When you push a car past 180mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy and a little bit

frightening. When you go past 200mph it actually becomes blurred. Almost like you’re
trapped in an early Queen pop video. At this sort of speed the tyres and the suspension
are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting
before they’re being asked to do something else. The result is a terrifying vibration that
rattles your optical nerves, causing double vision. This is not good when you’re covering
300ft a second.

Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the
first place. By the time you know it was there, you’ll have gone through the windscreen,
through the Pearly Gates and be half way across God’s breakfast table.

It has always been thus. When Louis Rigolly broke the 100mph barrier in his Gobron in
1904, the vibration would have been terrifying. And I dare say that driving an E-type at
150mph in 1966 must have been a bit sporty as well.

But once you go past 200mph it isn’t just the suspension and the tyres you have to worry
about. The biggest problem is the air. At 100mph it’s relaxed. At 150mph it’s a breeze.
But at 200mph it has sufficient power to lift an 800,000lb jumbo jet off the ground. A
200mph gust of wind is strong enough to knock down an entire city. So getting a car to
behave itself in conditions like these is tough.

At 200mph you can feel the front of the car getting light as it starts to lift. As a result you
start to lose your steering, so you aren’t even able to steer round whatever it is you can’t
see because of the vibrations. Make no mistake, 200mph is at the limit of what man can
do right now. Which is why the new Bugatti Veyron is worthy of some industrial strength
genuflection. Because it can do 252mph. And that’s just mad — 252mph means that in
straight and level flight this car is as near as makes no difference as fast as a Hawker
Hurricane.

You might point out at this juncture that the McLaren F1 could top 240mph, but at that
speed it was pretty much out of control. And anyway it really isn’t in the same league as
the Bugatti. In a drag race you could let the McLaren get to 120mph before setting off in
the Veyron. And you’d still get to 200mph first. The Bugatti is way, way faster than
anything else the roads have seen.

Of course, at £810,000, it is also jolly expensive, but when you look at the history of its
development you’ll discover it’s rather more than just a car . . .

It all started when Ferdinand Piëch, the swivel-eyed former boss of Volkswagen, bought
Bugatti and had someone design a concept car. “This,” he said, “is what the next Bugatti
will look like.” And then, without consulting anyone, he went on. “And it vill have an
engine that develops 1000 horsepower and it vill be capable of 400kph.”

His engineers were horrified. But they set to work anyway, mating two Audi V8s to
create an 8 litre W16. Which was then garnished with four turbochargers. Needless to
say, the end result produced about as much power as the earth’s core, which is fine. But
somehow the giant had to be cooled, which is why the Veyron has no engine cover and
why it has 10 — count them — 10 radiators. Then things got tricky because the power
had to be harnessed.

For this, VW went to Ricardo, a British company that makes gearboxes for various
Formula One teams.

“God, it was hard,” said one of the engineers I know vaguely. “The gearbox in an F1 car
only has to last a few hours. Volkswagen wanted the Veyron’s to last 10 or 20 years. And
remember, the Bugatti is a damn sight more powerful than any F1 car.”

The result, a seven-speed double-clutch flappy paddle affair, took a team of 50 engineers
five years to perfect.

With this done, the Veyron was shipped to Sauber’s F1 wind tunnel where it quickly
became apparent that while the magic 1000bhp figure had been achieved, they were miles
off the target top speed of 400kph (248mph). The body of the car just wasn't aerodynamic
enough, and Volkswagen wouldn’t let them change the basic shape to get round the
problem.

The bods at Sauber threw up their hands, saying they only had experience of
aerodynamics up to maybe 360kph, which is the effective top speed in Formula One.
Beyond this point Bugatti was on its own.

Somehow they had to find an extra 30kph, and there was no point in looking to the
engine for answers because each extra 1kph increase in speed requires an extra 8bhp from
the power plant. An extra 30kph then would need an extra 240bhp. That was not possible.

The extra speed had to come from changing small things on the body. They started by
fitting smaller door mirrors, which upped the top speed a bit but at too high a price. It
turned out that the bigger ones had been keeping the nose of the car on the ground.
Without them the stability was gone.

In other words, the door mirrors were generating downforce. That gives you an idea of
how much of a bastard the air can be at this speed.

After some public failures, fires and accidents, and one chief being fired, they hit on the
idea of a car that automatically changes shape depending on what speed you’re going.

At 137mph, the nose of the car is lowered by 2in and the big rear spoiler slides into the
slipstream. The effect is profound. You can feel the back of the car being pressed into the
road.

However, with the spoiler in place the drag is so great you’re limited to just 231mph. To
go faster than that you have to stop and insert your ignition key in a slot on the floor. This
lowers the whole car still further and locks the big back wing down. Now you have
reduced downforce, which means you won’t be going round any corners, but you have a
clean shape. And that means you can top 400kph. That’s 370ft a second.

You might want to ponder that for a moment. Covering the length of a football pitch, in a
second, in a car. And then you might want to think about the braking system. A VW Polo
will generate 0.6g if you stamp on the middle pedal hard. You get that from the air brake
alone on a Veyron. Factor in the carbon ceramic discs and you will pull up from 250mph
in just 10sec. Sounds good, but in those 10sec you’ll have covered a third of a mile.
That’s five football pitches to stop.

I didn’t care. On a recent drive across Europe I desperately wanted to reach the top speed
but I ran out of road when the needle hit 240mph. Where, astonishingly, it felt planted.
Totally and utterly rock steady. It felt sublime.

Not quiet, though. The engine sounds like Victorian plumbing — it looks like Victorian
plumbing as well, to be honest — and the roar from the tyres was biblical. But it still felt
brilliant. Utterly, stunningly, mind blowingly, jaw droppingly brilliant.

And then I reached the Alps where, unbelievably, it got better. I expected this road rocket
to be absolutely useless in the bends but it felt like a big Lotus Elise.

Occasionally, if I accelerated hard in a tight corner, it behaved strangely as the four-

wheel-drive system decided which axle would be best equipped to deal with the wave of
power. I won’t say it’s a nasty feel or dangerous. Just weird, in the same way that the
duck-billed platypus is weird.

You learn to raise an eyebrow at what’s only a foible, and then, as the road straightens
out, steady yourself for Prince Albert’s boiler to gird its loins and play havoc with the
space-time continuum. No, really, you come round a bend, see what appears to be miles
and miles of dead straight road, bury your foot in the carpet and with a big asthmatic
wheeze, bang, you’re instantly at the next bend, with your eyebrow raised again.

From behind the wheel of a Veyron, France is the size of a small coconut. I cannot tell
you how fast I crossed it the other day. Because you simply wouldn’t believe me. I also
cannot tell you how good this car is. I just don’t have the vocabulary. I just end up
stammering and dribbling and talking wide-eyed nonsense. And everyone thinks I’m on
drugs.

This car cannot be judged in the same way that we judge other cars. It meets drive-by
noise and emission regulations and it can be driven by someone whose only qualification
is an ability to reverse round corners and do an emergency stop. So technically it is a car.
And yet it just isn’t.

Other cars are small guesthouses on the front at Brighton and the Bugatti is the Burj Al
Arab. It makes even the Enzo and the Porsche Carrera GT feel slow and pointless. It is a
triumph for lunacy over common sense, a triumph for man over nature and a triumph for
Volkswagen over absolutely every other car maker in the world.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Bugatti Veyron 16.4

Engine 7993cc, 16 cylinders in a W
Power 1001bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 922 lb ft @ 2200rpm
Transmission 7-speed DSG, manual and auto
Fuel 11.7mpg (combined)
CO2 574g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 2.5sec
Top speed 253mph
Price £810,345
Rating Five stars
Verdict Deserves 12 stars. Simply as good — and as fast — as it gets

If the motor car were invented today, there is absolutely no way that any government in
the world would let normal members of the public drive one. They’d argue it’d be too
dangerous, too complicated and suitable only for presidents and members of the armed
forces.

Happily, however, it was born at a time when the world hadn’t got round to muddling up
liberty with freedom. And as a result, it’s become jolly popular. Today the world is
groaning under the weight of 600m vehicles. And Japan alone is adding to that number at
the rate of 22,000 a day. That is unsustainable growth.

It’s always hard to predict the future, but in our lifetime – unless you are shot
prematurely – there will be only four motor manufacturers. One in America, one in
Europe, and a couple in the Far East. And none will be making anything we would
recognise as “a car”.

The notion of travelling with the wind in your hair down a country road at 100mph, with
petrol providing the firepower and four big exhausts producing the soundtrack, will be an
image every bit as outdated as diphtheria.

I have no doubt, for instance, that the speed-kills lobby will eventually win its argument.
Dead babies trump 400bhp every time. So all cars will be fitted with a satellite-monitored
electronic overlord that will physically prevent you from ever breaking the limit. I’m also
confident that the steering wheel will be removed. Already Mercedes has technology that
will apply the brakes whenever it’s necessary. The only thing that’s stopping them from
fitting it is legislation; the same legislation that insists on two pilots in the cockpit on
many commercial flights where only one is needed to actually fly the plane. Even though
80% of all plane crashes are caused by pilot error.

The upshot, then, is that you won’t actually drive your car. You will merely climb in, tell
it where you want to go and sit back as it takes you there. Think Will Smith in I, Robot.

All this is certain. And anyone who begs to differ may as well sit on the beach in a robe
telling the sea to go away.

Another thing that’s beyond doubt is that you won’t be driving round in a hybrid, such as
the Toyota Prius. These use just as much fuel as normal cars and are designed only to
assuage the guilt of people whose opinions come from a man so hopeless he couldn’t
even beat George Bush to the White House.

You will not have an electric car either. As the G-Wiz proves, They. Do. Not. Work.
They run out of juice whenever it’s raining, or dry, or windy. And to charge them up
again you have to plug them into a socket that is fed by . . . a power station. Yippee.

No. According to the eggheads, your car will almost certainly be powered by hydrogen.
The most abundant gas in the universe. And something that, when burnt, produces
nothing but water.

This raises an interesting question. If we’re so worried about melting ice caps and rising
sea levels, what’s the world going to look like when 600m motor vehicles start to chuck
water out of their tail-pipes? A point only I seem to have spotted thus far. Which means
it’s probably irrelevant.

It is possible to use hydrogen in an engine instead of petrol or diesel. Using current

technology, you lose about a fifth of the power, and that sounds bad. But come on. To be
just 20% behind petrol, which has been fuelling engines for more than a hundred
years . . . that’s not a bad starting point.

Except I don’t think it will be the starting point. I think that, soon, the holy grail will be
cracked: the hydrogen fuel cell.

Think of it as a battery that is constantly charged by feeding it with hydrogen and

oxygen. No, really. You mix them together and all you get in return is pure drinking
water, and electricity. Which is then used to power your car, soundlessly, and for ever.

It all sounds like some kind of Monbiotic wet dream but the big players are close now.
Close to making the dream of a world without oil a reality.

And please don’t imagine that you’ll have to tootle about in a road-going version of the
Hindenburg, exploding in a Nagasaki-style fireball every time you drive under a pylon.
The fact is that the best way of storing hydrogen is between the atoms in metal. Already
some scientists reckon they have gone one better and have worked out a way of putting
30 litres in a single gram of graphite. And 30 litres would be enough to take a family
saloon of the future 5,000 miles. So there we are. Problem solved. Personal transportation
will survive. What will die, however, is the notion that “the car” symbolises personal
freedom. As you sit there, being “driven” home, at a speed preordained by the
government and on a route chosen by Nasa, you will have no control.

The device, the tool, the machine will be no more an extension of your hands and feet
than a tumble dryer. It’ll be no more exhilarating than a vacuum cleaner. So yes, while
the world will be cleaner and quieter, it’ll be like drowning in ditchwater.

So let’s cheer ourselves up this morning with the fearsome Ascari A10. Normally I avoid
road testing cars made by small British companies because no one’s going to buy one
anyway. So all I’m doing by saying it’s rubbish is giving the owner someone to blame
when the bailiffs come round.

And they are, always, rubbish; hideous carbon fibre and magnesium reminders of what
cars used to be like before we got robots to build them.

That’s the thing, you see. The man who started the company can’t afford a robot or a
proper factory. So he makes the cars on a soulless out-of-town industrial estate, by hand.
And saying a car is a handmade is just another way of saying the door will fall off.

A car made by a small British company won’t have been hot-weather tested in Arizona or
subjected to trial by ice in Finland. Chances are, it won’t have been tested at all. And so it
goes with the Ascari. I bet that if you bought one it’d be a constant trial.

However, some things are worth a bit of extra effort. And this is one of them. With a
tweaked version of BMW’s old M5 engine sitting in the middle of the carbon fibre tub,
you have the power of 600 horses in a car that weighs about the same as a sausage dog.

The result is epic. You put your foot on the accelerator and then you become somewhere
else. This is hypercar fast. Koenigsegg fast. It really is a tankbuster.

Naturally the sequential gearbox needed to transfer all this power to the rear wheels is
substantial. Even the lever is huge, like something from the bridge of a 1960s cargo ship.
It’s noisy, too, so noisy that you can hear it whining and clunking above the sound of the
four Alpine tunnels masquerading as exhausts. This is a car that makes you just fizz with
excitement.

Sitting in the cockpit, hemmed in by strengthening beams and assaulted by the noise,
gives you a sense of what it might have been like to be in the engine room of a second
world war submarine that was being depth-charged.

But it isn’t all brute-force barnyard technology. It has quite the best steering of any car
I’ve ever driven. Perfectly weighted. Perfectly linear in its response. All car makers
should be forced, by law, to drive an A10 so they can see what they’re aiming for.
My favourite part, though, is the way it looks. It manages to be pretty and muscular at the
same time. Combining the appeal of Kate Moss and the Terminator is a trick no other
supercar designer has managed before. Of course, it’s not very cheap. It costs £350,000
and for that you don’t even get a radio. Not that you could hear it anyway.

The A10 is daft, for sure, and not at all relevant in the modern world. It consumes oil and
smashes up its environment. But elephants do that as well; they destroy their habitat and
drive themselves to extinction. And I bet you’ll be sad when they die out.

Vital statistics

Model Ascari A10

Engine 4941cc, eight cylinders

Power 625bhp @ 7500rpm

Torque 413 lb ft @ 5500rpm

Transmission Six-speed manual and paddle-shift

Fuel n/a

CO2 n/a

Acceleration 0-60mph: 2.8sec

Top speed 215mph Price £350,000

Verdict Destined for motoring history

Every week I find it jolly easy to be rude on these pages about the latest product from
some large and faceless corporation. But because I’m fundamentally weak and spineless,
I find it awfully difficult to be similarly critical about the heroic efforts of a mere one-
man band.

Chances are, the one-man band in question will have laboured over the project, in his
unheated shed, for years and years. He’ll have ignored the needs of his wife and the
education of his children because everything in his life will have been devoted to the
creation of his new “baby”.

And as a result he’d take it badly if a reviewer peered into the pram and said: “My God,
that’s ugly.”
Unfortunately, however, it will be ugly; and dangerous and impractical with it. That’s
because cars made in sheds on Black & Decker Workmates are rarely tested in Australian
deserts or in the frozen Arctic wastes.

They aren’t deliberately crashed to ensure they’re safe for people to collide in, nor are
they driven round a track for thousands of miles to make sure they’re reliable. In fact
they’re rarely tested at all, and this is another reason that I avoid them. Because most are
accidents that haven’t yet happened.

Somehow, though, a specially tuned car did turn up at the house the other day. It was an
Alfa Romeo that had been breathed on by a company called Autodelta, and since there
was nothing else for me in the drive I swallowed my nerves and took it for a spin...

I suppose if any cars can be tuned, Alfas make ideal candidates, chiefly because Alfa
Romeo itself is not allowed to tune them. Fiat, you see, owns just about all the car firms
in Italy, and each is given a specific role.

Ferrari: your job is to win the Formula One world championship until the end of time.
Maserati: your job is to make Ferraris that are a little softer and a little more practical for
the middle-aged businessman who wants bespoke engineering on an everyday basis. Fiat:
your job is to make cars for the walnut-faced peasantry, and Lancia: your job is to make
Fiats for the more successful and style-orientated motorist.

Job done, and a car in there for everyone. But unfortunately that leaves Alfa Romeo with
nothing to do. They aren’t allowed to compete with any of the others and that means they
have to try making cars that aren’t too fast, or sporty, or luxurious, or stylish, or cheap. In
other words it’s in their remit to be deliberately average.

Happily, they’re not very good at it. I drove a 166 to Wakefield last week and must say
that, on paper, it’s complete rubbish. It’s slower than the equivalent 5-series BMW,
thirstier than a solid rocket booster and equipped with...well, almost nothing at all. It
doesn’t even come with a cupholder and the depreciation has to be experienced to be
believed. Buy one tomorrow for £29,900 and in one year it will be worth just £13,000.
That’s £17,000 gone down the pan. Small wonder, I reasoned, as I plodded along, that
they’ve only managed to sell two in Britain this year.

And yet, beneath the politically inspired ordinariness, you can sense it has been designed
and thought-out by people who really do care. It had a soul, that car...a real, genuine
character that somehow managed to turn every mile of the journey into a heart-warming
event.

If I were to be in the market for a large four-door saloon, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.
I’d hang the cost and get myself a 166.

Imagine, though, if you could combine this sense of being with some genuinely exciting
performance. Imagine if you could free Alfa from its Fiat shackles and untie the
engineers’ arms. And now stop imagining, because such a car is here, in the shape of the
Autodelta 147 GTA.

The heart of the machine is the engine, which is a bored-out version of the renowned Alfa
V6. So you get 3.7 litres which, thanks to specially made stainless steel exhausts, a
Ferrari throttle system and a remapped computer, means an almost unbelievable 328bhp
is to hand.

Now that’s all very well and good, but the standard car cannot cope with the power from
its 3.2 litre, 247bhp engine. If you even think about going near the throttle, its front
wheels light up like Catherine wheels and you go nowhere in a cloud of expensive Pirelli
smoke.

The trick is to trickle away from the lights, wondering why you didn’t simply buy the 1.6
litre version, and then floor it. But even then you need to be careful, because torque steer
will put you straight into the nearest tree.

The fact is that you cannot put large power outputs through the front wheels alone.
They’ve got their work cut out doing the steering and the last thing they need is to be
distracted from the job with all those angry Italian horsepowers.

Engineers at Saab once told me that the most power you could realistically entrust to a
front-wheel-drive car is 220bhp. A point they proved recently by launching an unwieldy
250bhp front-driver called the Hot Aero.

And yet here’s Autodelta putting 328bhp through those front wheels. Are they mad? Do
they want to kill only their customers, or are they after people coming the other way as
well? Driving a front-wheel-drive hatchback with 328bhp is like playing Russian roulette
with a fully loaded gun. It’s like trying to fly a helicopter gunship while drunk: you’re
going to crash, and you’re going to die.

