Anyway, Vine said that when an elderly lady is marooned in the middle of the road and the lights go green for traffic, motorists start to rev their engines. Really? What motorists do this? I have been driving for thirty-six years and not once have I ever been tempted to rev my engine to encourage an old woman to get a bloody move on. What’s more, I’ve never heard anyone else do it either. The idea that an adult would do such a thing is preposterous.
But, of course, you can’t be bothered to telephone the show and say that, because you would be faced with someone who says it happens all the time. And then you’d be in a does/doesn’t argument until it was time for ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow.
This meant the counter-argument was put by a lunatic from a ‘motoring’ organization who said that if the lights at pelicans were retuned to give old people time to cross the road, it would be bad for the economy. At that point I switched over to Radio 4.
Later in the show they were going to be discussing bicycles and why, in London alone, in the past month seven million cyclists have been killed by motorists on purpose. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to that because at no point would anyone say, ‘If you’re going to put thousands of bicycles on the streets of London it is inevitable that some of them are going to be squished.’ That would be the voice of reason. And that isn’t allowed in Vineworld.
There are other issues, too, that are always held aloft as shining examples of the motorist’s stupidity. We all drive with our rear fog lights on, apparently, even when the weather is dry and clear. Really? I ask only because I haven’t seen anyone do that for twenty years or more.
We all hog the middle lane as well. This, of course, is true, but usually because the inside lane is crammed full of lorries. So technically we’re not hogging it. We’re just using it. We also block yellow junctions. Nope. You’re confusing us with bus drivers.
Then we have young motorists who tear about at breakneck speed. This is a given. A fact. There is no arguing with it. Even though it simply isn’t true. Most young people I know drive extremely slow cars very carefully because they can’t afford the petrol that breakneck speed requires.
Yes, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a problem with twockers, and kids on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford tearing hither and thither in other people’s hot hatchbacks. But that doesn’t happen any more. So complaining about it is like complaining about BT giving people party lines. And the quality of the recordings on Dial-a-Disc. And French 101 lavatories.
There is, however, one Vine discussion topic that is worth the time of day. The new-found fondness people have for SUVs. Naturally in Vineland they’re called Chelsea tractors and they’re all driven by silly rich women and they all have bull bars. And pretty soon the producer will put a caller through from the Labour party, who will say, ‘They were designed to go off road but all they ever do is put a wheel on the pavement.’ And then I switch over to Radio 4 again.
The fact is this. There are two types of off-road car. There’s an off-road car that is designed to go off road. A Range Rover, for instance. And then you have off-road cars that are not designed to go off road. These are called SUVs and they annoy me.
I look at everyone in their Honda CR-Vs and their BMW X3s and their Audi Q3s and I think, Are you all mad? An ordinary estate or hatchback costs less to buy and less to run and is nicer to drive, more comfortable and just as practical. But it doesn’t take up so much bloody space.
I parked yesterday between two of the damn things in a London square, and because they were so wide I couldn’t open my door, which meant I was stuck inside, being forced to listen to Vine’s callers phoning up to moan about secondary picketing.
Now, though, things are getting completely out of hand because Audi has decided that what the world really needs is another fast SUV. And so welcome to the SQ5, the fastest-accelerating diesel SUV of them all.
First things first: it’s not fast. If Audi had really wanted it to blister tarmac and earn its own slot on Jeremy Vine, the company would have given it a big petrol V8. But instead it has a twin-turbo diesel unit that is made to sound fast by the fitting of a speaker to the exhaust system.
Furthermore, if Audi had actually been serious about making it a high-riding modern-day take on the old quattro, it would have entrusted the suspension alterations to its in-house performance division. But it didn’t. It simply added some fat tyres and lowered the suspension and left it at that.
You read that right. It lowered the suspension. So Audi made a car that was jacked up to suit the weird new trend. And then to capitalize still further on that trend, it lowered it again.
Oh, it’s not completely horrid to drive. It zooms along with a fair degree of urgency, and I have to say the compromise between ride and handling isn’t bad at all. Even though it’s not as good as it would have been if the roof weren’t a menace to much of Europe’s air traffic.
Inside? Well, the back bench slithers backwards and forwards – a nice touch – but you don’t get satnav as standard, which seems a bit mean. The worst thing, however, is the visibility. The pillars, the headrests and the door mirrors all seem to conspire to make everything outside disappear. You could easily run over a cyclist in this vehicle and simply not know it had happened.
Which brings us to an inevitable conclusion. No. Motorists get a bad-enough press as it is, without driving around in cars such as this. I drove it for one day. And then went to Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, to get away from it. I’ll come back when it’s gone.
1 December 2013
I’m sorry, Comrade. No Iron Curtain, no deal
Dacia Sandero Access 1.2
It’s strange. Today there are far fewer car makers than there were thirty years ago. And yet choosing what sort of car you would like next has never been more difficult. This is because thirty years ago only one thing mattered: the letter at the beginning of the numberplate. That’s what told your neighbours you had a new car.
