What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . .

by Jeremy Clarkson

  And now I’m going to unpick every single thing I’ve just said by reviewing a car I have driven. The Mercedes SLS AMG Black Series. A lightweight car that isn’t quite as good as its heavier brother.

  To recap. AMG-badged cars are semi-lunatic versions of ordinary Mercs. Black Series cars are semi-lunatic versions of the AMGs. I have one, a CLK. It’s bonkers.

  But bonkers in a good way. Because it’s not really built to go round a track as fast as the laws of physics will allow. It’s not a Porsche or a Ferrari. Yes, it’s lighter and more powerful than the standard AMG car, but these modifications have only been made to increase my smiles per hour. It’s built to be a laugh.

  It’s much the same story with the standard SLS AMG. Oh, sure, it has a carbon-fibre prop shaft that weighs only 4 kg and an engine that can read Latin. But you try going round a corner quickly. The tail will swing wide and pretty soon you’ll be making more smoke than a second world war destroyer. You’ll also be giggling like an infant.

  With the Black Series, though, Mercedes has put its sense of humour back in the box and gone all sensible. Odd that. It is normally so carefree. But whatever, the SLS AMG Black Series now has a Ferrari-style electronic differential that tames the rear end. It also uses exactly the same gearbox that Ferrari puts in the F12berlinetta. Though in the Mercedes it’s tuned to last.

  Oh, and try this for size. While the 6.2-litre V8 develops more horsepower than the standard unit, it delivers 11 fewer torques. That means less fire and brimstone when you put your foot down. And then, finally, various bits and bobs are now made from carbon fibre, which means less weight …

  It should be good. And on a track it is. Very good indeed. Way faster than the standard SLS. But if you’re going on a track, why use a pantomime horse that’s been converted? Why not get a car that was built to be quick in the first place? A much cheaper Porsche 911 GT3, for example.

  And on the road? Well, it still has all the creature comforts and the ride’s not bad, so it feels quite similar to its heavier, slower brother. But it now comes with lots of showy spoilers and flaps. Imagine Kenneth Williams pretending to be the Terminator and you’re sort of there.

  I still love the standard SLS. I like the shape, and the noise and the hysterical muscle-car handling. It’s one of my favourite cars. It makes me happy just thinking about it.

  The Black Series doesn’t. It’s trying to be something it’s not. If I wanted a serious car I’d wait to try the new featherweight Alfa 4C. I’m doing just that tomorrow. And that makes me happy as well.

  6 October 2013

  Grab her lead and forget all about the mess on the floor

  Alfa Romeo 4C

  My coffee machine is a complete and utter pain in the backside. It’s a wall-mounted Gaggia and I cannot recall a single occasion when, after pushing the button, I have taken delivery of a cup of actual coffee.

  It always wants water, and after you’ve filled up its bowl, it says, ‘Empty trays.’ So you empty them, and then it says they aren’t emptied properly. So you empty them again and then again, and then you scrub them until they shine like a furnace worker’s face. And then you put them back and it says, ‘Trays missing.’ So you put them in again more firmly, several times, until it says, ‘Empty trays.’

  Eventually, of course, you resort to extreme brute force, whereupon it becomes Italian and changes tack. ‘Add beans,’ it says. So you open another tin of £900 Illy coffee beans and, being careful not to upset the trays in any way, you pour them into – as I write, I can hear it doing things in the kitchen, but I don’t know what – the bean drawer. And then it says, ‘Clean unit.’ So you have to go against every male instinct and find the instruction book, which tells you to hold clamp A while squeezing nozzle B for about a couple of hours, and then when you put it all back together it says it wants decalcifying.

  Usually I don’t get my morning coffee until it’s time for afternoon tea. But, of course, it’s worth persevering, because when the moment finally arrives the result tastes a whole lot nicer than the instant alternative.

  It’s the same story with your choice of pet. A dog requires almost constant attention. It raids your bin, gets the bones it’s nicked stuck in its throat, bites the postman, eats the milk lady, poos on the carpet, wants a walk when it’s raining, barks in the night for no reason and gets ill on Christmas Day, when the vet is too drunk to come over. But despite all this it’s so much more satisfying than a feed-and-forget cat.