To try to get round the problem, they’ve fitted a limited-slip differential, and that started
the alarm bells ringing even more stridently. Ford fitted such a thing to its Focus RS and
turned what might have been quite a nice car into a complete liability. On anything other
than a smooth track it would suddenly turn sharp left for no reason. And you couldn’t
prepare yourself, because sometimes it would suddenly turn sharp right. Limited slip diffs
in front-wheel-drive cars, I deduced after a sweaty, terrifying drive through Wales in the
RS, Do Not Work.

I was therefore decidedly nervous as I tippy-toed out of my drive in Autodelta’s passport

to the next life. I’d said a tearful goodbye to my wife, and hugged the kids: Daddy wasn’t
coming back.

The accident, I knew within moments, was going to be a big one, because this car isn’t
ferociously fast. It’s much quicker than that. Ferrari throttle? Forget it. When you stamp
on the accelerator it’s like you’ve hit the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. Suddenly all
the stars are fluorescent tubes.

In bald English, 0 to 60mph takes 5sec. Flat-out you’ll be doing 175mph, and therefore
there has never been a hatchback this hot before.

A corner was coming. And then it was a distant speck in my rear-view mirror. I vaguely
remember turning the wheel and I have a dim recollection of being astounded by the
grip...and then the moment was gone.

No, really, the damn thing’s a barnacle. Normally, in a tight bend, a front-drive car will
spin the inside wheel uselessly, which means the one on the outside suddenly has to do
all the steering and power-handling. But obviously it can’t and you understeer off the
road. But with that diff, the inside wheel doesn’t spin, it grips and grips and then it grips
some more.

Yes, bumps will cause some violent tugging at the wheel, and yes, it graunches horribly
while reversing at slow speed, but the upside is a whole new chapter written into the laws
of physics.

I’d love to stop at this point and give the man who made this car a nice warm feeling in
the pit of his tummy. But I’m duty bound to point out one or two shortcomings.

First, the body kit was awful, but worse than this was the ride. The car I drove belonged
to a 22-year-old — I’d love to see his insurance bill — and he’d set it up completely
wrong. It had the compliancy of an RSJ and the comfort of sitting down sharply on the
sharp end of a piledriver.

But, I see from the brochure, you don’t need to fit springs and dampers made from oak
and iron. You can have more conventional stuff if that’s what you fancy — and take it
from me, you do. You can leave the body kit off the options list as well.

This has an effect on price. As tested, my car cost £40,000, which, considering the speed
and grip, has to be the bargain of the century. But if you just stick to the engine, the diff
and some tasty tyres, it’s going to cost a lot less.

Better still, you can have all the important modifications that can be fitted to any Alfa:
the 166, the 156 and the GTV. And that’s a tempting prospect. It means you can have an
Alfa Romeo. Not just a Fiat with an Alfa Romeo badge.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model: Autodelta 147 GTA

Engine type: V6, 3750cc
Power: 328bhp @ 7300rpm
Torque: 260 lb ft @ 4700rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Suspension: Height-adjustable coil struts
Tyres: 225/40 Z18
Fuel: 20mpg (combined)
Acceleration: 0-60mph: 5.0sec
Top speed: 175mph
Price: £39,234
Verdict: Mad amount of power and astounding grip make this the hottest hatch ever

One of the things I used to admire about BMW was the focus shown by its designers and
engineers. They were the snipers of the car industry, lying in wait while the enemy
blundered about with smoking tanks and faulty machineguns, and then, boomf, delivering
a killer shot that never missed.

Once the company had stopped fiddling about with three-wheelers and converted post
office vans, it developed a recipe that served it well for nigh on 30 years. All its cars had
double headlamps at the front, a straight-six engine in the middle, and rear-wheel drive at
the back.

There were, in essence, three body styles, five engines and a range of options, so the
customer could indulge in a spot of pick’n’mix.

You could have a small car with a big engine and no equipment. Or you could have a
large car with a small engine and electric everything. But whatever you chose there was a
rightness to the feel of the thing. A sense that the company had put driving pleasure
above everything else.

Then it did a Coca-Cola. The sniper decided he didn’t want to be a sniper any more and
changed the damn recipe. So we ended up with four-wheel-drive cars that were made in
America, and two-seater convertibles, and a wide range of diesel engines. And then it put
a chap called Chris Bangle in charge of design.

Before Bangle, most BMWs adhered to the same set of rules. They had a lean-forward
shark’s nose, they had the double-kidney grille, they had grey paint and then there was
that little kink on the rear pillar. It’s called the Hofmeister kink, after the man who
invented it, and it gives the car an aggressive, lean-forward stance.
Now, though, all of these design cues have been lost in a sea of planes and creases that
probably play well in design circles. But in the real world they don’t look modern or
sharp. They look daft.

Still, at least the BMW badge continued to count for something. Apart from dipping their
toe into the mass market with the truly awful 3-series Compact, Beemers were always a
cut above norm. They were what you bought to demonstrate that life was treating you
well.

Only now, with the launch of the 1-series, this last bastion of BMWishness has gone.
Because the 1-series, like a Focus or an Astra or a Golf, is a five-door family hatchback.

For now, of course, this is great. It means a large number of people who could never
afford a BMW in the past can put that blue and white badge on their drive. The
neighbours will be impressed. The curtains will twitch. Men will offer their daughters to
your sons.

But how long will it be, I wonder, before the 1-series does for BMW what Freddie Laker
did for air travel? Turns something glamorous and exciting into a “win free save!” orgy
of packaged mass transportation.

In the early Seventies, if you went to Florida for your holidays you were seen as pretty
cool. But now you’re seen as a rather stupid oik.

The 1-series will be the ruination of the BMW brand. Of that I have no doubt. But at the
moment, despite the lost vision and the appointment of Bangle, that ruination has not yet
got into its stride. For now you can still buy a Beemer and survive the experience with
your dignity intact. The question is, should you? And to answer that, we have to work out
if the 1-series is any good.

The advertisements tell us, endlessly, that unlike any other family hatchback on the
market it has rear-wheel drive. And that’s great. Rear-wheel drive is a significant part of
BMW’s DNA.

In a front-wheel-drive car the front wheels have to deal with the steering and the delivery
of the engine’s power to the road. It’s a tough job and in most cases, for the purist at
least, the end result is deeply unsatisfying. With rear-wheel drive the back wheels do the
power delivery, leaving those at the front to get on with steering. It’s a much more
expensive option but the result is balance. And balance is a building block on which
something spectacular can be created.

You can feel the benefits, immediately, in the 1-series. Even at normal, trundling-about
speeds it feels more together than even the Focus, king of the front-drivers.

There’s more, too. In the Beemer you have a thick steering wheel, a short-throw
gearchange, and an antilock braking system that cuts in when you’re in real trouble and
not because it can’t be bothered to work out when that moment might be. There is
absolutely no doubt in my mind that as a driving machine this is a significant cut above
the hatchback norm.

And now, here comes the but, galloping over the hills with news of many, many
problems that will leave you wishing, with all your heart, that you’d bought something
else.

First of all there’s the styling. Now I know that when it comes to hatchbacks familiarity
breeds indifference. The new Astra is a truly stunning piece of design, but like pylons
you see so many you simply don’t notice the grace and cleverness. The BMW, however,
is just plain ugly. It may have the double headlamps and the kidney grille and the
Hofmeister kink, but viewed as a whole it looks like a van.

So what about the engine? Well, the petrol version will get you from 0 to 60 in about two
hours, so if you want any poke at all, and surely that’s the reason why you’re buying a
BMW, you have to go for the diesel. It’s not a bad diesel by any standards, but come on.
Where’s the fun in a car that sounds like a canal boat? So it’s slow and ugly and now
things really go downhill because thanks to the prop shaft and all the other rear-wheel-
drive gubbins, there is no space in the back. And I don’t mean that legroom is limited. I
mean there is absolutely none at all.

Even BMW says this car will sell to young people with no children, but this is silly. If
you have no children, why buy a family hatchback? Because you want a big boot? Well
forget that as well, because in the 1-series it’s tiny.

And then there’s the ride, which thanks to the fitment of run-flat tyres is intolerable on
anything but a kitchen work surface, and the quality of some trim pieces, which will
disappoint those who may have expected granite rather than Plasticine.

But the worst thing about the 1-series is the prices. In the past BMWs were expensive
because they were demonstrably better, and more exciting, than all of their rivals. But the
1-series, as we’ve seen, is demonstrably worse.

And yet for the top-of-the-range diesel you are asked to pay £20,700, and anything up to
£32,000 if you go berserk with the options list. Even if you show some self restraint
you’d be lucky to put a car like this on the road for less than £23,000, and I’m sorry, but
you can have two hatchbacks for that.

Park one of these on your drive and the neighbours will not think, “Hmm, that’s an
expensive car. He must be doing well.” They’ll think, “Hmm, that’s an expensive car. He
must be off his rocker.” You can have a Golf GTI for less, and that, in almost every
single way, is a better car.
So if you want a hatchback, buy a Focus. If you want a hatchback with some go, buy the
VW. If you just want some action and you don’t care about space in the back, or a hard
ride, or the price, buy a sports car. A Honda S2000 would be fine.

I have been accused, in recent years, of having it in for BMW. There was even some talk,
after my recent review of the dreadful X3, that I would not be allowed any more press
demonstrators. And this is why I’ve devoted the entire column this week to a test of the
1-series rather than tagging it on to the end of a rant about cheese.

And it’s why I’m choosing the words for my conclusion with even more care than usual.
So here goes. The 1-series is crap.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model BMW 120d Sport

Engine type Four-cylinder, 1995cc
Power 163bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 250 lb ft @ 2000rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Fuel/CO2 49.6mpg (combined) / 152g/km
Tyres 205/55 R 16
Acceleration 0-62mph: 7.9sec
Top speed 137mph
Price £20,700
Verdict Handles well but essentially pointless
Rating 1/5

Sarah Brown, the wife of our prime minister, is a complete mystery. For all I know, she
collects fish, is qualified to fly fighter jets, has two left feet and sounds exactly like that
woman with the broom in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. You even have to say “Sarah
Brown, the wife of the prime minister”. Which was unnecessary with Cherie Blair or
Denis Thatcher.

All I do know is that she looked at the country’s 28m men and thought: “No. They are all
horrid except for Gordon.” Which must mean she’s a bit odd. And let’s be honest here
shall we; like all women in and around British politics (with the notable exception of
Samantha Cameron), she’s not exactly a purring sex kitten.

Things are very different in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi has filled his entire cabinet
with ex-glamour models. And naturally, this brings me on to France’s President Nicolas
Sarkozy.
Unlike anyone in British politics, he attained high office and responded immediately by
replacing his wife with the almost impossibly gorgeous Carla Bruni. Her mother is a
concert pianist, her sister an actress and film director, and she’s an heiress to an Italian
tyre fortune. We’re talking good genes here. And you can see them all in those
cheekbones. I’m very much in love with Carla.

More than that, I’m very much in love with the French for taking her into their hearts.
That’d never happen here. Imagine, if you will, Gordon Brown winning an election (hard,
I know) and then ditching Sarah for Abi Titmuss. He wouldn’t last a week.

Weirdly, however, while the French like a good-looking woman in the Elysée Palace,
they plainly have trouble with aesthetics in other departments. Take the oyster as an
example. I have no idea who first cracked one open, peered at the snot inside and
thought: “Mmm. I’m going to put that in my mouth.” But I bet he was French.

Of course, Paris is a fine and handsome city but the man who dreamt up those 12 wide
boulevards radiating from the Arc de Triomphe was called Haussmann. And while he
was born in France, his parents were from the disputed province of Alsace. Which
technically makes their son an Alsatian. Which means he was a dog.

It’s also true, of course, that Parisian women are very elegant but I always think they
were put on earth to make Italian clothes look good. And have you ever been in a
Frenchman’s house? Holy cow. It’s an orgy or horror: antimacassars, Dralon, floral
wallpaper, Formica and chintz. The minimalist Danish look completely passed them all
by, leaving them all stuck in Huddersfield, in 1952.

France itself is a beautiful part of the world and the French language is spoken honey -
unless it’s being used in a pop song, obviously; in which case it’s as attractive as an
inside-out horse.

But just about everything the French make or do is lumpen, ugly or odd. This is
especially true of their cars.

If you asked anyone to name the 10 best-looking cars ever made, not a single person with
functioning retinas would put a French car on their list. Renault occasionally does
something appealing like the Avantime, but mostly it believes we’ll buy its cars
specifically because they’ve got big arses. Peugeot can do a good-looking car but only
when it pays Pininfarina to design it. Left to its own devices, it mostly does bland, with
occasional gusts of awfulness like the 309. That really was a mobile wart.

That leaves Citroën and, of course, what it has done mostly over the years is best
described as, er . . . brave. It’s hard, really, when it presents a new car to find the right
word. It’s best to imagine Heston Blumenthal has just asked you, eagerly, to try his new
dog turd-flavoured ice cream. You can’t be honest and say: “That was terrible.” So you
go for “brave” or “very striking”.
Today, though, Citroën is starting to buck the trend. The C5 is exceptionally good
looking. The C6 has great presence, and if you drive through town in a C4, no one is
going to point and laugh. But then, just when you think Citroën has got the idea, out pops
the new Berlingo.

The old one was just a van with windows and it struck a chord. Oh sure, it looked like a
frog that had sat on a spike, but there was something rather appealing about the
nononsenseness of a box with seats. Especially as it retailed for about 60p.

Sadly, with the new version, they’ve tried to disguise the window cleaner origins with
chrome this and flared that. What they’ve ended up with is a plumber in a tux. It looks
and feels completely wrong. Almost certainly, then, you will see it and immediately
decide to buy something else. This would be very big mistake.

I’ll start with the problems. Um . . . Well, the tailgate is so huge that when you push the
button it will rise up, and unless you’re standing well back - which you won’t be because
you’ve just pushed the button - it will smash into the underside of your chin and remove
your whole head. This would become wearisome. But aside from this upside-down
guillotine feature, and the British female politician looks, the rest of the car is an object
lesson in common sense.

Prices start at less than £11,000, which is very low for something with this amount of
interior space. It rides more smoothly than a Jaguar XJ8 - they should have called it the
Aeroglisseur - and it is the first car ever to come with a loft. I mean it. There is an internal
roofbox into which, I’m fairly certain, you could fit a pair of modern-day skis. And that’s
just the start. There are so many cubbyholes and oddment stowage boxes that you could
hide a priest in there and never find him again.

The car I tested had a 90 horsepower diesel, which meant I couldn’t go very fast. But on
the long straight between Shipston on Stour and Chipping Norton, I did get past a tractor
in just 18 minutes. So it’s not the end of the world. And better still, it should do 40mpg
easily.

It’s a good car, the Berlingo. And in these difficult times, it makes even more sense than
usual.

THE CLARKSOMETER
Citroën Berlingo Multispace

Clarkson’s Verdict A good car for bad times

ENGINE 1560cc, four cylinder
POWER 90bhp at 4000rpm
TORQUE 159 lb ft @ 1750rpm
TRANSMISSON Five-speed manual
FUEL 49.6mpg (combined)
CO2 150g/km
ACCELERATION 0-62mph: 14.3sec
TOP SPEED 100mph
PRICE £11,905
TAX BAND C (£120 for 12 months)

________________________________________________________________________

I have some donkeys. The small one that looks like a cow is called Eddie. The quiet grey
one that doesn’t do much, except bite the hand that feeds it, is called Geoffrey, after the
chancellor that did for Mrs Thatcher. And then there’s the beautiful one: she’s called
Kristin Scott Donkey.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Ms Scott Thomas. I’ve seen The English Patient
20 times, except for the bathroom scene of course. I’ve seen that so often the DVD’s got
a hole in it.

As I’m sure we all know, Kristin lost both her father and her stepfather in air crashes. She
went to Paris to study drama and still lives there today with her obstetrician husband,
François Olivennes — a man for whom I’ve felt nothing but hatred. Until now. Because
the crush is over.

In a recent newspaper interview Kristin laid into Britain, saying it was stuck in the 1950s,
that everyone who goes to hospital dies, and that we’re all fat, acquisitive television
addicts.

Now I’m sorry but no one ever emigrates because of the success they’ve enjoyed at
home. No one ever says, “Well I have a happy home life, I’m rich and I have many
friends . . . so I’m off”. The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is
because they’ve cocked everything up in their own. So their views are bound to be
jaundiced.

Everyone you see planting olive groves on those endless “new life abroad” programmes
is inevitably a sad and lonely individual who thinks their homeland is to blame for
everything that’s gone wrong in their empty, shallow, friend-free, halitosis-ridden lives.

This is why Australians are all such chippy bastards. Because every single one of them is
descended from someone who, at some point, made a complete and utter hash of their
entire life. This means they all have a failure gene in their make-up.

Of course, I also think that Britain is a nation of inarticulate, pugilistic slobs. I agree with
Kristin, completely, but I’m allowed to say this because I live here. I’m also allowed to
say that I much prefer France. I like France so much, in fact, that I’d like to demonstrate
the point publicly, by buying a French car.

Of course, a French car is built by disgruntled and uninterested Algerians in a factory

with a floor made out of mud, so it’s not going to last very long. But then it’s a statement
more than a car really. I mean, a French car shows other road users that you loathe Tony
Blair, that you disapprove of his stance in Iraq and that you prefer a quail’s egg to a
burger any day of the week.

The problem is that while the French are very good at mushrooms and shooting pigs,
they’ve been in an automotive oxbow lake since about 1959. Now, though, we have the
Citroën C4.

You’ll no doubt have seen this on your television, turning into a robot and dancing. Well,
in real life the car can’t do that. But it can do pretty well everything else. It may be the
same size as a Ford Focus or Vauxhall Astra but it costs less, and it can do far, far more.

For instance, if you nod off while driving down the motorway, sensors under the front
bumper will detect the moment when you stray into another lane and set off a vibrator in
the seat to wake you up. My wife liked this feature so much she drove all the way to
London last week on the hard shoulder.

Then there’s the steering wheel. The rim turns but the middle bit stays still so all the
buttons are always in the same place, and my, what a lot of buttons there are. You can set
the sat nav, organise the cruise control, change the radio station, adjust the volume and
answer the phone. There are so many buttons, in fact, that you’ll almost certainly stray
out of your lane while trying to find the right one.

Don’t worry, though, because if you don’t want a Meg Ryan moment there’s even a
button to turn the Rabbit off.

Now. Have you ever inadvertently pulled the bonnet catch while driving along? No,
neither have I, but that hasn’t stopped Citroën fitting a flap to make sure you can’t, unless
the passenger door is wide open.

I bet you have worried, however, that your car will be broken into. Well the C4 has an
alarm and an immobiliser as you’d expect, but in addition its side windows are made
from laminated glass. It’s not bulletproof, but it’s the next best thing.

Next up, we have the air-conditioning system, which comes with a little flap into which
you can insert a tailor-made capsule full of your favourite air freshener. That beats
hanging a Christmas tree that smells of lavatory cleaner from your rear-view mirror.

At this point I should draw your attention to the digital speedometer that is designed to
ensure it’s readable even in bright sunlight, the double door seals to cut wind noise, the
nine speakers, the six airbags and the 280-watt amplifier. And then there’s the electronic
brakeforce distribution, the antilock brakes, the electronic stability control and the
emergency braking assistance, all of which have helped the C4 get a five-star Euro
NCAP safety rating.

