That’s why I can’t tell you how this car handles. Because every time I tried to go round a corner with any gusto at all, I fell over. There were other issues too. There are no cupholders. And it comes with an entertainment system that couldn’t even find Radio 2 half the time. The satellite navigation system, meanwhile, was unfathomable. And even if by some miracle I did manage to type in an address, it would take me on a route of its choosing to a destination that it plainly thought was near enough.
I suppose in the interests of fairness I should say that the 154-bhp engine is quite nice and that there is a decent amount of space in the boot. But, to be honest, that’s like saying there’s a decent amount of space in a postbox. There is, but you can’t really get at it because the slot’s too small.
It’s odd. I haven’t disliked driving a car as much as this for quite some time. It was so bad that even though it was half full of petrol paid for by someone else, and had a big sunroof, I spent the whole of last weekend driving around, in the sunshine, in my own hard-top car, using petrol I’d paid for myself.
For a Yorkshireman to do this? Well, it should tell you all you need to know.
28 July 2013
The fun begins once you’ve arm-wrestled Mary Poppins for control
Audi RS 5 cabriolet quattro 4.2 FSI
Over the past few years many companies and organizations have announced they are close to putting a driverless car into production. They all speak of a vehicle that will use satellite navigation to find a destination and radar to monitor its surroundings. A car that will pull up when the traffic stops and move off again when the road is clear. A car that will find a parking space, and reverse into it, all by itself.
But then what? That’s what I’ve never understood. There’s no point sending your car into town to buy a pint of milk because while it will be able to find the right shop and the nearest available parking bay, it will not be able to go inside and actually buy the milk.
Similarly, it would be able to find your office but then it would spend all day just sitting outside. It wouldn’t be able to go to your desk and answer all the emails. A driverless car, then, is completely useless. You have to be inside or there’s no point. And if you’re inside it’s not driverless.
That said, I’m sure there are plenty of people who would very much like to step into their car after a hard day at work, tell it to go home and then curl up in the back for a little sleep. But could you actually nod off? Would you trust the on-board systems to behave? Really? You’d put your life in the hands of the same people that built your laptop?
I flew to the Isle of Man last weekend on a brilliant little aeroplane. It had a whizz-bang glass cockpit and was completely up to date in every way. So the pilot set the autopilot and we sat back for a chat. Things were going very well until we descended out of the clouds near the island’s airport to find that we were heading straight for a hill. If he’d been asleep we’d have hit it.
Which brings me to the Audi RS 5 cabriolet. This has something called active lane assist, a technology that’s not new. But systems we’ve seen in the past simply vibrate the steering wheel if sensors think you’re straying out of your lane on a motorway. The system in the Audi is different: if it thinks you’re drifting out of your lane, it actually takes control of the steering and puts you back on the straight and narrow.
I tested it on the Westway in London and was amazed because it simply stayed in the outside lane, steering nicely round the long left-hander. I didn’t have to do a thing, so I thought, Brilliant. I can get on with some texting …’
But no. Because after a short while a message flashed up on the dashboard saying I now had to take manual control of the steering. What’s the point of that? Why build a car that is capable of steering itself but after a minute or so can’t be bothered?
I’m afraid it gets worse. Because later, on the M40, I decided to pull into the middle lane, and the steering wheel wouldn’t really let me. It was gently pushing the wheel to the right, thinking that I’d nodded off and that my life needed saving.
It was not a big push. It was like arm-wrestling a child. You can overcome the system, but unless you indicate – which tells the sensors you’re moving on purpose – it argues every single time you cross a white line. This started to drive me mad. I therefore decided to turn it off. But I couldn’t find out how to. And that made even my hair angry.
You spend an extra £370 on this system, hoping that one day it will save your life. Then it will drive you so mental that you’ll want to drive into a wall and kill yourself. And it won’t let you. My advice then is simple. There are many options you can have on the RS 5. But don’t, whatever you do, buy this one.
Which brings me on to the nutty question. Should you be buying an RS 5 cabriolet at all? Well, let’s start with the engine. It’s a joy. To meet stringent emission regulations, most new engines are turbocharged. You can’t really tell. There’s no lag any more between putting your foot down and the commencement of acceleration. And yet …
When you put your foot down in the Audi and that naturally aspirated 4.2-litre engine is energized, it’s just better. You can’t put your finger on why this is so. But it is. This is a tremendous engine – one of the very best in production today.
And the rest of the car? Well, that depends. If you have the on-board drive control software set to Comfort, it’s a fairly quiet, reasonably comfortable boulevardier. You don’t drive it in this mode so much as promenade in it.
But if you engage the Dynamic mode, the feel of everything changes. The engine becomes more urgent, the gearbox snaps to attention. Even the noise is different. In Comfort mode the RS 5 is quiet, like a nuclear power station. You sense rather than hear the grunt being produced. But in Dynamic mode it’s like a nuclear power station that’s blown up. It’s loud and a bit scary. I liked it.
It encourages you to drive a little more quickly, to explore the outer limits of the four-wheel-drive system. But sadly I can’t report on how the handling stands up to right-foot brutality because the active lane assist system kept steering me where it wanted to go, rather than what was necessary.