  Which naturally brings me on to Alfa Romeo, an experience that’s subtly different. I had one once, a GTV6, and it was like a coffee machine – that had been designed by a dog. At night it would let all the air escape from its tyres, its clutch would weld itself to the flywheel and once it dropped its gear linkage onto the prop shaft, causing an extremely loud noise to happen, followed by the rear wheels locking up. It was a constant nightmare.

  But here’s the thing: even when it was a sunny day, and it wasn’t being premenstrual, it was a pretty horrible car to drive. The steering was too heavy, the driving position was tailored for an ape, second gear was impossible to find and it handled as though it was running on heroin.

  It’s not alone, either. At present, the Giulietta is ho-hum and the MiTo is ghastly. And if we plunge into the pages of recent history, we find the 8C, which wasn’t quite as good as it looked, and the SZ, which was the other way round. But only because it looked as if it had been designed by a madman. The 33, the 75, the 156, the 159 and the 164? There’s not a great car there. Just many puddles of oil on your garage floor.

  And yet Alfa Romeo is still my favourite car maker. I still believe you can’t really call yourself a petrolhead until you’ve owned one. So why is this?

  It’s no good going back to the Sixties and saying, ‘It’s because of the GTA.’ Yes, it was fabulous, but it was one car in a torrent of rubbish. Judging Alfa on this one achievement would be the same as ignoring all of Mussolini’s crimes simply because he once bought his mother some flowers.

  I’ve had a good, long think and reckon that in all its history Alfa has made only four or five really good cars. Memorable cars. And that in the past thirty years it hasn’t made one.

  Yet the love remains, and I think it’s because we all sort of know what Alfa could and should be making. We have in our minds a mini Ferrari. A supercar on a shoestring. Pretty as hell, lithe as a greyhound, cheap as chips and built for fun. We have in our minds the 4C. It is utterly gorgeous. Spoilt, some say, by the headlamps. Yes, maybe, in the way Cindy Crawford is spoilt by her mole – that is, not spoilt at all.

  But it’s not the looks that impress most with the 4C. It’s how it’s made. Before this, if you wanted a car with an all-carbon-fibre tub, you had a choice: you bought a machine such as a McLaren MP4-12C or you bought a Formula One racer. It’s expensive to make a car this way, but that’s what Alfa has done.

  The benefit is lightness, and that’s a theme it has continued throughout. So, if you’re after luxury and soundproofing and lots of standard equipment, forget it. There’s no satellite navigation. You don’t even get power steering.

  The result is a car that tips the scales, fat with fluids, at well under a ton. Which means it doesn’t need a big engine. Instead, mounted in the middle of the car, is a 1742 cc turbo unit that itself is made to be so light it has to be bolted in place to stop it floating away.

  Disappointed that it only has the four-cylinder engine from a motorized pencil sharpener? Well, don’t be. Because, thanks to the lightness, you can get to 62 mph in 4.5 seconds and onwards past 160 mph. Way past, I found. Oh, and 40 mpg-plus is on the cards as well.

  I shall make no bones about it. I loved this car. It’s like being at the controls of a housefly. You can brake later than you think possible into corners, knowing that there’s barely any weight to transfer. And it has so much grip. Then there’s the noise. Or rather noises. It makes thousands. All loud. All mad.

  Yes, the interior trim is shocking, but if you want that lig
htness, it’s the price you pay. And you do want it. Because lightness is coming. It has to. It makes both the polar bear and the petrolhead happy. And in the Alfa it made me very happy indeed. I drove the car round Lake Como on a sunny evening and there was almost a tear in my eye. I kept thinking that life didn’t really get any better.

  Now the boring stuff. I fitted easily. The boot is big. The dash readout is clever and clear so you don’t need spectacles to see how fast you’re going. And you can choose how you want your car to feel. Really. Just put it in Dynamic mode. And leave it there.

  There are only a couple of drawbacks. The gearbox is a bit dim-witted and the steering isn’t quite as sharp as I had been expecting. Also, it’s wider than a Mercedes SLS AMG, which means it’s wider than Utah. And it costs around £45,000. That, for a carbon fibre-tubbed mini-supercar, is not bad at all. But it does put it in the same price bracket as a Porsche Cayman.