I should remind you at this point that I’m not reviewing a £100,000 S-class Mercedes.
I’m writing about a normal, everyday family hatchback; a family hatchback that’s an
orgasmatron with swivelly headlamps. Yup, when you turn the bit of the wheel that does
actually turn, the searchlight-bright xenon bulbs turn, too, illuminating bits of the road
that would otherwise be hidden.

Of course, the old DS had this feature about 200 years ago, but it didn’t have front and
rear parking sensors, or wipers that come on when it rains, or lights that come on when
it’s dark, or tyres that let you know when they have developed a leak.

It’s not often that I’m stunned by any car, leave alone a family hatchback. But the C4’s
equipment package genuinely had me reeling in open-mouthed disbelief.

And now you’re expecting the but. The moment when the whole pack of cartes comes
crashing down.

Well, sorry, but the five-door version is elegant and the three-door is properly striking.
And I must say the 2 litre VTS coupé I drove went, handled and stopped with much
aplomb and vigour. It wasn’t as much fun as a Golf GTI because it felt heavy. But then it
would, with all that stuff weighing it down.

If you don’t fancy the hot version, don’t despair because there are 22 models on offer,
including four trim levels, five different petrol engines and a choice of three diesels.
You’ve got to be able to find something you like in there.

You’ll certainly be able to find something you can afford because even the VTS rocket
ship is listed at £17,195. That’s a full £2,000 less than a Golf GTI and that on its own is a
good enough reason to ignore the VW. But then you have the £1,100 cashback deal that
Citroën is offering at the moment. Factor that in and the price falls to just £16,095. And
that . . . that is truly incredible value.

Of course, I can pretty much guarantee that your C4 will break down every 15 minutes.
Citroëns just do, and I’m not fooled by the three-year warranty on this one. Having the
fault fixed for free in no way compensates for being stuck on the hard shoulder at three in
the morning. Although, if you leave the lane sensor on, you will at least have a nice time
waiting for the tow truck.

Certainly, I would expect Kristin Scott Thomas, with her love of the French, to have a
C4. But in fact it turns out she has a Volvo estate. How English is that? You can do
better. You can be English and have a French car.
VITAL STATISTICS

Model: Citroën C4 VTS coupé

Engine type: Four-cylinder, 1997cc
Power: 180bhp @ 7000rpm
Torque: 149 lb ft @ 4750rpm
Transmission: Five-speed manual
Fuel/CO2: 33.6mpg / 200g/km
Insurance: Group 15
Acceleration: 0-60mph: 8.3sec
Top speed: 140mph
Price: £17,195
Verdict: C'est magnifique!
Rating: Four stars

By now, you will have heard all about the new Apple iPhone. You will have been told its
battery has the life expectancy of a veal calf, and that if you want to take a photograph,
you’d be better off setting up an easel and breaking out the oils.

What’s more, you’ll have been told – by people , who haven’t got one – that it works
only on O2 that it can’t receive pictures via the text service and that it jams a lot.

There’s something else as well. It is able to deliver the weather forecast from San Diego
and clips from YouTube of young Asian men falling off motorcycles, because it can be
connected to the internet. This, however, is not easy. Certainly you won’t be able to do it.
So you’re going to need a “little man”.

It used to be that wealthy families in rural idylls would have a “little man” in the village
who could be called upon to come round at a moment’s notice and remove dead pigeons
from the chimney pot. Or start the car. Or free the satellite dish from the clematis.

He was the most vital cog in the community. But not any more. Because today he’s been
surpassed by someone far more important. The “little man” who will come round to fix
your broken laptop.

Unfortunately, my little man, who is called Hugo, recently met with some success and is
now busy installing vast intranets on industrial estates. So asking him to come round to
unblock a stubborn wireless network is a bit like asking Led Zeppelin to come round and
be the turn at your four-year-old’s birthday party.

This is a disaster because Hugo is the only man alive who knows how my house works.
He knows the systems that prevent reporters from sitting in the road outside and reading
my e-mails. He knows the codes that allow my daughter’s laptop to speak to my phone.
He knows the DNA of every socket and every inch of cable. And now he is gone.
So when my iPhone asks for an APN and a username and a password before it can hook
up to something called the Edge, I have no idea what it’s on about. Nor do I know if I
want the VPN on or off because I don’t know what a VPN is. Or data roaming. And then
I have to tell it whether I am WEP, WPA or WPA2.

And, of course, my new little man can’t help either because all the information is locked
in the mind of my old little man.

The upshot is that I can’t access the internet when I’m out and about, and do you know
what? That is not the end of the world, because when I’m on location I rarely have the
time or the inclination to think: “What I’d like to do now is watch a Korean explode, and
then maybe I’ll watch a plump lady in Houston playing with herself.”

Nor can I access my e-mails, which is also a good thing because nothing has ever been
said in an e-mail that needed to be said at all.

And anyway, even without these facilities, the iPhone sits in the pantheon of great
inventions alongside the wheel, fire and Sky+. It’s one of those things that come into
your life and you think: “How in the name of God did I ever manage without it?”

Sure, the camera, as has been suggested, can’t take pictures if it’s too dark, too bright or
something in between, but everything else is brilliant. You type out texts on a proper
qwerty keyboard, and even if you make a mistake it uses witchcraft to correct the error.
And then there’s the telephone, which comes with big, special-needs numbers that you
can’t miss even if you have fingers like burst sausages. And on top of this, it’s an iPod.

Problems? Honestly, there aren’t any. I’ve had mine hacked so it works on Vodafone,
and I’m sorry, but the battery is fine. It lasts for four days. Though this might have
something to do with the fact that I’m a man, and therefore only think to use a phone
when I’m on a cliff, clinging to a branch, in a howling gale. And only then as a last
resort.

This brings me on to an interesting idea. Why doesn’t Apple make a car?

The fact of the matter is that the established car makers are timid and afraid of change.
They think the mini MPV is a revolution and that the Smart car can be mentioned in the
same breath as penicillin. This means they never think outside the box.

Why, for instance, does a car have a steering wheel? Or pedals? Or a dashboard? No,
really. As anyone under the age of 15 will tell you, the handset for a PlayStation can be
used to steer, accelerate and brake a car. And there are still spare buttons on the handset
that can be used to fire machineguns.

And, of course, without a steering wheel or a dashboard, there’d be a lot more space in
the cabin, and no need for expensive, weighty airbags. And that’s just me, thinking off
the top of my head.
I feel fairly sure that if Apple were asked to make a car, it would come up with an
automotive iPod, and within weeks we’d view the current alternatives in the same way
that we now view the cassette tape, the LP and the 8-track. Until then, however, we will
have to make do with the Daihatsu Materia.

In essence, this is a small, five-door hatchback that you can buy for £10,995. But as you
can see from the pictures, it doesn’t look like a small five-door hatchback. It looks like
the Johnny Cab Arnold Schwarzenegger used when he was on Mars.

You may not care for the styling very much, in the same way that you may think an iPod
is no match for the gloss and the joy of an album cover. But there is one big advantage.
And I do mean big. Inside, the Materia is absolutely vast.

On the outside, then, you have a car that is as easy to park as a small Volkswagen. But
inside, five adults can luxuriate.

It’s a nice place to be too. The dashboard doesn’t look like it was designed to a price –
which, because they’ve put the instruments in the middle so they don’t have to be
changed for left-hand-drive markets, it was. However, precisely because the instruments
are in the middle, it looks like it’s all been styled by someone with a vision, and a polo-
neck jumper.

The Materia is well equipped too. You get a CD changer – wow – air-conditioning, rear
parking sensors, electric bits and bobs and, if you fork out £800 more, an automatic
gearbox.

Under the bonnet there’s a 1.5 litre engine that produces – just – enough get-up-and-go to
mean the Materia can be used on a motorway. It’s not like today’s Euro-smalls that have
too much weight and too little oomph to get out of the inside lane.

To drive? Well it’s fairly terrible, if I’m honest. Any attempt to make it dance is resisted
with lots of bouncing around, and because the front seats are so utterly lacking in side
support you tend to fall out of them if you are even remotely spirited.

It doesn’t matter, though. Criticising the little Daihatsu for not being sporty is a bit like
criticising Postman Pat’s van for not being any good at making mashed potatoes.

The only thing I will criticise is the fuel consumption. Maybe because the body has the
aerodynamic properties of a warehouse, or maybe because the engine’s bigger than is
normal, it isn’t the pound stretcher you might imagine: around 35mpg will be the norm.

This will add a few pounds to your annual motoring bill but I think it’s worth it. I liked
this car very much. You will, too, whether you’re a school-run mum, an old lady or a
surfer dude who wants a boxy replacement for your recently expired VW Microbus.
However, there is a long way to go. Daihatsu has wandered off the well-worn path with
this one, and come up with what the motor industry would call radical and daring. But
imagine what might be possible if the Materia were now handed over to the computer
industry. We’d get a properly amazing car. And little men everywhere would be in work
for the rest of time.

Vital statistics

Model Daihatsu Materia

Engine 1495cc, four cylinders

Power 102bhp @ 6000rpm

Torque 97 lb ft @ 4400rpm

Transmission Five-speed manual

Fuel 39.2mpg (combined cycle)

CO2 169g/km

Acceleration 0-62mph: 10.8sec

Top speed 106mph

Price £10,995

Rating

Verdict A giant leap for car-making kind

A little while back I tested a bog-standard Fiat Panda and while it was slower than a real
panda, it was also a damn sight cheaper to buy or run. So on balance, I liked it very
much.

Since then, though, a couple of things have caused me to look once again at those initial
findings. First of all James May, my colleague from Top Gear, has bought one, which
means there must be something wrong with it, and second, I know what that something
is.

Yes, the Panda is very good in town and very good, too, in snow and ice. It is also a great
deal of fun on small rural back roads, because even if something does turn out to be
coming the other way, there is always room to squeeze between it and the hedgerow.
But the Panda is a very small car, which means it has a very small engine, which means it
is absolutely hopeless on the motorway. As hopeless as I would be on the men’s downhill
course at Klosters.

Driving an underpowered car on the motorway is one of the most dangerous things a man
can do. It’s up there with sticking your middle finger in the bottom of a sleeping tiger.
It’s very nearly as dangerous as driving through Alabama with “Hillary for President”
written on the side of your car.

The problem is simple. You come up behind a truck that is doing 50mph in the middle
lane. So you think you will simply pull out and overtake. You therefore indicate, wait for
a gap in the stream of traffic to your right and ease out.

Textbook stuff. Worthy of a Mr Tufty safe driving award from PC McGarret No 452.

Except you’re in for a shock because although you have your foot welded to the floor and
you’re in third gear and the little engine is screaming itself to death, you are not doing
what a scientist would call “accelerating”.

And now the car in the outside lane that was a speck in your rear-view mirror is leaving
thick black lines all over the road as the driver desperately tries to avoid slamming into
the back of the “effing a***hole” that pulled into his lane at 50mph . . . and then failed to
go any faster.

You’re terrified that at any second it will slam into your tailgate, and this is doubly
worrying when you’re in a Fiat Panda because the tailgate in question is only 4in abaft of
your most precious and vital organs.

I use this as a general rule of thumb. If a car has less than 100 horsepower, it is never safe
to pull into the outside lane if there is a car in sight . . . even if it’s three miles away. If a
car has less than 60 horsepower, it is never safe to pull into the outside lane at all.

Sixty horsepower was fine in the days when cars had four wheels and a seat but now the
average small car has so much safety equipment and so many luxury goods nailed to its
dashboard that it weighs more than Bolivia. And to move a country, you need more than
60 horses. A lot more.

As you may know, I’m not well disposed to the idea of governments banning things,
except for beards and ginger hair and butter beans and Scotsmen sitting in Westminster
and caravans and any talk of global warming by people who don’t know what they’re on
about and the Toyota Prius and books with no plot and costume dramas on ITV and
anything with Jade Goody in it and Ken bloody Livingstone, but the only thing that stops
me from banning the Fiat Panda from the outside lane of a motorway is that May would
become even later for his call times on Top Gear.
Actually, there’s another reason. Fiat has just brought out a more peppy version of its
lovable little car that has — wait for it — a dizzying 100 horsepower. That’s about a fifth
of what I reckon is necessary to make progress these days, but hey, it’s a step in the right
direction.

A 100 horsepower Panda should, in theory, be the perfect car. As cheeky and as much
fun as its less powerful brothers. But useable on the motorway and not burdened with the
ponderous May association.

It looks fab, too, with all sorts of sporty chicken wire grilles and zoomy lights. If it were a
dog, it would have patches and cockeyed ears and it would whiz round your mother’s
ankles whenever she came to stay and make a point of sticking its nose in the vicar’s
crotch. But nobody else’s. If it were a dog, you’d like it a lot.

But it isn’t a dog. It’s a car and it’s good at that, too, easily swallowing two children into
the back and, thanks to its boxy body, still having a decent-sized boot. I bet you could get
an ironing board in there if you were determined enough.

So snow, ice, the school run, the motorway, town centres, parking, flash dinner parties,
the station run in a morning. The little Fiat can take all these things in its stride and still
be suitable for the family man who likes to spend his weekends doing extreme ironing.
So, as a result, the specialist motoring press has been raving about this car.

Thinking that it might actually be Jesus with alloy wheels, I borrowed one. And I’m sorry
but I pretty much hated it.

The problem is that the original, proper, normal Fiat Panda was conceived as a local car
for local people. It was designed to be as cheap as possible and it is: £7,000 for a car that
has, give or take, just as many parts as a £21,000 VW Golf is little short of remarkable.
And it’s not like it was made by jungle people who were brought up on What Ox
magazine either.

The trouble is that by sticking a 1.4 litre engine under the bonnet, you are now paying
£10,000 for a £7,000 car. And it shows.

Yes, it’s faster. Yes, it corners well. And yes, it rides more smoothly than you might
imagine, too, but there is almost no refinement at all. It’s like putting a Saturn V rocket in
your vacuum cleaner. Sure, you will get the housework done more quickly but there will
be some issues with noise, vibration and harshness.

And so it goes in the hot Panda. The engine gave me a headache, and because it’s pretty
loud I had to turn the stereo up, and that made my headache worse. So then I had to slow
down, and then what’s the point of all that extra power?
They say it will do 115mph, and I dare say that’s right, but achieving this speed is hard
— there aren’t enough Nurofen in the world and it’s not desirable anyway because the
Panda is so small it feels like you’re the food and it’s the hermetically sealed bag.

The windscreen is right there, in front of your nose. The back window is right there,
touching the back of your head, and the deep side windows complete the picture with
your peripheral vision. So when you’re doing 90mph it feels like you’re doing 90mph . . .
without the benefit of a car around you. That’s quite disturbing, especially when you have
the headache from hell.

I suppose if I were a well-off youth after a stylish urban runaround, and I never needed to
make a long journey, the 100 horsepower Panda might make some kind of sense. But for
anyone else, I’m afraid it’s time to draw pretty much the same wearisome conclusion that
I seem to draw with all small car tests these days. You’re better off with the Suzuki Swift
Sport.

Vital statistics

Model Fiat Panda 1.4 16v five-door

Engine 1368cc, four cylinders

Power 100bhp @ 5800rpm

Torque 94 lb ft @ 4500rpm

Transmission Six-speed manual

Fuel 43.5mpg

CO2 154g/km

Acceleration 0-62mph: 9.5sec

Top speed 115mph

Price £9,995

Rating 2/5

Verdict Like a rocket in a vacuum cleaner

A couple of weeks ago Michael Palin was to be found in a Tibetan yak herder’s hairy
tent, making cheese. After much plunging with a sort of broom handle, he said wistfully:
“There is a much slower pace of life here.”
Well yes, Michael, that’s true, because when I want some cheese I don’t have to milk a
yak. I simply climb into my supercharged Mercedes and pop to the supermarket. This
gives me more time to play shoot-’em-up Star Wars games on my son’s PlayStation.

Later, Palin, on a trek around the Himalayas for your Sunday-evening viewing pleasure,
adopted a rueful tone and asked the yak herder’s English-speaking friend if he felt Tibet’s
culture and history were being lost now that China was in the driving seat. The man
didn’t really seem to give a toss. He wasn’t worried about whether his son felt Tibetan or
Chinese just so long as he got a good education, learnt Engrish, and was able to go to
university in Peking. Or maybe Oxford.

And there you have the central thrust of my point. Contrary to what we learn in this
country from books, and television, there is no nobility in poverty. There is nothing
charming about a worn-out loincloth. Making cheese is boring. And given the chance I’m
pretty sure that most yak herders would rather spend their time shooting Ewoks in the
face on a PlayStation.

Ray Mears is the worst offender. He’s the BBC’s bushcraft specialist and keeps winding
up his programmes by explaining that we have much to learn from whatever ancient tribe
he’s been with that week. No we haven’t. We don’t need to cure a headache by rubbing
bark into the palms of our hands, because we have Nurofen.

The simple fact of the matter is that remote tribes from the middle of Africa, or Alaska or
whichever godforsaken hellhole he’s in, have a great deal more to learn from us than we
do from them. They start fires by rubbing gull beaks together because they don't have
Swan Vesta. They eat boiled soil because they don’t have takeaway pizzas. And they
while away their evenings singing tuneless old songs because they don’t have Robbie
Williams or the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar.

We see the same sort of thing closer to home. When was the last time someone went on
Parkinson and said they were born in a large house with a silver spoon in their mouth. All
of them claim to have been brought up with outdoor plumbing, as though this will create
a halo of empathy. Why? There’s no dignity is traipsing down the garden for a crap.
That’s why no one does it any more.

Cilla Black, for instance, never talks about the large house where she lives now; it’s
always the crummy one in which she was brought up. Well if she thinks being poor is so
much fun why doesn’t she give all her money to a Tibetan yak herder and hitch-hike back
to Liverpool.

I love not being poor. I love that I was born in England in the later part of the 20th
century. I love that I don’t have to make cheese from the juice of a yak, or headache pills
from bark, or butter from the hooves of a caribou. I love that I can eat out whenever I
want, and wash away the residue using a flushing commode.

Yes, people who sit around cross-legged all day eating twigs and leaves have better,
whiter teeth than me, but I can go to the fridge whenever I want and drink a refreshing
bottle of Coke which, if you stop and think for a moment, has to be one of life’s greatest
pleasures. Cold Coke, from the traditional bottle, when you’re thirsty beats the spectacle
of a gleaming white urinal when you’ve been driving for 40 miles with crossed legs. Cold
Coke when you’re thirsty is up there with Uma Thurman saying: “Oh, okay then. Just this
once.”

What I love even more is that we don’t even consider Coke to be a luxury good. In parts
of Africa people have to walk for 40 miles for a drink of filtered mud, and when they get
there and have shooed away the leopards and wildebeest, out of the savannah pops a
whitey-boy TV documentary crew to say how noble they are.