The idea of identifying a vehicle’s age by a letter on the numberplate started in 1963. But quite quickly the car makers noticed that it was creating a massive problem. Because the letter denoting age changed on January 1, everyone wanted to take delivery of their new vehicle on New Year’s Day. This meant car salesmen had to sit about dusting the pot plants for eleven months and then work like mad ants over the Christmas holidays. It made life tough in the car factories as well and created a cash-flow headache seen previously only in the nation’s turkey industry.
And so in 1967 the changeover date became August 1. This, it was felt, would create two spikes. One at the beginning of the year, when people could take delivery of a 1968 model. And one in August, when the new letter became available. But it didn’t work. That letter meant more than the endeavours of Pope Gregory.
That letter trumped everything. It said you were doing well. That life was being kind. It was critical. Nobody cared what sort of car they bought just as long as other road users knew it was new. And strangely the people this helped most of all were the comrades behind the Iron Curtain.
Cars made in the Soviet bloc were cheap. They were therefore the easiest way of getting the right letter on your driveway. People would see the H-registration plate and say, ‘Have you seen the Joneses at number forty-seven have a new car?’ and simply not notice that it was a Moskvich. Which wasn’t really a car, so much as a collection of pig iron fashioned into a rough approximation of a car.
Or the FSO Polonez. Made in Poland by people who didn’t care, from steel that was both heavy and see-through, it was utterly dreadful. The steering wheel was connected to the front wheels by cement, and when you pressed the accelerator, it felt as though you had sent a signal to an overweight and sweaty man in a vest, who rose in a disgruntled manner from his seat in the boot to put some more coal on the fire. Eventually this would cause you to go 1 mph faster.
Braking? Yes. It had that. Though really it was like trying to stop an overloaded wheelbarrow on a steep, muddy hill. Certainly in b
oth cases you tended to end up with brown trousers. But despite all this the FSO sold in respectable numbers because it was available at no extra cost with a V on its numberplate.
Then there was the Lada Riva. It was originally designed by Fiat when Ben-Hur was still the star attraction in Rome – I mean the actual Ben-Hur, not Charlton Heston – and the design rights were sold to Lada, which promptly didn’t develop it at all. Why should they? There was a thirty-year waiting list at home, there was no competition and there were plenty of people in Britain who’d buy one because of its numberplate.
Oh, the company had other reasons. It would argue that because the Lada was designed and built to handle Russian roads, it was tough. This was untrue. It was actually designed to handle Italian roads and it had the crash protection of a paper bag. The pillars supporting the roof had the strength of drinking straws, which meant that if you rolled during an accident your head was going to end up adjacent to your heart.
Skoda, bless it, tried its hardest with some interesting designs. But back at home it had no yardstick against which these designs could be measured. So often they didn’t work. Though when I say ‘often’, I mean ‘always’.
Unusual rear-suspension design on rear-engined cars meant that if you tried to take any corner at any speed, the rear wheel would fold up, the car would spin and you’d hit a tree and die screaming in a terrifying fireball. And at your funeral they’d say how sad it was because you’d just bought a new car.
Of course it was inevitable that one day the alphabet would run out of new letters for car registration plates, and so someone came up with the system we have today. You can still tell a car’s age from its registration plate, but only if you have a calculator and the brain of an elephant.
Some say it was Ronald Reagan’s proposed Star Wars technology that finished the Cold War and brought down the Berlin Wall. Others reckon it was the accident at Chernobyl that caused Mikhail Gorbachev to come to do the business with Margaret Thatcher. But actually it was the registration-plate change. Because that one single thing ended the demand for cheap-at-any-price new cars.
Which brings me, after quite a long run-up, to the Dacia Sandero. Prices start at £5,995, which on the face of it is astonishing value for money. Yes, it’s built in Romania, which has exactly the same car-building history as Ghana, but it’s actually based on the one-before-last Renault Clio. So. This is a car that is based on a 2007 Renault, that does more than 55 mpg and that is yours for less than the price of most holidays.
There is probably an inconsequential issue with its name. Even though it’s spelt Dacia, which in English rhymes with fascia, its maker insists that actually it should be pronounced ‘datcha’. Which means you could end up with a Russian country house.
Using the Romanian pronunciation is silly. It’d be like the Florentine marketing board urging British people to visit Firenze. We wouldn’t know where to go.
But what of the Sandero itself? Drawbacks? Yes. Plenty. It looks as if it’s been styled by someone who’s never actually seen a car before. And it is a bit spartan. And a bit cramped in the back. And a bit slow. And a bit roly-poly in the corners. And, compared with some of its rivals, it produces quite a few carbon dioxides, which means you have to pay £125 a year in vehicle tax.
In the olden days none of these things would have mattered, because for less than £6,000 you could have had the latest registration prefix. But now you just get a thirteen or a sixty-three and nobody really knows what any of that means.
So the Sandero must be judged as a car, and I’m sorry, but for £5,995 you can do quite a lot better by trawling through driving.co.uk, The Sunday Times’ second-hand-car website. This, then, is why buying a cheap new car is so much more difficult than it was. Because without anything that identifies it as new, you may as well plunge into the vastly more complex world of pre-owned.