  Of course, the Cayman is more in tune with where we are now. It feels sturdy, and well made and luxurious. But that sort of thing will have to stop. We will have to go down Alfa’s route, which means, in fact, the 4C feels like the future.

  It also feels like the Alfa that the company made only in your dreams. It feels wonderful. I’m sure, naturally, that it will be like my coffee machine to own. But, unlike with any other Alfa in living memory, the rewards will make all the effort worth it.

  13 October 2013

  Goodbye, Dino. It’s the age of the mosquito

  McLaren P1

  Let us be in no doubt about this. The Toyota Prius is a stupid car for sanctimonious people. It has two power sources and is made from rare materials that have to be shipped all over the globe before the finished product is finally delivered with the morning muesli and a copy of the Guardian to some malfunctioning eco-house in some trendy part of town where the coffee shops sell stuff that no one understands.

  Remember how people used to sew CND badges to their parkas in the 1960s? This simple act didn’t actually stop the SS-9 missiles rolling off the Soviet production lines, but it did tell everyone that you were interested in nuclear disarmament. Well, that’s what the Prius is: a badge. A full metal jacket that tells other people you are interested in sandals as well. It’s a knowing wink, a friendly nod. And I hate it.

  However, it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important cars to have seen the light of day. A genuine game-changer. Because versions of its hybrid drive system will eventually be fitted to every single car on the market. McLaren is already there. Its new 903-bhp P1 uses a 727-bhp 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 that works in tandem with a 176-bhp electric motor. This has not been done to save the polar bear, but to produce more speed. A lot more. Yes, you can turn the V8 off and use the electric motor to drive you silently around town, but mostly it’s used to fill in the performance hole while the turbos spool up, and to fire rev-generating backwards torque at the petrol engine during gear changes.

  I asked a McLaren engineer if the P1 would have been even faster if it weren’t fitted with 324 very heavy laptop-style batteries and the extra complexity of the electric motor, and he was most emphatic. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Really, no.’

  So, in other words, McLaren has taken Toyota’s concept and turned it into something else entirely. You can think of this car as Viagra. Designed originally as a drug to mend a patient’s broken heart, it is now sold to keep you going harder and faster for longer and longer.

  And McLaren is not alone. Ferrari is working on a car called, weirdly, the Ferrari the Ferrari, which uses much the same technology. Porsche is nearly there with a hybrid called the 918 Spyder. Already it has lapped Germany’s Nürburgring in six minutes and fifty-seven seconds. That’s faster than any road car has gone before. Mercedes is working on a hybrid S-class.

  They’re not statements. They’re not cars for eco-lunatics. They are cars for people who want the speed they have now – and in some cases even more – but not the petrol bills. What we’ve done, then, is taken a technology intended for the greens … and hijacked it. We’ve weaponized the muesli.

  There’s more, too, because we are about to see a shift in the way cars are made. For years they’ve all been built along pretty much the same lines. The body is a sort of frame onto which the engine, the suspension, the outer panels and the interior fixtures and fittings are bolted.

  This is fine, but as the demand for more luxury and more safety grows stronger, the penalty is weight. Twenty years ago a Vauxhall Nova weighed about 800 kg. Its modern-day equivalent is more than 1,000 kg. Many larger cars tip the scales at more than 2 tons. And weight blunts performance, ruins handling and costs you at the pumps. Try playing tennis with a dead dog on your back and you’ll soon see the problem.

  Happily, there is a solution. It’s called the carbon-fibre tub and it’s been the basis of all Formula One cars for years. It really is just a tub, which is used instead of the frame. And because it’s made from carbon fibre it weighs less than Richard Hammond. Seriously. But it is much stronger. Ferrari uses a similar thing in its road cars. So does McLaren. And now it’s starting to filter down the food chain. The Alfa Romeo 4C has a tub. Maybe one day the Ford Fiesta will too.

  Preposterous? Not really. I remember when the video recorder first went on sale. The Panasonic model was £800 and was viewed by the bitter and mealy-mouthed as being another example of life being all right for some. And here we are today with DVD players being available on benefits.