Rubbish. They would chop off one of their yaks’ legs for a glass of cold Coca-Cola. To
them it’s a 42-year-old single malt, a Gulfstream V and a Pershing 85 all rolled into a
single, slim-hipped bottle. And it’s much the same story with the subject of this week’s
column. The Ford Mondeo.

This car holds a special place in my heart because when it was being designed Ford
inadvertently created the best camera tracking car in the business.

You probably think, when you watch Top Gear, that all the moving pictures are taken
from some elaborate pick-up truck with scaffolding and jib arms. But in fact we always
use a Mondeo because it has a good, smooth ride and because its sloping tailgate, when
raised, gives the cameraman a 180-degree field of fire.

Of course you’re probably not that bothered about this particular feature. In fact you’re
not bothered about the Mondeo at all, because so far as you’re concerned the days when
you bought a Ford passed on the same day Terry and June was axed and the council
moved your bog from the vegetable patch into a cupboard under the stairs.

You think of it like Coke. Fine when you’re on holiday and you need a set of wheels
from Hertz, but back at home you’d rather have an Alcopop BMW or an organic fruit-
whip Audi.

This is a shame because the Mondeo is better-looking than most of its rivals, and better
equipped, too. It’s also cheaper, more spacious, better to drive and surprisingly well
screwed together.

If an alien, or even an African, were to come to Britain, he simply wouldn’t understand

why so many people pay so much more to get so much less.

Unless, of course, you happened to be running around in the new £22,000 ST TDCi
version, which isn’t very good at all.

Sold only in Britain, it’s styled to look like the flagship V6 with huge wheels and lowered
suspension, but under the bonnet you get a diesel engine that makes the sounds of the
canal when you start it up. And the sounds of the bus when you get going.

This is the most powerful diesel engine ever slotted into a Mondeo. It’s a 2.2 litre that
gets the car from 0 to 62 in 8.7sec and onwards to 138mph. And you’ll still be able to
average 37 or maybe even 40mpg. Not bad, you might be thinking, as you scan the ads
for used BMWs.

Well keep on scanning, because to make the Mondeo achieve this kind of performance
you really have to work the six-speed gearbox. If you lose concentration for a moment
you’re out of the power band, spluttering, or right at the top of it, sounding like a
narrowboat that’s about to go critical.

This is the problem with overly powerful diesel engines. On paper the torque figures look
good, but in reality the grunt comes in a short, sharp lumps. And the Mondeo is a
particularly bad offender. Also, on full beam, the headlamps are rubbish.

Don’t you love that. That we can dismiss a car because it has poor full-beam headlamps;
even though the latest research shows we used dipped beam these days for 98% of the
time.

Ray Mears would tell us that we’re spoilt, but I’ll tell you what. I’d far rather that Africa
and South America joined our way of life, than that we joined theirs.

It’s hard to find a point in history when a man sound in mind and body could have bought
a Jaguar. Certainly it wasn’t possible in the 1970s, when they were made either badly or
not at all by a bunch of Trotskyites who spent most of the working day at the factory
gates round a brazier, popping inside occasionally to leave their lunch in an inlet
manifold and then going on strike again when a foreman asked them to take it out.

There was even a time when the weak and stupid British Leyland management thought
seriously about renaming Jaguar the Large Car Division. Hmm. I can see that someone
might buy a piece of farm equipment from the People’s Tractor Factory, but that’s mostly
because they’d starve or be shot if they bought something else. I cannot see, however,
why anyone would want to drive round in a Large Car Division XJ12 when they could
have a, er, Bavarian Motor Works 735i instead.

Eventually, though, Jaguar’s management was sent off to live on plastic inconti-
armchairs on the south coast, the workforce was given a clip round the ear by Mrs T and
the company was rescued by Ford.

And then, briefly, there was a time - it was 3.15pm on October 12 - when a sensible chap
might have thought: “No. I won’t buy a Mercedes or a BMW or an Audi or a
wheelbarrow. I’m going to get one of those supercharged Jaguar XJRs.”
Right up until tea time the next day, Jaguar even managed to do well in the JD Power
customer satisfaction surveys. Although this result, you have to suspect, was born of
amazement rather than solid build quality. “Jesus. I’ve bought a Jag and it’s got all the
way home without exploding or turning inside out. And there isn’t a single sandwich in
the inlet manifold.” It’s for much the same reason that, at the same time, Skoda was
doing well too.

Sadly, the honeymoon didn’t last. Jaguar launched the S-type, which was about as
relevant as Terry and June. And then the X-type, which was very nice. As well it should
have been because it was a Ford Mondeo with a fancy radiator grille and a bigger price.

To make matters worse, Jaguar had decided to shake off its wood’n’leather image by
going into Formula One. Brilliant, except its cars, which were also Fords behind the
green paint, either came last or crashed into one another. Then Ford ran out of money.

The result is that, apart from at 3.15pm on October 12, the only people who have bought
a Jaguar since about 1970 did so because they were buying something British. That’s not
a good enough reason. That would be like someone from Ankara buying a car “because
it’s Turkish”.

Given the choice of two similar products, I’ll always buy the one with a Union Jack on
the label. But who says: “No. I will not buy a Riva Aquarama speedboat. I shall buy this
lump of dog dirt instead. Because it was made in Pontefract”?

Of course we know exactly who says that sort of thing. Golfers. The ruddy-faced little
Englanders who refer to everyone by their initials and become aroused whenever anyone
mentions Enoch Powell.

Now, though, since Jaguar was offloaded to the Indians, it is very obvious that the little
Englanders have had enough. They could just about stomach Jag being American-owned.
But with Mr Patel in the hot seat? “Better have another G and T, Maurice. I think I’m
going to have a coronary.”

You must have noticed the result. In the past few months the whiff of the 19th hole has
been lifted from the Jag range. No longer do you open the door to be knocked senseless
by a nauseating cloud of Eau de Belfry.

The smell of Nick Faldo’s trousers has now settled on the Lexus range, and Jags, for the
first time since the E-type was given a V12, are being bought by people you’d have round
for dinner. And so, with a spring in our step and hope in our hearts, we arrive at the door
of the Jaguar XKR.

When it was launched, our heads told us that it was a very fine car. Faster, more practical
and cheaper than the Aston Martin V8 Vantage. And not exactly a minger, either. Of
course the power of the badge is strong in us all, so while our heads said Jag our hearts
said Aston and off we all toddled to buy the Vantage.
Why not? Astons were all glamour and James Bond, and Jaguars were full of Jim
Davidson.

That, though, has now changed. Astons are bought largely by people who can’t even park
properly, and the XKR is an extremely good way of saying: “I know I’m not James Bond.
I’m not having a midlife crisis. I just wanted a good-looking two-seater and I bought this
one because it’s the best.”

It is. I recently said that 15% of me wants an XKR convertible, but as each day goes by,
that climbs. It’s up to 36% now and that’s the point when you go on the website to see
what colours are available. Green, I’m thinking. With a fawn hood.

The only problem is the engine. When it was designed in 1435, 400 brake horsepower
was lots. But since then the Germans have been engaged in a power war and now we
have the Audi RS6 wading into the fray with 572bhp. That makes the Jag’s 416bhp look
weedy and vegetarian.

I know that, as we speak, a 500bhp 5 litre Jag V8 is being tested, but it won’t be here for
a year. So you either have to buy a Merc or a BMW. Or you have to think: “Actually,
with fuel costing more than lobster, maybe 416bhp isn’t so bad . . . ”

It certainly isn’t so bad in the limited-edition XKRS I drove last week. At no point did I
put my foot down and think: “Mmmm. Has it broken down?” The only thing I did think
was: “Mmmm. I wish it made a bit more noise.” I know that, from the outside, the
exhausts crackle and rumble, but from behind the wheel, all you can hear is the whine of
the supercharger. It’s a bit like being in Nigel Mansell’s nose.

I also wished the sat nav was a bit more funky. Doubtless, an all-new command-and-
control centre is on the drawing board and that’s probably a year away as well. Memo to
Jag, then. Ring Mr Patel. Ask for more rupees.

It’s important because, God, this is a lovely car. I parked it next to my wife’s Aston
Vantage and there’s no doubt in my mind: it’s better looking. It’s likely to be more
reliable too, as well as still being cheaper, faster and fitted with two (albeit useless) seats
in the back. And nicer to drive.

The S model’s engine has been tweaked so the top speed is up to 174mph. And,
underneath, you get revised springs, dampers and antiroll bars. It’s stiffer than the normal
car but you’re hard pressed to tell. It still rides the bumps beautifully – better than any
other car in the class, by miles - and it still handles with a smile-on-your face simplicity.

Sadly, only 50 of these cars have been made for the UK. All are hard tops. All come in
black and all have been sold. But it’s really not the end of the world, because it felt very
similar to the standard car, which costs £9,000 less, comes in any colour your like and is
available as a convertible too.
You’ve probably never thought about buying a Jaguar before. Trust me, though. You
should now.

The Clarksometer

ENGINE 4196cc, V8
POWER 416bhp @ 6250rpm
TORQUE 413lb ft @ 4000rpm
TRANSMISSION Six-speed auto
FUEL 22.9mpg (combined) CO2 294g/km
ACCELERATION 0-60mph: 4.9sec
TOP SPEED 174mph (limited) ~
PRICE £79,995
TAX BAND G (£400 a year)
Clarkson’s verdict Buy Indian, it’s the smart choice

Nearly all four-wheel-drive cars are capable of amazing their owners by scaling lumps of
seemingly insurmountable geology. That said, nearly all four-wheel-drive cars are
equally capable of amazing their owners by getting stuck on little more than a mildly
sloping croquet lawn.

I have driven a Jeep Wrangler over the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, climbing
boulders so vast that they would not even fit inside the foyer of a large National Health
Service hospital, and yet I’ve been stranded in exactly the same car on a small hill in
Gloucestershire.

It’s the same story with the Range Rover. This is a car that once took me in Hannibal’s
footsteps from Val d’Isère to Italy, so I figured it would make mincemeat of the
Yorkshire Dales. Wrong. After 500 yards it sank up to its door handles and the locals
(who were laughing a lot, for Yorkshirists) said I wouldn’t get it free until June. You
know the Toyota Land Cruiser. Built to take Wilbur Smith through the vast heat that is
Africa, designed to fight the good fight for the United Nations in the world’s
troublespots. And utterly defeated by a small mound of earth built by my local farmer to
keep gypsy caravans off her land.

The problem is that while a big off-road car may have 9in of ground clearance, it will
become beached when asked to tackle an obstacle that is 10in tall. Look at it this way. I
can amaze old ladies with my ability to get things down from 7ft shelves in a
supermarket. But if the product they want is more than 7ft 1in from the ground, I’m just
as useless as they are.
And then there’s the tyres. Unless they’re knobblier than a teenager’s face they’re going
to spin like a washing machine on its final cycle if you ask them to get you up a sloping
lawn. Wet grass in off-road circles is known as “green ice”.

Which brings me neatly on to the Argocat I’ve just bought. This is a small Canadian
bathtub with headlamps. But it has eight-wheel drive and this means its off-road ability is
simply incredible.

When three of its wheels are in mid-air or flailing around in the mud for grip, it still has
five to keep you moving. And of course, as an added benefit, an eight-wheel-drive
vehicle is twice as irritating for the environmentalists as one with only four-wheel drive.

So far I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing around with it and as yet haven’t discovered a
single obstacle that it can’t beat. You arrive at a slope so severe that it would stump Chris
Bonington and you think: “Well, there isn’t a hope in hell of getting up that.” Not in a
vehicle that has only 25 horsepower under the bonnet. That’s like asking a food blender
to get a satellite into orbit. But up it goes. Nothing stops it. I bet it could even manage
some of the speed humps in Kensington and Chelsea.

And if you really don’t like the look of the terrain ahead, you just turn the handlebars,
which locks up all four wheels on one side, and the little eight-foot ’Cat spins round in its
own length, like a tank.

The only time I had a moment’s worry was when I inadvertently drove into the sea while
on the Isle of Man. I’d been told not to worry because it floats and because the chunky
tyres act like paddles on a Mississippi steamer. So, I’d been assured, I’d be able to potter
along at speeds of up to one knot. Which is great in a lake. But not so good in the Irish
Sea, on the eve of a full moon with the tide racing out at 9 knots. This is a good way of
arriving, backwards, and quite fast, in the harbour at Belfast.

Happily, one of the Argocat’s tyres brushed up against a piece of seaweed and this
provided enough traction to give it forward momentum again and make it back to shore.

Drawbacks? Well if you peel away the floor to reveal the workings of the beast, you find
what looks like a mad secret dungeon shared by Mr Suzuki, James Watt and Zed from
Pulp Fiction. It’s a world of chains in there and I’m sorry but I find this to be very
unsatisfactory technology. Chains, as any eight-year-old boy knows, come off a lot,
causing your testicles to slam into the saddle and become pancake-shaped. Chains make
you go cross-eyed.

Then there’s the question of noise. The Kohler engine may be small but my God it makes
a din. It’s so loud you can’t even hear what the environmentalists are saying as you
bumble by. This means you can convince yourself they are waving their walking sticks in
a gesture of countryside camaraderie.
I love my Argocat. It does 22mph, which means it’s faster and more comfortable than
walking, it seats six and it costs around £14,000. Which means it’s about £16,000 less
than the new Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Jeep pioneered this whole off-road business back in the 1930s and like all American
organisations with 15 minutes of history under their belts, tradition runs deep in the
company’s veins.

Strange to report then that with its new car it has made no effort whatsoever to ape the
rather appealing styling of the last one. It’s just 16ft of car. A lump of what could well be
some Hyundai. Inside, however, there is one piece of Jeep tradition that has not been lost.
No space at all. The new Grand Cherokee may be 5in longer and a wee bit wider than the
old model, but climbing inside is like climbing into the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
You’d need to be legless to fit in the back and the only dog that would fit in the boot is
one that had been run over.

What’s more, everything in the cabin feels like it’s come from Matalan. Except for the
handbrake, which has the texture of a Far Eastern vibrator. And then there’s the leather,
which seems to have come from those polyurethane synthetic cows that provide America
with its UHT milk.

Like the new Discovery, the big Jeep has a monocoque chassis, which proves the
Mercedes influence at Chrysler is beginning to filter through. But there’s still some way
to go because the damn thing has a live rear axle, which means any imperfection in the
road shakes your hair out.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the seats were up to scratch. But they are useless. The only
good thing is that due to a lack of side support you spend more time falling out of them
than sitting there being shaken to bits by America’s idea of modern rear suspension.

So it’s uncomfortable, cramped and feels like it’s made entirely from melted Lego. And it
costs more than £30,000. Admittedly, you get lots of standard equipment for that,
including a heater that works like American foreign policy, blowing either very hot or
very cold but incapable of getting the temperature just right. You also get three headrests
for your deformed rear passengers, the middle one of which obliterates all traffic in the
rear-view mirror.

There are some good things, though. The headlamps are very bright, which is good for
spotting bears, and the Mercedes V6 diesel engine is quiet, refined, frugal and remarkably
powerful.

Sadly, however, to discover this means you would have to be driving the thing, and that
would mark you out as being mad. Because apart from the engine and the brightness of
the headlamps, every single thing about this car is wrong.

Even the underside technology is from the Stone Age. Yes, you get three electronic
differentials that send the power back and forth depending on which wheel has the most
traction. But the suspension can’t be raised and lowered, so when you’re beached that’s
it. And it won’t self-level either. Perhaps that’s why they’ve made the boot so small — to
stop you putting anything heavy in there.

As an off-roader then, the Grand Cherokee is beaten by my little Argocat. As a car, it’s
beaten by just about everything.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Jeep Grand Cherokee 3.0 CRD

Engine 2987cc, six cylinders
Power 215bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 376 lb ft @ 1600rpm
Transmission Five-speed automatic 4x4
Fuel 27.7mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 270g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 9sec
Top speed 124mph
Price £32,895
Verdict Outclassed and outplayed
Rating 2/5

Model Argocat Avenger 8x8

Engine 674cc, two cylinders
Power 25bhp @ 3600rpm
Torque 40 lb ft @ 2200rpm
Transmission Two forward, one reverse, auto
Fuel One gallon petrol per two hours
CO2 N/A
Acceleration 0-62mph: N/A
Top speed 22mph
Price £14,682
Verdict The more wheels the better
Rating 3/5

Jeremy Paxman. Very much the embodiment of 21st century man. Civilised, urbane, well
read and quick-witted. Yet underneath the polished veneer of sophistication pulsates the
brain of a tree shrew. Yup. Underneath that £50 haircut Paxman is no different from the
bass guitarist with AC/DC or your dog or even the brontosaurus.

Last week he rolled up at the Top Gear Karting Challenge wearing the sort of disdainful
sneer that makes him such a terrifying adversary on Newsnight. “I’ve never even seen a
go-kart before,” he drawled before the race.

By rights he should have hated every moment of it. Here, after all, was one of the most
respectable and respected men on television all dolled up in a stupid racing suit and
squeezed into a noisy, pointless bee of a thing.

But no, he loved it. Karting is cold, uncomfortable and a little bit dangerous. Uncultured,
uncouth and yobbish, it is the diametric opposite of University Challenge. But it is
guaranteed to send a shiver up the spine of even the most donnish romantic because,
sitting down there, close to the ground, it feels fast.

Speed, we’re forever being told, kills. Slow down, say the advertisements on television
and the digital boards on motorways. Flash flash go the speed cameras. The message is
clear and constant, but I’m afraid you might as well try to teach a lamppost how to tie
shoelaces.

We need speed like we need air and food and water.

And I’m not talking about the usefulness of going quickly either. Obviously, the faster
you travel the sooner you get to where you’re going. So you can see more and do more
and learn more. Speed, as I’ve said many times before, makes you cleverer.

Nor am I being flippant. Though, yes, speed does mean you can now go to see your
mother- in-law — but you don’t have to stay the night.

What I’m being is scientific. Thousands of years ago what caused man to come out of his
cave and think: “I wonder what’s in the next valley”? The risks of going to find out were
immense but obviously he went ahead or we’d all still be living in Ethiopia.

More recently, what caused Christopher Columbus to sail across the Atlantic, or Neil
Armstrong to fly to the moon? Why do people bungee jump? Well, it’s simple: we like
risk.

Deep at the root of any brain in the animal kingdom is the limbic system, a sort of slug-
like sticky thing that controls our instincts.

When we do something dangerous, it dumps a load of dopamine into our heads that
makes us euphoric. You see the effects of this on the face of a footballer after he’s scored
a goal. He’s taken a chance, got away with it and for a moment or two he is completely
out of control, lost in a sea of pure ecstasy.

When you take cocaine, the drug causes dopamine to be released. It’s why people
become so addicted, why it’s so moreish. But you don’t need to clog up your nose and
become a crashing bore to get exactly the same effect. All you need to do is get out there
and put your foot down.

Next weekend is the Festival of Speed, an event where some of the best cars in the world
drive past huge crowds of spectators in the grounds of Goodwood House.
If you’re able to pop along, I urge you to go to the start line where you will see all sorts
of respectable middle-aged men from the world of rock music and big business. They
always say, before they set off, that it’s not a race and that they won’t be trying hard.