It’s remarkable, really, that I liked this car so much when it had such a deeply annoying feature. It would be like AA Gill enjoying his dinner, despite the large globule of chef phlegm that was clearly visible on the potatoes.
Perhaps it’s because my week with the car coincided with what the government laughably called a ‘level-three heatwave’. A convertible this good in weather that sensational was a joy. It made you question the need for a driverless car. It would be like having driverless sex. Why give over such pleasurable duties to a machine?
I had that canvas top up and down like a pair of whore’s drawers and I learnt many things: that you can raise or lower it at speeds of up to 31 mph; that when it’s up, it keeps the sound on the outside and the chill on the inside. And that when it’s down, you get a burnt face.
I also decided that Audi does a pretty good interior these days. Everything is sensibly placed, intuitive and well screwed together.
There are a couple of things that grate, though. It’s not the best-looking car in the world. It comes across as heavy, which it isn’t especially. And it is bit pretentious. But worse than this is the price. It’s not even adjacent to cheap. In fact, it’s on the wrong side of bleeding expensive.
However, until BMW gets round to launching a convertible version of the forthcoming M4, this is as good as it gets. Just remember: do not fit the active lane assist. And spend the £370 you save on Red Bull. That way, you won’t need it.
4 August 2013
Gliding gently into the parking slot reserved for losers
Peugeot 2008
My children are not even remotely interested in cars. My son has a Fiat Punto, simply because it’s Italian and he quite likes pasta and Inter Milan. He has no clue about its engine and is really only bothered about fuel economy. Speed, he reckons, is dangerous and silly.
It’s
the same story with all his friends. They can tell you who plays centre-back for every football team in Europe, and how many left-footed goalkeepers there are in the Premier League, but could they tell the difference between an Audi and a Mercedes? Not in a million years. Would they be able to identify Kimi Räikkönen? Nope, not even if he was all alone in a shed wearing a name badge.
Then we have my friends. Of these, maybe three are what you might call interested in cars. The rest simply aren’t bothered at all. Mostly they go out every couple of years and buy whatever Range Rover happens to be in the showroom that day.
I’m aware also that there are significant numbers of people who dislike cars in the same way they dislike soap and David Cameron. And all of this raises the question: who’s watching Top Gear? Who’s buying all the car magazines? Why has Ferrari just had a record year?
I’ve been pondering on this for quite some time and now I think I have the answer. It’s the people who go shopping in London’s gigantic Westfield centre.
The multistorey car park there is permanently packed with slammed Volkswagen Golfs, tarted-up Beemers and tricked-out Mercedes. It echoes constantly to the bellow of big-bore exhausts, the squeal of tortured 35-profile tyres and the boom of megawatt sound systems. It’s a cathedral to the god of horsepower. A meeting point for the disciples of speed.
They’ve even worked out their own rules in there. The car park’s owner has introduced a one-way system and various give-way points, but they’ve been replaced with a simpler system, which is: whoever has the most expensive car has the right of way. It works rather well.
Of course, you get people who cheat. Recently a chap in an AMG-badged Mercedes tried to nick the only remaining space outside Waitrose, but I’d already clocked that he was actually in an E 250 so gave no quarter at all.
However, last week it all went wrong, because I was driving a Peugeot 2008 Cross Dresser. And that, in the car park at Westfield, is the bottom of the food chain. It is the speck that insects eat. So you have to give way to absolutely everyone and then you must park in the loser lane, miles from the shops.
It’s much the same story elsewhere. In Notting Hill two trendy-looking Dutch tourists stopped dead in their tracks, pointed at me and burst into peals of laughter. Then they took photographs and wandered off, laughing at those too. I think that if I’d just spent £19,145 on this car, and people laughed at me wherever I went, I’d be a bit disconcerted.
But I wouldn’t have just spent £19,145 on this car because I simply don’t understand the appeal. And it’s the same story with all its rivals. The Mini Countryman, the Ford B-Max, the Vauxhall Whateveritis. And that dreary new Renault. You pay more than you would for a standard hatchback and all you get in return is the ability to drive while wearing a busby.
I think they’re cars for people who’ve completely given up on life. They know they will never again have sex outside, or wake up with a hangover. Life has become a beige montage of comfortable shoes, nights in front of the television and excruciating anniversary dinners at the local Harvester. When you see someone go past in a car such as this, you know that he will be actively looking forward to the cold embrace of death.
But the fact is that many people do like cars of this type, in the same way that many people like All Star Mr & Mrs and marzipan. So it is my job to see how the Peugeot stacks up. And the truth is … it’s really not bad at all.
It won’t go round corners very fast, and it’s about as exciting as being dead, but as a car for someone who sees no fun in anything at all, it makes a good deal of sense. Providing it doesn’t go wrong. Which, because it’s a Peugeot, it probably will.
But if it doesn’t, it’s surprisingly good. First of all, the suspension is so delightfully soft you don’t feel potholes at all, or speed humps, or your neighbour’s bicycle, or any of the other things that Peugeot drivers are prone to running over. It glides around like a hovercraft.