  For about forty years cars have inched along, getting a little more refined and a little easier to use with each generation. They have been evolving at about the same rate as the trees in your garden. But, in part because of the law makers in Brussels and the need to meet tough rules on what comes out of the tailpipe, we are about to witness a seismic shift. The meteorite has landed, and if the species is to survive, it needs to change.

  I look at all the cars out there now and all the cars in this supplement and I get the impression they are all dinosaurs, roaming about in the fields, chewing grass and bumping into one another, blissfully unaware that the dust cloud is coming.

  Some of them have V12 engines. And they’re not going to survive the storm. Nor will V8s. And that’ll be sad. We’ll all miss the rumble. In the same way, I’m sure, as when the last apatosaurus keeled over, the species that were left may have shed a bit of a tear.

  But look at it this way. It’s argued by some that dinosaurs actually evolved into birds. The velociraptor became the white tern. The Tyrannosaurus rex became the peregrine falcon. And cars will have to do the same thing. It’s already happening, in fact. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ford has squeezed 124 bhp out of the 1-litre three-cylinder engine it fits into the Fiesta. And I challenge anyone to get out after a drive in that thing without wearing a grin the size of Jupiter’s third moon. It’s a riot and yet it can do more than 60 mpg.

  That Alfa Romeo 4C is a pointer as well. It’s light, so it needs only a little petrol-sipping 1742-cc engine to reach 160 mph. But imagine if it were a hybrid, if it had a small electric motor firing gobs of instant torque at the rear wheels while the petrol engine was waking up, and adding horsepower to the mix when the road ahead opened up. It’d be like driving a mosquito that had somehow mated with a water boatman.

  I have enjoyed my time with the dinosaurs. I shall look back at the Mercedes SLS AMG and the Ferrari 458 Italia and the Aston Martin Vanquish with a teary eye. And I shall always keep a picture of the wondrous Lexus LFA in my wallet. But that chapter is closing now. We’re about to start a new one, and from the snippets I’ve seen so far, it looks rather good.

  20 October 2013

  Watch out, pedestrians, I’m packing lasers

  Mercedes-Benz S 500 L AMG Line

  Because I spend pretty much all of my life at airports, I’ve learnt a great deal about the human spirit. And what I’ve learnt most of all is that a man is genetically programmed to go into a branch of Dixons.

  You watch him with his little-wheeled hand lugga
ge and his laptop bag, wandering past all the shops selling perfume, and all the other ones selling Chinese bears in Beefeater suits. He drifts past Smythson like a trout in a slow-moving river and looks neither left nor right as he meanders past the art gallery selling massive horses. He doesn’t even register it – never even stops for a minute to think, How would you get an actual life-sized ceramic horse in the overhead bins?

  But then, carried by the current of his tiny mind, and by impulses over which he has no control, he will slither into Dixons to have a look at all the new machines that beep when you push their buttons. It doesn’t matter if the passenger is late and doing that half-run businessman thing. He will still go to Dixons. Nor does it matter if he’s naked and plainly in need of some new trousers. He will still consider a quick browse in gadget central to be more important. Hungry? Thirsty? Minutes to live? None of these things will get between a man and his need to examine the latest GoPro camera.

  Which brings me on to the new Mercedes S-class. Over the years this flagship has been the pad from which most of the important motoring innovations have been launched. Crumple zones. Collapsible steering columns. Airbags. That sort of stuff. If it matters, we saw it first on an S-class.

  So what manner of new stuff is to be found on the new model, I hear you ask. Well, stand by and roll the drums, because … it comes with the option of having a choice of fragrances in the air-conditioning system. Don’t mock. In thirty years’ time, when the S-class is a minicab, you will welcome anything that masks the overpowering aroma of the driver’s armpits.

  I haven’t finished with the air-conditioning system either, because you are also able to go into the on-board computer and alter the level of ionization in the air being delivered. And what is ionization? Good question. Glad you asked. Because it’s the process by which an atom or a molecule acquires a positive or a negative charge. So, in my book, that means Mercedes has developed a car that can fire lightning out of the air vents. It says that this makes the interior more relaxing. If I were ever to use an exclamation mark after a sentence, I’d have used one then.