But the instant the visor snaps shut on their helmets, the brain screams: “Give me some
dopamine,” the red mist comes down and they shoot off in a whirl of smoke and noise.

So what do the spectators get out of it? Well the same deal really. When the car comes
roaring toward you, bellowing that V8 bellow, your body is thinking: “Hello”.

And when the unseeing limbic system senses danger it goes berserk. When you hear a
noise in the house in the middle of the night you remain stock still, just like a springbok
when it thinks it senses a predator. Blood is fed to the muscles, which is why your face
goes white.

Next time you see Paxman, then, having a ding-dong on Newsnight, consider this: his
outer human brain is thinking of an intelligent response, but his inner tree-shrew brain is
thinking, “Where’s the nearest tree?” His blood is a mass of endorphins and adrenaline
that make him strong and awake, and so is yours as the Ferrari GTO barrels toward you at
120.

And so was mine the other day when I decided to see how fast I could make the new
Koenigsegg go on our test track in Surrey.

Mr Koenigsegg is a completely bald inventor from Sweden who decided one day to make
a supercar. Ferrari and Lamborghini should be afraid. Very afraid.

Sweden’s odd like that. Only 172 people live there but when they turn their attention to
something, the world tends to notice. Sweden produced one of the greatest Wimbledon
champions of all time and one of the biggest-selling pop acts. Sweden is where you go
for your self-assembly furniture.

Anything anyone can do, the Swedes can do better. Only a few years after someone failed
to assassinate Ronald Reagan someone shot the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme.
And, unbelievably, they still haven’t caught him.

So, what’s the new car like? Well, it’s almost the same weight as a McLaren F1, it is a
little bit more aerodynamically efficient, and with 655bhp in the boot it’s a little bit more
powerful. The result is, quite simply, the fastest road car in the world.

They’re talking about a top speed of 240mph and that’s about 30mph faster than Michael
Schumacher drives when he’s at work.

My limbic system was impressed. And it was even more impressed when I came back
from my first speed run to say the front was feeling a little light. “No problem,” said Mr
Koenigsegg. “We will jack up the back of the car a bit. And do you mind if we put some
gaffer tape round the windscreen?” Wow. It’s risky enough to drive any car at more than
170mph but to do it in a car that’s been jacked up a bit and has a windscreen held in place
with duct tape . . . There were so many chemicals coursing around my arterial route map
that if you’d cut me I’d have bled pure acid.

Eventually, I got it up to 174mph, 4mph faster than I’d managed in any other car on the
test track. And then the dopamine came. Speed kills? Maybe, but it doesn’t half thrill as
well.

So does the Koenigsegg. It’s an absolute beast, as hot as the centre of the Earth and as
noisy as a foundry. It’s like working out on the footplate of a steam train but the rewards
are huge.

Pile up to a corner, change down on the ridiculously narrow-gated gearbox, brake hard.
Already your clutch leg is aching from the effort. Now turn the wheel. There’s power
assistance, but not much. Your arms are straining to hold the front in line, so you apply
some power to unstick the back end. Grrrrr, goes the 4.7 litre V8. Weeeeeeeeee goes the
supercharger. And eeeeeeeee go the tyres are they lose traction.

Whack on some opposite lock to catch the slide. Whoa, it’s still going. More lock needed.
More effort. Your arms are really hurting now and you’re desperately trying to balance
the throttle, to find the sweet spot that will hold the back end in check.

There. There it is. Smoke is pouring off the tyres now, but the car is powering sideways
and under perfect control through the bend. Inside you have sweat in your eyes, you feel
like you’ve been arm wrestling a mountain all morning but with the dopamine coming
you don’t notice a thing.

Welcome then to the world of the super-fast supercar. They are utterly stupid, of course.
Just like the people who drive them. Us.

VITAL STATISTICS
Model Koenigsegg CC
Engine type V8, supercharged, 4723cc
Power 655bhp @ 6500rpm
Torque 553 lb ft @ 5000rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Suspension (front and rear) double wishbones, coil springs, anti-roll bar
Dimensions 4,190mm length; 1,990mm width; 1,070mm height
Tyres (front) 245/40 ZR18, (rear) 315/40 ZR18
Top speed 240mph
Acceleration 0 to 62mph: under 3.5sec
Price £354,000
Verdict An absolute beast
Damn it. I had some plans to introduce foxhunting in cars when the more traditional
equine variety is banned, but now the government has announced it is deciding whether
four-wheel-drive vehicles should be banned from Britain’s ancient rights of way.

At the moment, you can drive any car down any so-called green lane providing you can
prove that it was once used as a road. Those of a rambling disposition — and remember
the Ramblers’ Association began its life as an offshoot of the communist movement —
say this is preposterous. You shouldn’t be able to drive a Range Rover down the
Ridgeway just because it was once used by a bullock cart in 1628.

Now I agree, people who spend their weekends in combat trousers pushing one another’s
Land Rovers out of muddy puddles are probably mental. I certainly wouldn’t use one as a
babysitter, that’s for sure. But if they want to spend their free time driving their Isuzu
Troopers into a lake, that’s their business. And anyway, only 5% of the nation’s
enormous network of country paths are available to off-roaders, so taking that small piece
of the pie away does seem a bit unfair.

Fairness, however, doesn’t really bother eco-twerps. They had a speed limit on all
waterways in the Lake District, except a tiny part of Windermere on which normal people
could water-ski and ride jet bikes. Now, however, thanks to the communists, even this
little piece is about to be taken away and given back to Bill Oddie.

If off-road cars are banned from the countryside, we may have a problem because there
are also whisperings in the rectory of power that they may also be banned from town
centres too. Everyone, apparently, is getting fed up with mums in their Chelsea tractors,
taking up too much space and generally bashing into everything.

So all in all then, not an especially good time for Land Rover to stick its neck above the
battlements and announce the arrival of a new Discovery. A car that cannot be used in
town . . . or out of it.

Now I should make it crystal clear at the outset that I absolutely loathed the last Disco. It
used the old Range Rover’s chassis, which means it was rooted in the late 1960s, and
boy, could you tell on the road. You could have given one to an asylum seeker as a sort
of welcome-to-Britain gift and he’d have gone straight back home again.

And it had the most awful image problem because it was either driven by mums or
murderers. Mums liked the seven seats. Murderers liked the early models, at least, with
proper locking differentials, which were very good off-road. This meant they could drive
far into the woods to bury their victims’ heads.

The new car is a completely different animal. The raised rear roof line remains for those
who have a pet giraffe, and the doors seem to have come from a different car, but overall,
there’s no doubt that it’s a looker. A sort of Matra Rancho for the 21st century if you like.
Underneath you get a separate chassis and a monocoque, so you have the toughness to
deal with the green lanes you won’t be driving on and plenty of refinement in towns,
where you won’t be driving either.

It is a hugely comfortable car to drive: quiet, not too roly-poly in the bends and blessed
with an extraordinarily delicate throttle pedal that makes parallel parking — even on a
steep hill — a complete doddle. The only thing I really didn’t like about the new Disco
driving experience were the parking sensors that beeped pretty much constantly and went
hysterical when I was still miles from the car behind.

What good is 2ft in a modern city centre parking slot? They should be set to go berserk
when you’re 2mm from impact, not 2ft.

This is especially annoying because the latest Disco is so big that you’re always 2ft from
everything. You could be in Paris and still be only 2ft from you’re own front door. Mind
you, this does at least mean that there’s now a small boot to be found behind the third
row of seats.

Under the bonnet you get a 4.4 litre version of Jaguar’s 4.2 litre V8. This could uproot
trees with its torque and surprises you with its power. And if you don’t fancy mpg figures
in the low teens, you can have a diesel that uses the stunning twin turbo from Jaguar’s S-
type.

Inside, while you don’t get the style or flair of a Range Rover, you do get a sense of
utilitarian toughness. You could certainly detonate a small — let’s say one-kiloton —
bomb in there and nothing would break. Prices haven’t been announced yet but expect
the base models to start at less than £30,000 and the more expensive HSE petrol versions
to nudge £50,000.

The Discovery is likely to be better off-road than its big brother, the Range Rover. It is
also bigger, more powerful, more torquey, faster, more practical — thanks to the seven
seats — more economical and considerably cheaper.

On this basis it would be easy to sign off by saying the Disco is better than one of the best
cars in the world. But I’m afraid we’re far from the end of the story. You see, the Range
Rover is actually a five-seater executive car that happens to have four-wheel drive. Its
rivals are the Mercedes S-class and the Jaguar XJ8.

The Discovery is the other way round. It is supposed to be an off-road car that you can
use on the road. Its rivals are the John Deere tractor and the wellington boot. This is why
the new version worries me. I have not yet had a chance to take it off-road but I know I’ll
miss having a selection of levers that make an almighty clunking noise when you pull
them, as solid chunks of pig iron interlock with other solid chunks of pig iron.

Instead you get a rotary knob that you use to tell the car what sort of surface you’re on:
grass, gravel, a muddy track, sand or the M1. The onboard computer then changes the
settings to optimise the diffs and the ride height and the throttle sensitivity.

In theory it sounds amazing, and in practice it’ll probably work beautifully. But if I were
in the middle of the Kalahari, I’d rather have two chunks of pig iron than some silicon
chips that were designed and developed by four blokes in Banbury. Of course, you may
argue, the Discovery will not be used in the Kalahari or even the Lake District, so why
worry about how it will perform there?

Oh, come on. That’s like saying a nuclear missile will never be fired so why worry
whether it will fly. It’s nice to know it can.

Whatever, one day soon, I’ll do something mad and adventurous with the new car to see
if it can handle the rough stuff and report back.

In the meantime, I do have some concerns. The man from Land Rover could lift and tilt
the middle row of seats easily, but that’s because he was built like a supertanker’s anchor
and had arms like slabs of ham.

I struggled and I suspect a mum with a screaming child under one arm would be
completely flummoxed. The Volvo XC90, which is also made by Ford remember, is a
much more practical and marginally more spacious proposition — and cheaper, too, it
must be said.

I also noted that each occupant in the rear is given controls to change the radio station.
This sounds fine in theory, but do you let your kids choose what they listen to when
you’re driving? I don’t. And if they had the wherewithal to override my decision and
switch to Radio 1, I’d take a hammer to them — and their control panels — within the
first three miles.

Here’s the big one then. Would I swap my Volvo for a Disco? The Land Rover’s
certainly nicer to drive. It feels more substantial, too, as though you’re getting more
“stuff”. It also has better engines and undoubtedly more ability off-road. However, I
mainly need a device for moving children to and from school, so the answer is “no”.

As a car for mums, the Disco is narrowly beaten. But at the first possible opportunity I’ll
take one off-road and we’ll see just how it shapes up as a car for murderers.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model: Land Rover Discovery V8

Engine type: V8, 4394cc
Power: 295bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque: 315 lb ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission: Six-speed automatic, four-wheel drive
Acceleration: 0-60mph: 8.0sec
Top speed: 121mph
Tyres: 255/60 VR18
Price: TBA (£30,000-£50,000)
Verdict: Hugely comfortable, highly powerful and robustly built, but will the complex
new computer systems still work in the Kalahari?

______________________________________________________________________

While I was away last week, someone came in the night and erected a couple of
handmade road signs on the grass verge outside my house.

They advertise a new website that encourages road users to report fellow citizens for
dangerous or antisocial driving. I think it may be called www.interferingzealot.com.

The idea is simple. If you are annoyed by someone’s driving you simply post their
numberplate, and a brief description of their crime, in the hope that they’ll log on too and
be so ashamed they’ll turn over a new leaf and become a vicar.

Let me give you some examples. A chap with the username of StephenHarrison, who has
made 157 posts so far, quotes the numberplate of a car that, he says, on July 9 in
Birmingham city centre “positioned itself in the left/straight-on lane, then turned right at
the roundabout”.

It gets worse. Another chap, called Kev627, tells us that in Perham, Hampshire, a chap
driving a Ford Fiesta “indicated 100 yards before the exit prior to the one it used to leave
the A342”.

I’m surprised to find that someone in Glasgow didn’t tell the members he’d seen two
Muslim men “drive right over the pavement and into the terminal at the city’s airport in a
burning Jeep Cherokee”.

Sadly, I’m afraid I don’t know whether I appear because I don’t know what my
numberplate is.

But I do know this. We are talking here about the dullest website in the whole of human
history. And also the most terrifying . . .

The problem is that we now have so many laws in the UK and so few policemen to
enforce them all that the slack is being taken up by an army of bitter and twisted
fiftysomething busybodies with beige clothes and upper lips puckered so badly by rage
that they look like one of Mr Kipling’s cakes.

Think about it. When we were growing up it was illegal to murder someone, and er . . .
that’s it. Now it is illegal to eat an apple while driving, or use a mobile phone. It is illegal
to smoke a cigarette in a bus shelter or use more than two dogs to kill a fox. It is very
illegal to smack your children and if you try being a Brazilian in a Tube station you’re in
real trouble.
To enforce all these new laws we have a police force of 140,000, most of whom do four
days a week of ladder training and one day a week arresting doctors for attempting to
explode.

To try to get round the problem the government has introduced new tiers of policing such
as speed cameras and those Highways Agency teams you see on motorways in
chequerboard 4x4s. They look like policemen and they have the legend “traffic officer”
emblazoned in the back window. But their main job is to clear up the mess after an
accident. Which means, technically, they are Wombles.

Then you have the community support officers, who have fewer powers than
Luxembourg and are really nothing more than neighbourhood watch wardens in hi-viz
jackets.

If they see a Brazilian fox eating an apple in a bus shelter they have to call for a proper
policeman, who can’t come because it’s night time and the station is shut, or because he
hasn’t had any fox training or because he’s otherwise engaged on the top deck of the No
42, arresting a doctor for having a backpack full of baking powder and hair gel.

The fact is this. The government is churning out the laws, and the only way they can be
enforced is if ordinary people start to shop their fellow citizens. That brings us neatly to
two places at the same time. Moscow, in 1967, and www.interferingzealot.com. Which
actually, are the same thing.

No, really. How long will it be before you will only confide in your oldest friends, and
then only in a whisper, in case an agent of the state is listening.? You think I’m joking but
trust me on this. Today you are being reported for indicating a bit too early in your Ford
Fiesta. Tomorrow, when they get round to making climate change scepticism a crime –
and they will – the equivalent of StephenHarrison and Kev627 will shop you for leaving
your TV on stand-by.

It all flies in the face of everything I learnt at school. That you never, ever shop anyone to
the teachers.

And it’s all the wrong way round. Instead of setting up websites where people are
exposed for breaking laws that shouldn’t exist, I suggest we set one up that reveals the
names and addresses of those who call for such laws to be imposed in the first place. I
even have a name for such a thing: www.shop-a-dingleberry.com.

In the meantime, though, I must thank the people who put up the signs outside my house.
On these chilly summer evenings they came in very handy. As firewood.

And now it is time to move on to the subject of this morning’s column. The new
Mercedes C-class.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

I haven’t finished yet.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

I’ve owned a couple of Mercs in the past four or five years and have grown accustomed
to the way the on-board computer works. I know how long you hold the mute button
down to make the traffic announcement system go away. I know that you have to push
the second button up on the right twice to make the sat nav map bigger. I know how to
use the phone. It’s all intuitive.

And now they’ve changed it, which means I spent most of my time in this car fiddling
with what looks suspiciously like a rip-off of the BMW iDrive system. I’m sure that in
time you could get used to it. I’m sure it’s all very German. But so was the old system. So
why change it, you clodhopping imbeciles?

Occasionally I was able to ignore the hulking presence of the new computer system and
concentrate on the car itself, and I must say it wasn’t too bad in a straightforward,
Mercedesy sort of way. It’s bigger than the old model, a little bit heavier and it rides
around on suspension that can trace its roots back to the 190 from the early Eighties.

That said, the 280 I tried came with the seven-speed gearbox – that’s two more than it
needs – but the changes were so smooth you never really noticed that it was doing them
more than is actually necessary.

Other things? Well, it was quiet, extremely smooth riding and quite fast. Although the
diesel version you’ll buy won’t be.

I liked it more than the dreary BMW 3-series, but is it, I wondered, significantly better
than the much cheaper Ford Mondeo?

The Ford is more spacious and better looking – the C-class, with all its fancy styling
details, looks like a Kia Magentis. But there’s a sense in the Merc that you are driving
something that’s been hewn from the solid rather than assembled.

There’s some evidence to suggest this might be the case.

When Daimler-Benz merged with Chrysler, the American engineers realised after a short
while that the Germans at Mercedes were paying five times more for their seats than they
were.
So they sent some Chrysler seats to Stuttgart saying, “Hey guys. We think you’re being
overcharged.”

Having spent a few weeks examining the Chrysler seats, the Germans replied, “Nein. Ve
zink it is you who are being overcharged.”

There was a time, I agree, when Mercedes stopped taking such care, but they’re back in
business now. You can’t quite put your finger on why, especially when a woman from
Radio Nether Wallop has just interrupted Terry Wogan to say the pelican crossing on
Acacia Avenue has stopped working and you can’t find a way to shut her up.

And as you fumble about with all the buttons on the centre console you won’t be looking
where you’re going. Which means that when you do finally get home you will turn on
your internet to find that Kev627 and Stephen Harrison have put you on
www.interferingzealot.com.

Vital statistics

Model Mercedes C 280 Sport

Engine 2996cc, six cylinders
Power 228bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 221 lb ft @ 2500rpm
Transmission Seven-speed automatic
Fuel 30.7mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 224g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 7.2sec
Top speed 152mph
Price £31,077
Rating 3/5
Verdict Good if you ignore the computer

When Mercedes-Benz announced five years ago that it was going to make a car for
everyone, I thought that was a figure of speech. But it seems Mercedes really is
endeavouring to provide a different model for every single one of the world’s 6.4 billion
people.

If you are an African dictator with a fuel expenses account paid by Bono and the World
Bank you can have a large S-class with a sumptuous and turbocharged V12 engine. If you
are a taxi driver in Geneva you can have the same car, but with diesel power and wipe-
down seats. Then there’s the Maybach, which so far as I can tell was made specifically
for Simon Cowell.

At the other end of the scale we find the A-class. It was developed after Merc bosses
received a letter from a Mr Grant Neville of Huddersfield who said he wanted a car with
two floors and five seats. Fine. Mr Neville was very happy.
But then they got another letter from a Signor Olivio Pagnietta of Pisa who said he
wanted a car exactly the same size as an A-class and with exactly the same number of
seats. But only one floor. So they came up with the Vaneo.

We see a similar everyman policy with the E-class saloon. They made a version for some
chap in Ottawa who wanted a top speed of 145mph. And then a businesswoman from
Madrid said she liked the car very much but wanted a top speed of 143mph. So they did
another model to oblige.

This opened the floodgates so now there is an E-class with every top speed you can think
of. There’s even an E-class with a big Chrysler body on it called the 300C. And if you
want the same car but 250mm shorter, they’ll sell you a C-class, which comes with a
range of engines more infinite than space. Does sir want 122bhp, or 143 or maybe 150?
We can also do 162, 177, 192, 218, 229, 255 or 367. Basically, you can pick any number
you like.

