youngest Simon? Is there a Clive aged under ten? Where is the last Derek? Do you live next door to the final Brian?

  This cull of monikers doesn’t happen in Iceland, because the government gives new parents a list of names from which to choose. But here the army of opinion-forming orange people have got it into their heads that they can call their poor little tyke pretty much anything that comes into their heads. And, frankly, why go for something traditional such as Edith or Gertrude when you can name your little girl after a sweet white wine, or a village where you had particularly enjoyable sex in Crete?

  This, of course, brings me on to the naming of cars. By and large it’s always been very simple. Expensive cars such as BMWs and Mercedes and Audis were given numbers and letters. Smaller, cheaper cars had names. And usually those names were absolutely terrible.

  Fiat has always been especially hopeless. Over the years, it has had the Road and the One and the Point. But we can’t forget Austin Rover, which named the car it said would save it from the dustbin after the Paris underground system. Can you imagine Renault calling its next little car the Tube? No. Neither can I.

  Volkswagen isn’t much better, but there’s a reason for this. In the past it would give a shortlist of names to executives in the company, who were asked to rate them out of ten. Which meant the winner was invariably the name that was everyone’s second or third favourite. How else could they have arrived at the Golf? That’s like calling a car the Herpes.

  Then we have Nissan, which for a long time kept alive traditional English names that Coleen and Wayne felt were beneath them. There was the Cedric, the Gloria and the Silvia.

  Toyota, meanwhile, called the first car it tried to sell in America the Toyolet. Until the importers suggested that Toyopet might be a bit better. And then we had the Mitsubishi Starion. Which was supposed to have been the Stallion but there was a mix-up caused by the Japanese problem with the letter ‘l’.

  There have been some good names, though. The best by a mile – and I won’t take any argument on this – is the Interceptor. The Pantera was pretty good as well but, really, for consistently good names you need to look to America, which has given us the Thunderbird and the Mustang, the Cougar and the Barracuda.

  It’s a confidence thing, I guess, the big, toothy ability to name an awful, slow car after a wild, ferocious animal: it’s like calling your son Hercules, even if you have an inkling he’ll grow up to be a six-stone weed with asthma and pipe cleaners for arms.

  All of this brings me on to the new baby Vauxhall. The company has called it the Adam, which was the Christian name of the founder of Vauxhall’s sister brand Opel, but the car maker says that’s not why it chose the name. It says it chose Adam for the reason that UKTV changed the name of its G2 channel to Dave. Because it’s a nice name. I think I agree.

  The Adam is supposed to take Vauxhall into territory currently occupied by the Fiat 500 and the Mini. It’s supposed to be a trendy car for young urbanites. But there’s a small problem with that. The Fiat and the Mini hark back to cars people remember fondly, but what does the Adam hark back to? The Chevette? The Viva?

  ‘The Prince Henry,’ said a spokesman for General Motors, Vauxhall’s owner. Well, it’s true. The Prince Henry was indeed very special – the first performance car – but if you can remember that, I suspect you’re not really in the market for a small car. Or indeed any car. Not since your final road journey in that hearse.

  No. This new car cannot rely on people wanting to recapture a flavour of the Fifties and Sixties. It’s going to have to stand up on its own four wheels. So does it?

  There are three trim levels: Jam, Glam and Slam. But each is available with a bewildering array of options. There are, and I’m not making this up, billions and billions of permutations. And don’t worry if you make a mistake and order ‘Men in Brown’ door mirrors – that’s what they’re called – because you can have them changed for the ‘White My Fire’ option in a jiffy.

  In fact, when you become bored with the look of the interior you’ve selected, you can change it next month or next year for something completely different, for £70.

  The upshot is that you cannot hate the way the Adam looks because you can make it look however you want. You can’t really hate it as a town car either. There is space in the back for two people, provided their lower legs are no more than 3 inches thick
, and there is a boot that’s just about big enough for a midweek shop.

  Visibility is good, the clutch is light, the steering is nice and the ride comfort is exceptional. Take away all the connotations, and the fashion aspiration, view it as a town car only, and I have to say it’s better than the Fiat and the Mini.

  But as an all-round car, I’m not sure. The model I selected was a 1.4-litre Slam with a chessboard roof lining, yellow trim on the wheels and a billion other sporty features besides. This meant it looked like a hot hatch, and one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t.

  The Adam is not at all fast. It doesn’t handle with much enthusiasm and at 70 mph on the motorway it feels awfully busy – as if it’s sort of surprised to be there.

  There are more things too. It doesn’t come with satellite navigation or a telephone, because it is designed to hook up to your smartphone and piggyback the features on that instead. In theory this is a properly good idea. I even asked a man from Vauxhall how it all worked, and in a matter of seconds, well, minutes – well, a quarter of an hour – he had the car talking to his phone.

  But when I was left to fly solo, my phone treated the Adam in the way that a reluctant bitch treats a dog. There was no mating at all.

  So. There are problems but overall it’s a likeable and practical little car. The only thing that would stop me buying one if I were in the market for such a thing is its other name. Adam is fine. Vauxhall, though? They’ve still got some way to go with that.

  7 July 2013

  Ha! They’ll never catch me now I’m the invisible man

  VW Golf GTI 2.0 TSI Performance Pack

  There are many wonderful cars on the market right now: the Ferrari 458 Italia, the McLaren 12C Spider, the Bentley Continental GT V8, the Mercedes SLS AMG, the Lexus LFA, the Aston Martin Vanquish and the BMW M6 Gran Coupé. All are fast, stylish and characterful and I’d happily own any one of them. But I can’t, because driving around in a flash car is like driving around naked. You tend to get noticed. Which is not something I find very enjoyable.