You can buy it with a petrol engine but why waste your money? You’re not interested in revs or speed. You’re just waiting for death, so save your pennies on fuel and have the diesel. That’s the engine I tested, and again I was surprised. It pulls so well from low revs that you could stick it in top and leave it there all day. And it’s not just torquey; it sips diesel in the same way that an old lady sips a sherry.
It’s a nice place to sit in as well. There are natty materials in the cabin, with some nice stitching on the upholstery, and my model came with a glass roof, so it felt airy and pleasant. The satnav was dead easy to use, the car had many toys and even possessed a Range Rover-style traction system. You tell it what sort of surface you’re driving on and it decides which wheel should get the power. The only slight niggle is that it’s not actually four-wheel drive. So, really, it’s just a knob for impressing your passenger. It doesn’t really do anything at all.
I suppose, grudgingly, I will admit that because of the taller, boxier body you do get more space everywhere than you do in the standard hatchback. There really is room in the back for people, and the boot could handle three medium-sized dogs. Four, if you didn’t like them very much.
So as a tool it must be said that this car ticks many boxes and does a lot of important things extremely well. But I hated it. I loathed the way it makes no attempt at all to be exciting or exhilarating. And I felt embarrassed to be in a Peugeot, which has become a badge of honour for the terminally uninterested.
In short, this car does absolutely nothing for me, and I don’t blame my fellow disciples in the Westway shopping centre’s car park for treating me – and it – with such disdain and derision.
But for the vast majority of people – and I mean, 97.3 per cent of the population – it makes a deal of sense. If – and it’s a big if – it is reliable, then you really couldn’t ask for more. The only trouble is, the sort of people I’m talking to have used this bit of the newspaper to line the budgie cage. So they’ll never know.
10 August 2013
Where the hell did they hide the ‘keeping up with Italians’ button?
Jaguar F-type
I bet there’d be a hint of regret as well – a sadness that my life hadn’t worked out quite as well as I’d hoped, and that the chap who’d just blasted by had more important things to do than sit behind my sorry arse all day long. That he was more important and more clever. And possibly fitted with a bigger gentleman sausage.
Well, last week I found out exactly what it is like to be passed by faster-moving traffic. I was driving the new Jaguar F-type; the one with the big engine. The V8 S. It can accelerate from 0 to 62 mph in less time than it takes someone with a mild stutter to say ‘62 mph’ and it has a top speed of close to 190 mph. It is a very, very, very fast car. But I was in Italy, so absolutely everything else was even faster.
I pulled out of a restaurant one night, roof down, stars twinkling and Lake Como stretching away into the moonlight shadow of that glorious Alpine hinterland. With something zesty on the stereo, I engaged Dynamic mode and roared off into the night.
It was an epic evening to be driving, and an epic road, but after a short while I began to notice that a pair of headlights that had been some distance back were gaining awfully quickly. And, of course, not wanting to inconvenience a local by getting in his way, I increased to flank speed.
Now the Jag was really bellowing. That big 5-litre supercharged V8 was flexing its muscles after each corner and hurling me into the xenon glow that lay ahead. But it was no good. The headlights were right behind me by this stage, so I did what any decent human being would do: I pulled over in the next lay-by to let him past.
And guess what. He was driving a 1.25-litre Ford Fiesta. The old model with the Yamaha engine and the silly oval grille. That was not an inspiring car when it was new, and now, more than fifteen years later, I bet it’s even worse. But I can report that with an Italian at the wheel it is still faster than a hot Jag.
And there’s more. It is a fact that on a twisting mountain road a car is always going to
be faster than even the fastest superbike. A bike simply doesn’t have enough grip to corner anywhere near as quickly as a car … unless there’s an Italian on board, in which case it somehow has all the grip in the world.
I love driving in Italy, I truly do, because there the car has nothing to do with environmentalism or politics. And to describe it as a means of transport is the same as describing a fresh sardine that’s been grilled in a bit of butter and flour as a means of staying alive. To an Italian the car is an expression of your soul, your zest for life. Speed is not dangerous. It’s necessary.
You may know the coastal motorway that heads from France towards Genoa. For an hour or so you are either in a tunnel or on a viaduct or going round a hairpin bend with a 1,000-foot drop on either side. If this were anywhere else in the world there would be a 30-mph speed limit, enforced by helicopter gunships. But it’s Italy so it has the same 130-kph (81-mph) limit as all the other motorways.
And that, I presume, is a 130-kph minimum, because everyone – mums, nuns and the conker-brown, walnut-faced peasantry in their ancient Fiats – was doing more like 150 kph. Round blind bends where you could not possibly see if the road ahead was blocked. It was madness, and I loved it.
Twice, over the years, I have been pulled over by the Italian police while driving a Lamborghini. And on both occasions I was told very sternly that I wasn’t driving fast enough. You have to love that. And on my most recent trip I was getting much the same sort of treatment from everyone. I really did get the distinct impression that many people were extremely annoyed with the lumpen, badly dressed Englishman in his enormous, slow-moving Jaguar.
I, meanwhile, was having a ball, because the F-type is one of those cars, and Italy is one of those places, where you stomp about all morning thinking up excuses to go for a drive.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . Page 41