Now this policy of meeting all requirements, no matter how ludicrous, is extremely good
news for you and me. But it is jolly expensive from Merc’s point of view. You see, when
someone wrote to say they lived in Paris and wanted a small, easy-to-repair plastic car
that could be parked nose-on to the pavement, Mercedes set up the Smart division which
last year lost a reported £250m.

I’m delighted to say, however, that this hasn’t stopped them, a point that becomes
blindingly obvious when you look at the range of coupés. There’s the C-class, the SLK,
the SL, the CLK, the CLK convertible and the CL. All of which are available with a
choice of 2m engines and 14,000 option packages.

But this wasn’t good enough for Hans Beckenbaur, a flour merchant from Dortmund,
who wanted a car that looked like a coupé but was in fact a four-door saloon.

Mercedes was horrified that he’d exposed a gap in its line-up and immediately set about
filling it with the car you see here, the CLS.

It is a Marmite car, I know. You either love it or you’ve put down your newspaper and
run from the room retching. I’m in the love camp.

So far as I’m concerned this is certainly the most spectacular looking car Mercedes has
made and possibly one of the all time greats from anywhere.

Those slim windows and pillarless doors put me in mind of the Batmobile, while the rear
lights are similar to the Starship Enterprise’s exhaust vents. But the best thing is that the
CLS looks more expensive than it is. Prices start at a little more than £40,000, which is
roughly half what I was expecting them to be.

I almost didn’t want to drive it. I feared that it would be a bit like actually meeting Uma
Thurman. It might be a let-down. It might not be able to cash the cheques that its glorious
styling was writing.

So I started in the back, where you’d expect the sloping roofline to make the
accommodation suitable only for Anne Boleyn. But no. There are only two seats rather
than three, but there is enough room for non-amputees to stretch out and relax. Even I
fitted and I have the body and legs of an ostrich.

The front, though, that’s where you want to be. Because although the CLS is based on the
ordinary E-class, it’s actually 40% stiffer. Which means it’s 40% more sporty. And to
make the recipe even better, the car I tested had a 5.5 litre supercharged AMG V8. The
engine that sounds like a second world war fighter and goes like a modern day rocket.

Sadly, because it has such a rich seam of weapons-grade torque, Herr Beckenbaur’s car
has to make do with the old five-speed automatic gearbox. It would rip Merc’s new
seven-speeder to shreds. They say, as always, that the power of this engine is so brutish
that the top speed of the car has to be electronically checked at 155mph. But I saw 175 on
the speedo, and it was still climbing like a bat out of hell when I ran out of road and had
to hit the brakes.

Aaaaargh. They were astonishing. Mash your foot onto the brake pedal and I’m not
joking, it really does feel like your face is being torn off. The g forces are so immense it
actually hurts.

This is because the CLS uses the same technology we first saw on the McLaren SLR.
When it’s wet, the pads pulse slightly to keep the discs dry, and if you lift your foot off
the throttle in a big hurry the computer system notices and orders the braking system to
tense so it’s ready for some action.

And what’s more, it’s the brakes that are also used to keep the car in check should you
find yourself on a motorway exit road going little bit faster than is prudent.

Even if you have the traction control system turned off, Big Brother is still awake, and if
he detects the onset of a slide, the offending wheel is individually reined in without you
having to do a thing. It all sounds too brilliant for words. But after just 10 minutes of hard
use, the Mercedes Achilles heel reared its ugly head.

The whole dashboard went bright red as the on-board Blair delivered the bad news.
“Brakes overheated. Drive carefully.”

Mercedes says it’s cut its profits from £3 billion to £1 billion a year in a drive to improve
quality. But I fear it may have to cut them still further.

Certainly, some of the trim pieces on the CLS are a bit low rent. The plastic on to which
the seat massage button is mounted looks like it’s come off a Hyundai.

But then, if I’m being honest this is nitpicking, and I really was brutal with the brakes. So
let’s give Herr Beckenbaur’s car the benefit of the doubt. I certainly want to, because it
was a gem; fast, handsome, well priced, comfortable and blessed with a handling balance
that’s pretty close to perfect.

And here’s the thing. To hammer the point home about Merc’s car-for-everyone policy, I
was going to sign off by listing a number of stupid small changes that I’d like to see on a
CLS if I were to buy one. It was going to be stuff like a green steering wheel and a 5.6
litre engine instead of a 5.5.

But you know what. In truth, I can’t think of a damn thing I’d like changed. I’d take it as
it is.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Mercedes CLS 55 AMG

Engine type V8, 5439cc
Power 476bhp @ 6100rpm
Torque 516 lb ft @ 4500rpm
Fuel/CO2 21mpg (combined) / 326g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 4.7sec
Top speed 155mph
Price £70,565
Verdict Almost flawless
Rating 4/5

As the government and our increasingly insane local councils continue to wage their
fanatical class war with the internal combustion engine, we get some interesting news.
For the first time there are more families in Britain with two cars than families with no
car at all.

Of course, Gordon Brown would tell us that this is an unfortunate side effect of his
masterful control of the economy and that the longest period of stability in the nation’s
history has brought untold riches to all and sundry. It’s a theory for sure, but there are
other reasons why people run two cars. Like, for instance, human beings are lunatics.

You may have read recently that the beaten up old Fiat Panda belonging to Michael
Howard’s wife Sandra was beaten up still further after it had been left in a station car
park. This looked good in the election campaign. The wife of the leader of the opposition
tooling around in a 17-year-old peasant-mobile. But I’m willing to bet this was actually
the family “station car”.

You may be unfamiliar with this strange new phenomenon so let me explain. The idea is
that you buy a banger that can be scraped and vandalised while left in a station car park.
Lots of people round these parts have such a thing, including one chap whose idea of a
banger is a brand new Mini Cooper S. Think about that. He’s bought a £15,000 car like
it’s a disposable razor, or a cardboard camera. Something to be used and abused, bashed,
crashed and then thrown away. And he’s not alone.

I met a middle-aged woman the other day who couldn’t be bothered to work out how the
rear seats on her Toyota Yaris fold down. So she bought a Seat Arosa as well, in which
she keeps the back bench permanently tucked away. “I use the Toyota for transporting
people and the Seat for moving stuff,” she said.

Then you have the Sheridan family from Leicestershire who run a fleet of five cars. “This
way,” according to Mr Sheridan, “the drive is permanently full so passers-by believe we
have visitors and will be less inclined to drop in.”

My wife is similarly potty. She recently bought a Land Rover from the Swiss army. It has
four 20ft aerials, whistlers for scaring away wildlife, a gun, camouflage netting and tyres
so wide that turning the steering wheel is only possible in theory. The sole crumb of
comfort I can take from this insane purchase is that having been a Swiss army vehicle it
won’t have seen any action at all.

Obviously I wondered out loud what in God’s name had caused her to buy such a thing.
“Well, it’ll be useful for picking up the Christmas tree,” she replied, hopefully.

This is undoubtedly true. But buying a car specifically to make an annual five-mile round
trip does seem awfully extravagant. It’d be like buying a dinner service “for best” or a
leaf blower for those troublesome autumns. And this is what worries me. Because it’s
now increasingly becoming the norm. And that means legislation cannot be far behind.

Soon, and I’m going to keep this column in a special place so I can revisit it at a later date
and write a told-you-so follow-up, I can pretty much guarantee that a pinched-faced class
warrior in Whitehall will raise the issue at a quango. And the next thing you know we
will be limited by law from owning more than one car.

The argument will sound good. We’ll be told that the world doesn’t have enough
resources to let people own cars simply to frighten away unwanted guests, or because
they can’t be bothered to find how the rear seats fold down. We’ll also learn that such a
ban would be good for congestion, good for reducing the stranglehold of the global car
industry, and good for the kiddies, who once again would be able to play footie in the
streets.

Then they’ll ban rugby, dinner parties and leaf blowers as well. And then you’ll be forced
to talk with a regional accent. And then they’ll shoot your dog, unless it’s a pit bull or a
whippet. And then they’ll get rid of the royal family. And then all the animals will be
equal.

So if you’re only allowed to have one car, what should it be? Obviously by then we shall
also be banned from owning a four-wheel-drive vehicle of any kind and possibly BMW
will be outlawed, too, for being elitist. Rover will be gone, Audi will still be tuning its
suspension to deal only with the velvet smoothness of the designer’s mahogany desk,
Jaguar will still be making concept cars to show which direction it’s headed and you still
won’t want a hybrid because you still won’t be able see the point of a car with two
engines.

So what about the Mercedes-Benz E-class? By rights this large and expensive saloon car
should be viewed in the same way as private education or business class travel. It should
be a target for people called Dave, and yet somehow, because it’s an understudy to the S-
class and the extraordinary CLS I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, few see it that way.

I see it, mostly, as the car from which G-list celebrities spill at rope ’n’ red carpet
functions in London’s glittering West End. I see it as a slightly upmarket taxi. Oh sure,
the version I tested came with a creamy 3.5 litre V6 engine, space in the boot for
Christmas tree, lots of dead cow and many electrical functions, but each time I climbed
aboard I felt like I should really be wearing a cheap suit, and that Rebecca Loos should be
in the back. It felt, in other words, like a tool, rather than a car.

I must say I also found it monumentally boring. The figures suggest it will go from 0-
62mph in 6.9sec, which is pretty sprightly for a car of this size, but I never once felt
inclined to push the accelerator all the way to the floor. And nor did I ever feel the need
to explore its claimed top speed of 155mph, because this is one of those cars that no
matter what you do settles on a motorway to 80.

Corners? Well, since I didn’t crash I can only assume that the steering wheel does have
some say in the direction of travel, but not in a way that encourages anyone to explore the
outside of the handling envelope. It’s built to be driven in such a way that Jodie Marsh
doesn’t drop her alcopop.

And that’s why this would be the perfect one car in Tony Blair’s one-party state.

You would certainly never take this car out for fun, and you would never drive it in an
enthusiastic fashion either. You’d cruise into town, park and then cruise home again,
wondering if perhaps you might have been better off on the bus. If it were a colour it’d be
beige. If it were food it would be lettuce. It is as hair-raising as Enid Blyton.

A car like this is large without being ginormous, and apparently well made, in a factory
where all the water is recycled and all the wood comes from company-run reusable
organic forests. And when you’ve finished with it your hand will be bitten off up to the
elbow by a London “chauffeur” who needs something to take Ant and Lard to the Baftas.
This means residuals are excellent.

This, then, is a car you buy with your head. But human beings have hearts, too. That’s
what gives us passion and makes us lunatics. That’s why I’ve ordered a Ford GT, and
why my friend has a Mini Cooper station car. It’s why another chap I know has an old
Mercedes 600 Pullman that his wife doesn’t know about.

And it’s why we scan the second-hand columns of this newspaper dreaming about Astons
and Ferraris.

If all the animals were equal, we’d all have E-class Mercs. But as we know, some are
more equal than others.

Vital statistics

Model Mercedes E350 Avantgarde

Engine V6, 3498cc
Power 272bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 258 lb ft @ 5000rpm
Transmission Seven-speed auto, rear-wheel drive Fuel 29.1mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 231g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 6.9sec
Top speed 155mph
Price £36,270
Rating 3/5
Verdict As interesting as a lettuce and as hair-raising as Enid Blyton

Sometimes, I wish I was James May. Obviously, I don't want his jumpers, his hair or his
collection of Bach records. Nor do I want his house, his cars, his accent, his ability to
mend motorcycles or the leather ballet boots he bought recently.

But sometimes I do wish I had his regimented, organised mind because that would make
my life as a columnist so much easier. Take Richard Littlejohn, for example. Present him
with a news story and you know exactly what he's going to make of it.

And it was the same story with the late Auberon Waugh. When you read in his
autobiography that he was three when he learned to hate the working classes, you know
what his take's going to be on everything from the French riots to Big Brother.

James is the same. James likes his beer to be brown and his house to be beige. I therefore
know what James will think of a new car long before he actually drives it. Poncy, usually.
And I know he'll continue to call it poncy until the day he dies.

I'm rubbish at this. I change my mind six or seven times before I get out of bed.

One minute, I think the only way to deal with disaffected Muslim youths is to drop a bomb on
them. The next I think the solution is to drop a bomb on America.

I try on opinions like I try on clothes, standing in front of a mirror and wondering if they suit me.
Sometimes, I take them home and realise I made a bad choice, so I throw them away and get new
ones.

This gets me into all sorts of trouble because I can have a definite, firmly held view on, say, a
new Peugeot and then, when I drive it again, I can't remember what on earth that view might have
been.
People sometimes stop me in the street and are alarmed to find I sing the praises of something I
destroyed in print just two weeks earlier.

Take the McLaren F1. When it came out, I said it was a stupid car because it had a stupid price
tag. You'd have needed to win the premium bond jackpot twice to have bought such a thing, and
then there'd have been nothing left over for shoes, or supper.

"Why dream", I asked, "about something there's no point dreaming about?"

On this basis, I'd be similarly dismissive of the Bugatti Veyron. I mean it's on sale now at
£840,000. And, for that money, you could buy a house.

If there were any consistency in my life, if I had even a shred of Jamesishness, I would
have refused a test drive.

Why bother? It's too expensive. I'm not going to dangle such a thing under the noses of
the readers knowing full well their chances of having enough money to buy one are about
the same as being gnawed to death by a platoon of woodlice.

I didn't, though. I packed my little suitcase and went to Italy, where I was presented with
quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created. (This opinion may
change at some future date but I'm sticking with it for now).

I mean, take the flappy-paddle, seven-speed gearbox. I spoke to the man who headed up
the project at Ricardo and he said he'd never done anything so difficult. Quite an
admission from someone whose products are used by F1 teams.

"Oh, F1 is nothing," he said. "They don't have anything like the power of a Bugatti and only have
to last two hours. The one in the Veyron has to work for 10 or 20 years."

Small wonder it took 50 people five years to make the damn thing work.

It wasn't just the gearbox, either. It was the engine too, that massive quad turbo W16, and the
aerodynamics as well.

The team had been given the shape of the body and told there could be no alterations. They'd
been told too that it must do 400kph and must produce 1,000bhp.

They weren't fighting to beat Mercedes or BMW. These guys were fighting to beat heat, and
friction and lift. They were fighting nature.

And how did motoring commentators react? Instead of cheering them on and offering support, we
laughed at the many and very public setbacks.

Well, the laugh's on us now because they've made it work. When that massive rear spoiler begins
to rise on specially cooled hydraulic rams, you can feel the back of the car being pressed into the
road.
It's not that it can do 252mph, it's the way it manages to do 252 so effortlessly that impresses me
most. At high speed, a McLaren F1 feels like the Bell X-1, a mass of vibrations and terror. At
high speed, the Bugatti feels like an Airbus - solid, planted, safe.

You may not like the look of the thing, or the gaudiness of the interior. You may think Ferdinand
Piech a mentalist for ordering such a car be made, and to hell with the shareholders. But you have
to love the engineering. You just have to.

It isn't even a straight-line rocket ship, either. On that twisting dual carriageway that comes back
down to the ionosphere from the Mont Blanc tunnel, I had it in handling mode, and it's hard to put
into words how much grip there is.

Foot down and with 800bhp hitting the front wheels, you get a dollop of power understeer, but it's
not like any power understeer I've ever felt because there's still 200bhp going to the back
wheels... and that's a number that's growing by the moment. It feels odd at first, but then it feels
spectacular.

Nearly as spectacular as the hammer-blow power delivery when the corner's over, or the
chuckability when you get to the next. I could describe this car as the Lotus Elise's big brother. So
I will. It's that good.

And now I've changed my mind. It's not 'that good' at all. It's better, because I drove this car for
12 hours and emerged in London with no aches. You can't do that in an Elise, and not only
because after 12 hours, you'd still have 12 to go.

At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I've ever said about any other car obsolete.
It's rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a
bloody nose.

Of course, I don't mind changing my opinions about Ferrari and so on. I'm used to it. I spend half
my life apologising, and I don't mind finishing up here with another. I'm sorry I laughed at the
Bugatti Veyron's gestation. I didn't realise quite what a project it was.

James too is bowled over by the scale of what's been achieved - I knew he would be - but sadly,
the praise is not universal. I've have read a couple of reports where commentators are still
sneering about the problems of making it, and the supposed soulless nature of the finished
product.

Come on chaps admit it. You were wrong and the Veyron makes you look like a twat. I know
how you feel. The McLaren F1 did much the same thing to me.

On the seventh day God didn’t rest, he looked at what he had created and thought: “Oh
dammit, England’s gone all wrong. The sea is washing silt and rubbish off the beautiful
coastlines I have created in the north and depositing them in an ugly bulbous lump near
Kent.”
Today we call this unholy place East Anglia and I’m sure it’s all jolly lovely if you have
a fondness for parsnips and so on. But you can tell it wasn’t part of God’s great plan
because it’s so hard to get there. Certainly you don’t want to start from Chipping Norton,
especially if you have a Land Rover.

For some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, motorways tend to go up and down the
country rather than across it. So to reach Newmarket on a Tuesday you have to swim
against the current, which is bad enough in any car but nigh on impossible in something
that predates modern man.

The noise of the thing had me whimpering like a frightened animal by the time I’d
reached Milton Keynes. Several hours later, as I lumbered past Bedford, I was in urgent
need of a chiropractor and then, as I crested Cambridge, I began to wonder if I might be
better off walking. Certainly it would have been faster and more comfortable.

Just stop now and think: what do you have in your life from the 1940s? That’s not old
enough to be an antique nor modern enough to be of any use? You wouldn’t watch 24 on
a 1940s television any more than you’d come down Mont Blanc on a pair of 1940s skis.
And yet, unbelievably, Land Rover expects us to buy its 1940s car. This thing doesn’t
have a chassis, it has foundations.

I know it’s cool and I know it works well off road, so if you’re a Chelsea florist or a
soldier it’s fine. But everyone else, I suspect, will be put off by the noise, the driving
position, the ride, the astonishing lack of space, the absence of any creature comforts, the
lamentable performance, the appalling economy, the questionable safety and the Third
World reliability.

I have this mental image of the Land Rover factory. It’s full of molten steel and is
illuminated only by myriad sparks. Everywhere you look thousands of children in chains
bang pieces of metal together. It’s not Dickensian, it’s way earlier than that. I’ll tell you
what it’s like in my head: it’s like the medieval subterranean mine you saw in Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom.

And do you know what really galls me? This country has the engineering know-how to
stay with the game, but we never do. We have a brilliant idea then sit back and do
nothing with it — for ever.

The Mini went on for 40 years. Rolls-Royce relied on an engine from the 1950s and
Bentley on the turbo from a truck. Were it not for German money these cars would still
be soldiering on, and your new Range Rover would still have Mexican electrics.

Were it not for American investment, Jaguars would still break down all the time and
Aston Martins would still be propelled by an engine from a time when France was
fighting in Vietnam. We really are a bunch of bone idle geniuses.