8 December 2013
You’re off by a country mile with this soggy pudding, Subaru
Subaru Forester 2.0 Lineartronic XT
When I was growing up, in the days before either health or safety had been invented, commercial breaks on the television were often filled with important public information films. They were designed to open our eyes to all of life’s hidden perils, and some of them were jolly frightening.
In one we were told not to put a rug on a recently polished floor. In another we were warned about the dangers of fishing while under electricity cables. And in my favourite we saw a pretty young woman in a short skirt running down the pavement. Sadly she wasn’t really concentrating, and as she rounded the corner she crashed head first into a large pane of glass being carried by two workmen. ‘Don’t run,’ said the voiceover sternly. It’s a piece of advice I’ve followed ever since.
Unfortunately far fewer of these films are made today, partly because some of the television presenters who fronted them are currently troubling the Operation Yewtree investigation. But mostly because after you’ve spent the day in a high-visibility jacket and a hard hat, filling in risk assessment forms, the last thing you need is for your evening’s viewing pleasure to be interrupted with yet more reminders to stay safe.
However, while we are no longer told to learn to swim and wear a seatbelt and think once and then twice about motorcycles, there remains one safety drum the government is still banging: we are still being told not to drive when we are tired.
Is this really the most important safety message it can come up with? What about driving when you are under the influence of marijuana or Vera Lynn? What about a message telling us not to swerve for badgers? Or cats? Or how about a simple film that explains to those recently arrived from eastern Europe about how a roundabout works?
Or maybe it’s just me because I’m only ever tired about two hours after I get into bed and turn out the lights. During the day, sleep for me is impossible. (Except after the first corner in a grand prix. Then I can nod off no problem at all.)
However, last Friday night I set off up the M1. It was dark and the middle of rush hour but, unusually, traffic was flowing quite well. In the outside lane everyone was doing 60 mph, Simon Mayo was on the radio with his ‘all request’ Friday and I was going to have dinner with my boy.
It was all very warm and safe and pleasant and the engine was moaning out its one long song and I started to feel the same sensation I get after a lovely Sunday lunch and Sebastian Vettel has just taken the lead in the second corner. My eyelids became heavy. My head began to nod. And way off in the distance I noticed the brake lights were coming on …
Ordinarily this would cause me to slow a little and to cover the brake pedal. But I simply couldn’t be bothered. It would have meant moving my leg and I was just too warm and cosy for that. Much easier, I reckoned, to plough into the back of the car in front.
Naturally the traffic wasn’t actually stopping. It was just a moron in a Peugeot braking for no reason and causing everyone behind to brake as well. So I didn’t have the accident. But I did for the first time pull over at the next services for a little walk in the fresh air and a cup of coffee. Weirdly I didn’t need a government film to tell me to do this. It was just common sense.
Once I was back on the road, with some matches in my eyes and a drawing pin on the seat – that works well, by the way – I began to wonder what on earth had brought about this drowsiness. Yes, I have just finished a relentless spell of travelling and, yes, there have been a few late nights. But that’s nothing new. Which led me to the conclusion that I was being sent to sleep by the car I was driving – a Subaru Forester XT.
I’ve never felt drowsy in a Subaru before. This is because the cars are built for slightly over-the-limit rural types who wear extremely heavy shoes from Countrywide and have little interest in comfort.
This applies to all the models it has sold here. You had the original pick-up truck. Sold through agricultural suppliers and farm shops, it had a corrugated iron cover over the back, some sheep in the passenger seat and at the wheel a slightly over-the-limit d
river with heavy shoes who’d never been to London.
Then you had the much-talked-about and greatly missed Impreza. Available in many stages of tune over the years, it came with a bonnet scoop the size of the Sydney Opera House and a turbocharger that was even larger than the driver’s shoes. Imprezas made their mark in international rallying, a sport that’s very popular with rural types who went to school with the local bobby and have no need to worry about the breathalyser kit in the back of his panda car.
And then there was the no-nonsense, go-anywhere Forester. It had no styling at all but it was extremely well made, a feature much prized in the shires.
In recent years, though, Subaru has been having a tough time. Sales in Britain have plummeted, and many have said this is because the strong Japanese yen made the cars expensive. That is rubbish. Sales were falling because of Tony Blair’s crusade to make the countryside illegal.
So now it seems Subaru is fighting back by going all skinny latte and arugula metrosexual. The new Forester has been styled and the bonnet scoop has gone and it is big and well equipped and pricy. Which means that it’s just another stupid sports utility crossover vehicle to make people in Surrey feel as if they live in the countryside.
Happily, unlike many other vehicles of this type, it does at least have some off-road credentials. A device that stops it running away on steep slopes, for example. And a boxer engine that a) makes a nice noise and b) gives you a lower centre of gravity. But sadly the gearbox is now what Subaru calls Lineartronic.
In essence, it’s a continuously variable transmission affair, and CVT gearboxes don’t work, even if they are fitted with eight artificial steps. A CVT gearbox detaches you from the sensation of driving, or being in control. Couple this to the electric power steering and a strangely mushy-feeling brake pedal and the sense of isolation is complete. As I discovered, you don’t feel as if you’re driving this car. It’s just somewhere warm to sit as the world drones by.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . Page 45