At the other end of the scale there’s Japan. They make a new car and long before the
advertisements are run on television there’s a new model in the wings with another even
newer one pushing it onto the stage. Since the 1960s there have been nine generations of
Toyota Corollas and seven different Honda Civics. They even make cars they can’t be
bothered to export.

Mitsubishi is the arch-villain at this. Time and again word filters through that it has
developed some amazing new car, but when you ring to find out if it will be sold in
Britain the response is: “Oh that old thing.”

Do you remember the Mitsubishi Gallant VR4? It was astonishing, a blend of handsome
styling with explosive turbocharged power and computerised, four-wheel-drive grip.
Following enormous pressure Mitsubishi relented and said it would export the car to
Britain, but sadly it was out of date and was dropped before the boat docked in Bristol.

And now it’s at it again with the Airtrek Turbo-R. On the face of it this is a rather
unfortunate-looking jacked-up five-door estate car with a silly name. Airtrek makes it
sound like a training shoe. But sticking the letter R after a car’s name lets you know that
it means business. We have the Jaguar XJR, the Honda Civic Type-R, the Bentley Turbo
R, the new VW Golf R32 and so on and so on.

R is the new GT. R is the opposite of D. R takes the concept of X, blends it with a
soupçon of i and a bit of E so you end up at the outside of the envelope, way beyond Z.

The motoring world’s alphabet goes like this: R, Z, A, C, X, E, F, GT, I, L, O, S, D. This

is definitely a non-U environment. H hasn’t been used since the Lancia Beta HPE went
west, and when faced with the question of whether to B or not to B, most car firms
decline.

But back to the Mitsubishi. It may not be on sale in Britain but a company called Xtreme
Automobiles from Dudley in the West Midlands will import one if you furnish it with a
cheque for very slightly less than £23,000. It will even throw in a three-year warranty.

Interesting. A Turbo-R imported by a company called Xtreme. It all sounds very

snowboardish, but at first it’s hard to see why. Not only is the exterior completely
unremarkable but the interior is finished and equipped like a Japanese bedroom.

When you turn the key no flames shoot out of the exhaust and dogs do not run screaming
from their kennels. I’ll tell you what it sounds like: it sounds like a car.

However, what you’re looking at here is a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VII in an overcoat. It
has the same permanent four-wheel-drive system, a 240bhp version of the same 2 litre
turbo engine and, despite the fitment of an automatic gearbox, the same sort of shattering
performance: 0 to 60 is dealt with in 6sec.

Being so tall, it doesn’t have the same tenaciousness as an Evo VII but you couldn’t take
an Evo VII off road, so you pays your money and you takes your choice.
I didn’t take the Airtrek off road either, but with its increased ground clearance and four-
wheel drive it’s probably nearly as good as a Land Rover Freelander or a Honda CR-V,
which means it’s almost certainly good enough. On the road, however, it’s amazing.

You sit there in that dull cabin looking down the boring nose, listening to the tedious
engine note not quite believing how sharp the turn-in is and how much grip you get, wet
or dry. Believe me, you could make your children very sick indeed in this car.

Don’t think, however, that it’s permanently hysterical and mad. When you’re not in the
mood it’s quiet with a good ride and light steering. The only real downside is a smallish
boot.

Despite all this, though, there’s no point buying one. If you want the absolute thrill of an
Evo — and there is no better thriller on sale today — then buy one. It’s not like it’s a
two-seater with no boot, it’s a four-door saloon for heaven’s sake.

However, if you want to sacrifice probably 30% of the Evo’s fun factor for more ground
clearance and an estate car body there’s no need to go to all the bother of buying a car
from Dudley, particularly if you live in Boston or Alnwick.

Because for over £2,000 less you can have a Subaru Forester S Turbo, which is officially
imported and which, if anything, is slightly more practical and even more fun than the
Mitsubishi Shoe. It is, after all, a five-door version of the legendary Impreza.

There was some speculation recently about what sort of car God might drive. We know
from the East Anglia debacle that he makes mistakes but, even so, I think even he would
consider the Land Rover a bit old. It’d be neat, from the story’s point of view, if I could
wrap up now by saying he agonised long and hard over the choice of a Mitsubishi Airtrek
and a Subaru Forester. But this would be silly because we all know God doesn’t drive a
Japanese car.

He has a 1997 Aston Martin Vantage.

VITAL STATISTICS
Model Mitsubishi Airtrek Turbo-R
Engine type Four cylinders, turbo, 1997cc
Power 240bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque 253 lb ft @ 2500rpm
Transmission Five-speed automatic
Suspension (front and rear) MacPherson struts, lower wishbones, coil springs, anti-roll
bar
Tyres 215/60 R16
Fuel 22.7mpg (combined)
Co2 238g/km
Dimensions 4465mm length; 1750mm width; 1540mm height
Acceleration 0 to 60mph: 6sec
Top speed 120mph
Insurance Group 17
Price £22,995
Verdict Dull inside, boring out, but the performance is shattering. Unfortunately the
Subaru Forester is slightly more practical, even more fun, and more than £2,000 cheaper

Last weekend, I was driving through one of those junior executive, Tory stronghold
housing estates – the sort where they have wife-swapping parties every Thursday at No
22 and everyone has baggy-knicker curtains. And I was staggered because just about
every single man was out on his drive washing the car.

What a meaningless way of passing the time. You don’t wash your vacuum cleaner or
your television set, you have a machine to wash the dishes and you employ a man to
clean your windows. So how much do you have to hate the sight of your wife and
children before you think, “I’d rather go outside into the cold and spend a couple of hours
burnishing my wheel nuts”?

I am aware, of course, that many men do hate the sight of their wife and children. Doctors
even have a name for these people: “anglers”. But even the concept of sitting in the
drizzle by a canal for six hours and then throwing everything you catch back into the
water is not as daft as washing a car.

First of all, it’s very hard work. You have to do all the exercises favoured by
homosexuals in gyms. Bending over, stretching, rubbing. But at least when homosexuals
finish, they have glistening, toned bodies that make them look good. You? You’re just
going to put your back out. And the more you clean, the more you’ll notice is dirty. If
you’re not careful you’ll end up polishing the inside of the tyre valves and then not
wanting to use your car if it’s raining.

This behaviour is called “being a concours enthusiast” and it’s very dangerous. Many
“concours enthusiasts” go on to be murderers.

And have you ever actually tried those cleaning products that are available in
supermarkets? There are any number of sprays, creams, waxes, shampoos. It’s like being
in Richard Hammond’s bathroom cabinet. Except, so far as I can tell, they don’t actually
do anything. “Simply spray onto the glass,” it says on the tin, “then, after two minutes,
wipe down with a clean cloth.” Rubbish. You can never trust any instruction that begins
with the word “simply”.

I’ll give you a little hint here. When your windscreen is completely covered in dead flies,
the best way of seeing where you are going is to buy a new car.

Why are you washing the car in the first place? A car will not get smelly armpits or a
cheesy groin. Bathing it will not increase its life expectancy or decrease the chances of a
breakdown. All it does really is demonstrate to others that you have a tiny mind and an
empty life. I want you to think carefully about this. Can you picture in your mind George
Clooney washing a car? Quite.

The Germans have realised that it rots the mind and that’s why it is illegal in most towns
to wash your car on a Sunday. There is simply no place for such useless nonsense in an
industrial powerhouse.

Oh, and here’s another thing. Washing a car is the only time you ever get up close and
personal with all of its panels. Which means you will find a million depressing little dings
and scratches that you would never have spotted had you left it caked in grime.

Mind you, cleaning out the interior is even more silly because I can absolutely guarantee
you will remove something that next week you will need. Everything I have ever bought
is in my car. People say it’s a skip, and disgusting and refuse to get in there. That’s one
advantage. Another is that last week, I needed a headache pill and it was simply a case of
rummaging under the seat until I found one. Because it’s so full of junk, I always have
everything I could conceivably need. A Biro, a refreshing drink, lots of loose change, all
sorts of maps, an iron lung and so on. I kid you not. There’s even a wetsuit in there.

Finally, we must discuss the chamois leather. And here, I have a two more tips. Number
one: if it is imitation chamois or a leather made from another sort of animal, it will not
work. And number two: if it is a real chamois hide that has been crafted by walnut-faced
men of the mountains, it will not work either.

You have to feel very sorry for the goat antelopes whose skin is used to make these
things. No really. Had they been native to Africa, they’d have been eaten by lions. Had
they been horses or cows, they’d have been turned into burgers. And had they been native
to Spain, the locals would have dreamt up some bizarre torture that would have involved
them being flung off a tower, by a man in pink satin trousers.

But no. They had everything going for them. They were cute and tasteless and they lived
in Alpine meadows with nothing to disturb them except nuns singing. They even had a
kindly Swiss man who came into their field once a day to play with their tits. Life was
blissful. And then one day, the world got it into its head that their skin could be used to
clean cars. And that was it for Johnny Chamois. Now, and for no reason, the poor
buggers are on the endangered list in some places.

Only the other day, I set off in my car on one of those crisp winter mornings when the
sun is low in the sky and, because I never wash my car, I really and truly could not see
where I was going. The inside of the windscreen was caked in gunk and, for reasons I
couldn’t fully understand, iced over just as thoroughly as the outside.

So, breaking with the tradition of a lifetime, I went to a petrol station and bought a
scraper. Sadly, because it had been made in China, it was about as good at getting ice off
a windscreen as the back of a dog. So, having made the situation much worse, I bought a
chamois leather. What this did was remove all the moisture, mix it with the dirt . . . and
put it back again. Honestly, I may as well have tried to clean the windscreen with a
muddy stone.

I’m running out of space so I’d better move on to the car I’ve been driving this past week.
It is a mainstay of the car-washing classes. A Tory stronghold car. A car designed for the
Barratt junior executive who dreams one day of going on his own. “The bank’s with me.
John’s with me...” In my mind, everyone who has a Renault Laguna is a wife swapper.

I liked the old model very much for reasons that are now lost in the mists of time and I
wish I could say the same of the new one. I tried the hatch version a few months ago, and
honestly, when I sat down to write the road test I couldn’t remember anything about it.
Except perhaps that it might have been brown. Fearing that you might need more
information than this, I’ve just tried the Sport Tourer estate and that was definitely
brown, and quite ugly.

Ooh. I’ve just remembered why I liked the old one. It was the first car ever to be awarded
a Euro NCAP five-star safety rating, and of course the new model is similarly blessed.
But most cars are, these days. That’s no reason for choosing the Renault over anything
else.

In fact, I struggle to think why you might even want to buy a five-seat estate like this. For
the same money every month you could have an Audi or a BMW. Or, if you are mad, you
could have one of the smaller four-wheel-drive cars. The list of other things that would be
better is long and includes rickets.

If, however, you are determined to have something boring and brown, buy a Vauxhall
Zafira or a Ford S-Max. At least that way you get two extra seats thrown into the mix.
But if you absolutely insist on a boring brown car with only five seats, I’d go for the Ford
Mondeo. It’s more spacious and though I doubt you’ll care, nicer to drive. Certainly, I
found the new Laguna’s steering a bit clattery. I also felt the trim was rubbish and that
some of the softness I usually like in French cars had been replaced by an unnecessary
German firmness.

To conclude, then, this is a car I’d rather wash than drive. And it doesn’t get worse than
that.

Vital statistics

Model Renault Laguna Sport Tourer Dynamique 2.0

Engine 1997cc, four cylinders

Power 140bhp @ 6000rpm

Torque 144 lb ft @ 3750rpm

Transmission Six-speed manual

Fuel/CO2 35.3mpg (combined) / 189g/km

Acceleration 0-62mph: 9.3sec

Top speed 126mph

Price £17,690

Road tax band F (£205 a year)

On sale Now

Verdict It’s really no fun at all

I don’t think I’d like to be a trawlerman; truffling around in a stomach-churning ocean for
fish that the Spanish have caught, cooked and eaten already. I also wouldn’t like to be a
removals man, smearing my fingers down dado rails while trying to get a bossy woman’s
sofa into a corridor that just isn’t wide enough.

But most of all I wouldn’t want to be a public relations executive. Yes, PR works for
celebrities and PR put a buffoon into No 10, but mostly there is no tangible measure of
success. Did the iPod become a global phenomenon because of great PR? Did the
Sinclair C5 fail because the PR wasn’t good enough? Maybe. Maybe not. PR people sit in
that murky grey area between the vagaries of chance and the certainty of advertising.

In theory what you try to do in PR is raise awareness and shape public perception. But in
reality what you do is take journalists and radio disc jockeys out for lunch and try not to
look too embarrassed when they don’t turn up.

You spend weeks trying to get a mention of the foot spa you’re promoting in any
publication, no matter how small or insignificant. And you’ll find yourself punching the
air in a dopamine-drenched moment of ecstasy when you find that two dozen phone calls,
the promise of some light sex and six redrafted press releases have got the product on to
page 14 of Lincolnshire Life. In the middle of an article about financial services.

Things, however, are rather different if you work in public relations for the car industry.
Because here you’re not cajoling the journalists. It’s the other way round.

Here’s the problem. Most young car journalists are paid less than £15,000 a year, which
means they have barely enough money left at the end of the week to buy food. And yet,
each week, a brand new car is delivered to their house, full of fuel and insured.
What’s more, twice a week they will be flown, first class or on a private jet, to Florence
or Tokyo or wherever. Here they will stay in a 38-star hotel where they will be showered
with tasty morsels and refreshing wines.

The next day, after driving the new car through some lovely scenery, they will have a
£150-a-head lunch and then board the jet for home clutching a nice freebie. A laptop
computer, perhaps, or some expensive luggage.

So, are they going to give up being Elton John by saying something awkward about the
car they’ve been driving? Would you? Or would you bend over backwards, or forwards
even, to ensure you were on the guest list for the next big global freebie? The car industry
PR people know this. They know they have the power. They also know they have the
budget to make sure that every single new car, no matter how dull, is guaranteed to get
full-page coverage in all the magazines and all the newspapers.

This, then, is one of the best jobs in the world. You farm out the tiresome business of
writing press releases to some poor hack who’s down on his luck and then you spend all
day eating grapes while telling journalists that if they want some new car for a photo-
shoot ahead of the launch there’d better be a lot of sucking up.

You don’t believe me? Well ring Porsche or BMW in the morning, ask to speak to the
press office, and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll spend the rest of the day bouncing
from voicemail to answerphone.

My favourite motor industry PR person is a girl who works for Nissan. The first time we
encountered one another she lunged out of the audience in the Top Gear studio to berate
me for a less than favourable review of the 350Z. It wasn’t the time or the place so I told
her to go away, and now all motor industry personnel are banned from the hangar and the
track when we’re recording. If I had my way I’d ban them from all of Surrey.

Then, the other night, she suggested at the Top Gear awards ceremony that I don’t write
my own newspaper columns. Well, sorry love, but as you’ve probably just realised, I do.

And to make matters worse, this morning I’m doing the new Nissan pick-up truck.
Getting it wasn’t easy. Normally when I want to review a car I simply ring up and ask to
borrow a demonstrator. But Nissan was reluctant to oblige, saying it was too expensive to
deliver a car over Christmas. Quite why this should be so I have no idea. Perhaps it’s
because the PR staff wanted all the demonstrators for themselves over the two-week
break.

Though quite why anyone might want a pick-up truck I have no idea. They are, to the
world of cars, what Mexican food is to the world of cuisine. They exist, they are popular
in Texas, and, er, that’s it.
There are some tax advantages I suppose. If you have a Vat-registered company and you
use a pick-up truck to do your business then you can get the Vat back. What’s more you
pay only an annual flat tax rate of £500 a year, whereas with a car it’s all worked out on
how much global warming you do. And employees with pick-up trucks don’t have any
tax liability even if they use company fuel at weekends.

Doubtless if you’re an accountant you’re probably nursing a semi at this point but if
you’re a normal person, well I’m sorry, but going this far to save money on tax is daft.

No really. It would be like moving to Andorra or Belgium to cut your tax bill. Why? I
mean would you rob a bank, knowing you’d do time in jail, just so when you came out
you had a lump sum to play with? No? Well that’s what you’re doing if you move to a
bleak and friendless place like Andorra. And it’s what you’re doing if you drive a pick-up
truck.

These things are classified as commercial vehicles because that’s what they are. Oh, they
may have leather seats and CD players but that’s like putting a painting in a cowshed. It’s
still a cowshed.

The Nissan Navara Aventura I drove had rain-sensing wipers, cruise control, Bluetooth
connectivity, a voice-activated mobile phone and satellite navigation. It also had five
leather seats and deep-pile carpets. But underneath it had leaf springs, such as you would
find on an ox cart on a Chinese farm.

So it rode with all the comfort of the Middle Ages and handled with all the poise and
panache of a boulder tumbling down a hillside. It wasn’t what you’d call quiet, either.
Unless you test shotguns for a living. In a blast furnace.

Nor was it wieldy. I found myself attempting to park in spaces that would have
swallowed a Hummer and, much to the amusement of bargain hunters who were in town
for the sales, giving up after half an hour. You really do have to think of the Navara as
you would a skip lorry.

But if you’re prepared to live with these drawbacks, if you really want a pick-up truck for
work or to make some kind of weird neocon style statement, then it’s not bad. Even
though it’s built in Spain it will almost certainly be mechanically bulletproof and the
four-wheel-drive system means it’ll keep going in muddy bits.

What’s more, the Navara has a torquier diesel engine than any of its chief rivals and a
bigger load bay, which comes with all sorts of clever mounting points to ensure stuff
doesn’t roll about. This, then, is probably the best of the bunch.

And don’t you find that interesting? No free suitcases. No first-class travel. No PR input
whatsoever. And still a favourable conclusion.
Sort of.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Nissan Navara Double Cab Aventura

Engine 2488cc, four-cylinder turbodiesel
Power 171bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 297 lb ft @ 2000rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Fuel 33.2mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 226g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 11.4sec
Top speed 105mph
Price £24,869
Rating 3/5
Verdict The closest a pick-up has come to being a proper car

Last weekend I took my boy to a game of club rugby. A team of part-time amateurs from
Birmingham were taking on the professional and mighty London Wasps.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much. Wasps are home to Lawrence Dallaglio, Josh
Lewsey and a sprinkling of other World Cup-winning household names. The team from
Birmingham, called the Pertemps Bees, are home to a warehouseman, a bricklayer, a
doorman and an electrician. There was absolutely no chance of a Bees victory. The
bookies rated their chances at 250-1 and that made it as near as dammit a statistical
impossibility. You wouldn't get 250-1 in a two-horse race, even if one of the horses was a
cow.

But being seven, my boy doesn't like close, tense games. He likes to see his team totally
destroy the opposition and since the chairman of Wasps is a friend of ours, this seemed
like the perfect place to break his club rugby duck. Mine too, actually.

Besides, I enjoy watching Birmingham lose things. Losing seems to suit their whining
adenoidal accents. Try singing Kylie Minogue's Lucky, Lucky, Lucky song in a Brummie
accent and it starts to sound like Albinoni's Adagio. Nigel Mansell was a perfect
Brummie; born to lose and moan about it. As soon as he won, he retired and went off to
play golf.

In the grandstand, I was surrounded by lots of Birmingham businessmen who plainly had
invested a great deal in the little club. They were red faced and pot bellied and were
wearing jumpers that could only have come from the Alan Partridge catalogue. I wanted
to see them lose, too.

At half time, over tea and buns, there was still no sense that the Bees could emerge
triumphant. They'd played well, for sure, but in the second half, when fitness would start
to play its part, everyone knew they'd be marmalated. Only they weren't. They played like
demons and when the final whistle blew the smallish crowd knew they'd witnessed the
biggest upset in the history of club rugby. The Bees had won.

"Neeeeoooow yeeeeow weooooow," said one of the jumper-men, tunelessly, as though

his dog had just died.
With hindsight, it was easy to see how this had happened.

The Wasps team had woken that morning, stretched, yawned and remembered sometime
over breakfast that they were due to play a team of no-hopers that day. The Bees team, on
the other hand, probably hadn't slept at all.

This was their big day and they had arrived at the ground more wound up than a freshly
synchronised Swiss watch.

On the pitch the Wasps went through the motions, using their heads, remembering their
training and knowing that, of course, they'd win in the end. They had logic, history and
talent on their side. But the Bees had heart. And the heart is a powerful weapon.

Over the years Uri Geller has impressed many people with his abilities to bend spoons
and stop watches. But not me. Because surely, if you'd been given the ability to bend
matter with your mind, you wouldn't waste your time appearing on crummy game shows
for £500 a time. You'd go out and do something useful with your gift, like breaking into
Fort Knox.

However, while I'm doubtful that the mind can bend metal, I do think it has control over
your own body. For instance, I'm able to put off the arrival of a cold or a sore throat if I'm
filming the next day. I just go to bed and say to myself, "I don't have time for this right
now", and I wake up in the morning mended. The Bees had done exactly the same thing.
They were completely outclassed but they'd wanted to win with such passion and such
verve they turned from electricians and warehousemen into square-jawed, muscle-bound
superheroes. They were gods. And watching this level of passion is infectious. I'm afraid
to say I ended up wanting them to win. I wanted to slap the businessmen on the back of
their jumpers and say well done. And Wasps? Well they were complacent. They got what
they deserved, frankly.

And speaking of complacency, let's move now to Volkswagen and its new Golf. Ooh, this
is causing some ructions in the Top Gear office. We're busy filming the road tests for the
next series at the moment and there's a faction in the production team that thinks we have
to cover the Golf because, well, because it's a Golf. But there's another faction in the
office that thinks it'd be a waste of videotape. I mean, who wants to spend their Sunday
evening watching a five-door hatchback going round corners? Perhaps there's a couple of
thousand viewers who might be thinking of buying one, but that leaves 4.2m who aren't.

That puts me in the judge's seat. So here goes. Volkswagen says this new car is a
culmination of all it knows about affordable family transport, and VW does indeed know
a lot, since Hitler used it to start the ball rolling 65 years ago. VW says it has been
making Golfs for 30 years and that this new one represents the peak. There are a couple
of good points. Because the new car is bigger than the old one, there's more space on the
inside, especially in the back, which is truly enormous. Really. Even if you're used to a
Range Rover, you will not be cramped back there.

There are lots of toys, too. I remember the old Mark I Golf used to have a trip computer,
which I thought at the time was the absolute last word in sophistication. But my test car
had heated seats and sat nav and a six-speed box and air-conditioning as well. It was very
well equipped indeed.

Then there's the driving experience, which is also better. Although the new Mark V Golf
is heavier than the old Mark IV, it feels more sprightly and more nimble. I'd even go so
far as to say the turbo diesel version was fast.

However, it's nowhere near as much fun to drive as the Ford Focus and the styling is just
catastrophically bland. They started with a blank piece of paper and ended up with a
blank piece of paper. Where are the natty details, the pleasing little touches that make you
proud to be an owner? Honestly, even the new Vauxhall Astra looks better. But the worst
thing is the quality of the interior trim. Get inside in a showroom, twiddle the heater
knobs, and I guarantee you'll get straight out again. There are discarded toys in our
playroom that feel more robust. And what's with the dashboard? It feels like it's been
made out of a melted Sanilav.

This is the thing that annoys me most about the new Golf, the nasty sense that the only
real difference between this version and the old one is to be found in VW's profit and loss
account. I bet it's much, much cheaper to make.

In the past, when someone has rung and asked what car they should buy for around
£15,000 I've always said "a Golf" without really thinking. It's always been perfect
because quality suits everyone, whether they're an heir to the throne or a geography
teacher. Quality is what made the Golf classless.

But this new one doesn't feel like a quality product. I'll tell you how it feels. It feels like
the engineers have spent the past few years making V16 engines for the new Bugatti and
V10 diesels for the Touareg off-roader. It feels like they've been busy with that
astonishing W12 Phaeton and its sister car, the Bentley Continental GT. It feels like
they've been out there, at the fizzy and exciting edge of engineering, having a ball.

And then one day someone came into their offices and said: "Sorry, boys, but can you do
us a new Golf?" So, with a lot of "Oh, sir" and Kevin-the-teenager shrugs, they put their
satellite-guided superchargers down and spent no more than five minutes doing just that.
A Golf, that was new.
Volkswagen, it seems, has moved on. With the Phaeton and the Bentley it is now making
some of the best luxury cars money can buy. But it seems to have lost the plot with the
bread and butter. As a result, the new Golf has no heart, no soul, no character at all. You
don't want it to win. You don't want it at all.

So the next time someone says they want a car for around £15,000, they will be in for a
shock. Because I'll suggest the 250-1 outsider bee. I'll suggest they buy a Renault
Megane.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Volkswagen Golf 1.9 TDI SE

Engine type Four-cylinder, 1896cc
Power 105bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 184 lb ft @ 1900rm
Transmission Five-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Suspension (front) MacPherson strut (rear) multilink
Fuel 53.3mpg (combined)
CO2 143g/km
Top speed 116mph
Acceleration 0 to 62mph: 11.3sec
Price £16,180
Verdict Spacious, well-equipped and fast but let down by nasty interior and lack of soul
Rating - two out of five

_______________________________________________________________________

At school I used to adore physics lessons. The laboratory was full of things that could be
accelerated at great speed either into the teacher, when his back was turned, or more
usually through the window.

In fact the only thing I loved more than physics was chemistry, because we could put acid
in one another’s pockets and make bombs.

No, really. Put a tiny piece of sodium in a bit of water and you had a fizz that could blow
up another boy’s homework. Put a lump of the stuff into a filled sink and you could take
half of Derbyshire off the map. I used to sprinkle it in the teacher’s hair and hope for rain.

And as a result of chemistry, I was never caught smoking. “No sir. They’re not nicotine
stains. My fingers are yellow because I spilt some potassium permanganate on them this
morning.”
Unfortunately this sort of thing is no longer allowed in school laboratories. All the
dangerous liquids are kept under lock and key and no child is ever allowed to sprinkle
polonium onto another boy’s lunch.

And the result is plain for all to see. Since 1996 entries for A-level physics are down by
5,000 and there have been 79 university science department closures. What’s more, in the
next few years half of the nation’s physics teachers will retire, leaving a gap that cannot
be filled.

What makes all this doubly alarming is that we are living in an increasingly technological
world. The demand for phones that can play tunes, jet engines that run on manure and
game consoles that mince pigeons is increasing at an exponential rate. And as it increases
the number of people in Britain able to design and develop these new ideas is dwindling.

That’s why it is critical the Science Museum wins a forthcoming competition to get its
hands on £50m from the Big Lottery. They’re up against, I should imagine, a collective
of fair-trade vegetarians who want to build a nuclear free peace windmill in Scotland.
And because of the way of the world these days, the wimmin will beat the blokes in
cornish-pastie shoes who want to reignite Britain’s love affair with machines, technology
and stuff that explodes.

Pity, because at the moment only 8% of the museum’s exhibits are on display. The rest is
held in seven giant aircraft hangars on a bleak hillside just outside Swindon.

I went there last week and it’s a truly jaw-dropping experience. Just to the left of the
creaking, rusted door, tucked away in an unlit corner, is the Blue Steel missile, Britain’s
first nuke. And parked behind it is a two-stage Polaris rocket.

Then you’ve got the world’s first hovercraft, the mini submarine used in For Your Eyes
Only and an early Hawk jet trainer, lost under the wings of a Comet airliner. Elsewhere
there’s a huge 1930s hot metal printing press, several seriously important cars, and lots of
early PCs: blue cabinets the size of small vans, some of which have the computing power
of a modern-day wristwatch.

In another hangar there are miles of racks, stacked from floor to ceiling and stuffed with
everything that was ever important. Honestly, I half expected to find the lost ark of the
covenant in there.

It is properly spooky; like being in a 3-D reach out and touch pop-up book on all the stuff
that changed our lives. And what made it even more eerie is this: I was the only person
there.

The plan is to change that. The men in cornish-pastie shoes want the lottery cash so they
can build an architectural wonder where all the quarter of a million exhibits can be
displayed properly. A place that should help Britain’s schoolchildren understand that it
won’t be environmentalists or politicians that’ll save the world from global warming. It’ll
be a scientist.

If you want to ensure the Science Museum gets its cash and the windmill fails, go to
www.voteinspired.org.uk and vote. I have.

And now let us move on to what happens when you let a bunch of nitwits take charge of
the greenhouse gas debate. The G-Wiz. I have often mocked this little car for being slow,
ugly, unsafe and hypocritical. But I have never driven one . . . until now.

First things first. It is very small. And it is even smaller than that when you’re inside. It is
so small in fact that anyone over the age of four will find their left knee is jammed behind
the windscreen washer switch, causing to it spray the windscreen constantly as you drive
along.

Actually, that’s not true. You will only spray the windscreen until you get to a right-hand
bend which, no matter how slowly you go, and believe me the G-Wiz goes very slowly
indeed, will cause you to slide right across the car until you are sitting in the passenger
seat.

In many ways this is better. Because while you can still easily reach and operate all the
controls, other road users will assume you’re the passenger, and therefore that the stupid
little car is not yours.

Sadly, however, the moment only lasts until you turn left. Because then you’ll slide back
behind the wheel and the windscreen washing will start all over again.

Until you brake. Then your knee will shoot forwards into the radio release button, which
will pop the fascia on to the floor.

Still, at least it has a radio, because otherwise luxuries are few and to be found only in the
shape of two crummy cupholders and some leather-look fabric that is glued haphazardly
to the door linings. Imagine a coal cellar and you have some idea of how well appointed
this car is.

And so what about life in the back? Well, there are two seats back there but God has not
yet designed a creature that could fit in them, and it’s pretty much the same story in the
boot, which is the size of a mouse.

Speed. Well 0-60mph is impossible because it won’t do 60mph. In fact, this is the first
car I’ve driven that seems to have no top speed at all. It’s like walking, only less
comfortable.

Small wonder this is not classified as a car by the European Union. They call it a
quadracycle, which means it can be sold without having to pass the usual safety tests.
Pity, because a recent test by Top Gear Magazine found that it was unsafe at pretty much
any of its speeds. All two of them.

Actually, I should be serious because boffins using the much respected Euro NCAP test
procedures found a number of design flaws that could kill or maim. You may save the
planet with this car. But you could well lose a leg in the process.

You will certainly lose all your friends because to justify your significant £7,000
purchase (£8,299 for the newer AC version), you will need to explain, loudly and often,
that it uses no fuel, that you simply charge it up at night – using power from a power
station incidentally – and you’re good to go 40 miles. Unless you use the lights. Or the
radio. Or the washer jets. Which you will, a lot. In which case it’s only 30 miles, or
maybe 20, before you coast to a halt . . . in the rain you caused by not buying a Range
Rover.

There’s another thing, too. Children playing in the street can hear a Range Rover coming
and know to get out of the way. The G-Wiz, on the other hand, is near silent, which
means they may run in front of you to retrieve a lost ball. You may then hit them . . .
causing your car to disintegrate and your legs to come off.

Even if I were a committed environmentalist I would not buy this car. It is too small, too
dangerous and I’m sorry but it runs on juice from a power station, hardly a flower in the
big green scheme of things.

What’s more, a few luvvies in London are not going to make the slightest bit of
difference, even if it’s correct that cars are buggering up the ice pack. We will not be
saved by going backwards. We will be saved by someone using technology to go
forwards. We will be saved, in other words, by science, maths and the lost British art of
invention.

Vital statistics

Model Reva G-Wiz DC (older version)

Motor 48V DC motor

Power 4.8kW continuous (13.1kW peak)

Torque 50 lb ft @ 2000rpm

Gearbox Single-speed automatic

Range Up to 40 miles (32, mixed roads)

C02 Equivalent of 63g/km if charged from fossil-fuel source

Acceleration n/a

Top speed 40mph

Price £6,999

Toyota Land Cruiser

The unstoppable one
Gavin Conway

As we descend from the brow of the hill we are effectively in free fall. All the antilock
braking, traction control and we'll-take-care-of-it-sir software in the world won't stop the
Toyota from head-butting the earth's crust. Big time. And it does.

But it's hardly surprising. We are on a course designed to take the new Land Cruiser to
the edge of its capabilities. It is Toyota's way of reminding us that the 51-year-old Land
Cruiser legend has been built on its ability to keep going regardless.

Nearly 4m have been sold globally and it has been exported to 127 countries — including
China, where it is called Shamowang, or King of the Desert. In Latin America the
imaginative locals call it El Macho.

However, these are challenging times for old-school off-roaders. Relatively recent
arrivals such as Mercedes's M-class and BMW's X5 might not be heroic in the mud but
are vastly better to drive on tarmac. Lately Volkswagen has proved with the Touareg that
you can combine sensational off-road ability with first-rate motorway manners. So 4x4
buyers have come to expect even the biggest off-roaders to drive more like saloon cars.
To that end, the new Land Cruiser is laden with technology to give a range of suspension
settings to suit your environment. At one extreme the comfort mode is meant to deliver a
more absorbent ride over rough roads, at the other the sport setting firms everything up
for twisty tarmac and tough cross-country conditions.

In comfort mode the suspension is good at soaking up big potholes and ruts. The ride
over dips and crests remains bouncy and nervous, though, and the body tends to lurch
slightly when you change direction quickly. Switching from maximum comfort to
maximum sport did not produce a dramatic difference. I didn't expect it to turn into a
Porsche, I just thought there'd be a more noticeable change. Sure, the body rolled a bit
less in corners but the Land Cruiser is still a long way from delivering the best on-road
experience for a 4x4.
Toyota has succeeded, however, in making the Land Cruiser much more refined. At
80mph wind, road and mechanical noise are remarkably low for such a big machine. The
performance from the 161bhp turbodiesel is also up to the task — 0 to 62mph in 12.7sec,
106mph top speed — and all that low-rev poke delivers a relaxed drive. A 245bhp V6
will follow soon after the main launch in January but Toyota expects 98% of buyers to
opt for the diesel.

The entry-level Land Cruiser will cost £23,995, and along with a cavernous interior you'll
get air-conditioning and a CD player as standard. The £36,795 range-topper brings a
mind-boggling specification that includes satellite navigation, air suspension and every
electrical function known to man.

At that price, though, its more dynamic rivals from Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen are
all in the frame. But like the nearly beaten hero who has one round of ammo left the Land
Cruiser shoots back. It remains unbelievably good at the rough stuff and is loaded with
technology to help it descend hills without sliding out of control and to power up them
even if only one wheel can find purchase.
Construction is still the old body-on-frame approach that Toyota says is better at taking
maximum off-road punishment than the now more common all-in-one monocoque.

Gravity still poses a problem, though. After dozens of runs our long muddy hill has
become less of an incline, more of a vertical drop. Gentle descent turns into hurtle and the
big Toyota smacks the foot of the slope hard — only to bounce off and keep going.
Because that's what Land Cruisers do.

Vital statistics

Model Toyota Land Cruiser

Engine Four cylinder, turbodiesel
Power 161bhp @3400rpm
Torque 253 lb ft @ 1600rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual
Suspension (front) double wishbones, coil springs, (rear) four link live axle, coil springs
Tyres 225/70 R17
Fuel 29.7mpg (combined)
CO2 253 g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 12.7sec
Top speed 106mph
Price £23,995
Verdict Struggling to keep up in terms of road dynamics, but still one of the best in the
world when it comes to off road ability

The latest generation of the Toyota Land Cruiser Amazon is the chameleon of the
automotive world, combining the roles of luxury car, people carrier and load lugger with
equal aplomb.
At around 16ft long it has enormous presence on the road and the elevated driving
position gives the driver a sense of invincibility, ideal if you are tackling the Australian
outback but a little over the top if you’re only doing the school run. However, the absence
of parking sensors can make slipping the car into that supermarket or underground
parking space a bit of a challenge.

You’ll see plenty of used examples with battle-scarred bumpers to prove the point.

Being big means the Amazon is also heavy and it needs a pretty powerful engine to get it
moving. Models introduced in spring 1998 were powered by a 4.7 litre V8 producing
232bhp or a 4.2 litre turbodiesel with 201bhp. Both units propel the car to an artificially
limited top speed of 109mph, with the 0-60mph benchmark being achieved in 11.7sec
and 13.1sec respectively. In a car of this size such performance feels impressive, and in
most situations the extra torque of the diesel engine makes it feel just as quick as its
petrol sibling.

Second-hand buyers of the diesel have a choice of two trim levels, the GX and VX. Both
have air-conditioning, CD player and alloy wheels but the higher spec VX adds leather
upholstery, electrically adjustable front seats, an electric sunroof, an active height-
adjustable suspension system (a useful addition for serious off-road use) and a four-speed
auto gearbox. The petrol models were available only as an auto VX.

If you want to use the car as a workhorse then the cloth-upholstered GX diesel model
with a manual gearbox is a great buy. Fuel economy is a true 25mpg and at £3,500 less
than a used VX it represents great value.

If fuel consumption concerns you then the V8 petrol model will give you sleepless nights.
On paper its combined cycle figure of 17.1mpg isn’t too bad but talk to owners and they
will all regale you with horror stories of journeys returning less than 10mpg. More
popular is to combine the diesel engine with the smooth four-speed auto gearbox;
together they will return about 20mpg.

With the Land Cruiser Amazon enjoying a reputation for bulletproof reliability and
unsurpassed durability, the vehicle has become a target for unscrupulous clockers, who
will happily “adjust” the mileage back safe in the knowledge that the car is unlikely to
provide any clues as to the actual distance it has covered. For buyers of older Land
Cruisers this is something to watch out for. The best advice is avoid if you can any car
that does not come with a comprehensive service history, including the original receipts.

With increased competition from the BMW X5 and the latest Range Rover, Toyota
revised the Amazon range in October 2002. The entry-level GX model was dropped and
the auto gearbox gained an extra ratio. But with a new Land Cruiser Amazon costing you
the thick end of £50,000 the case for buying a used example remains strong. If you want
a luxury off-roader with seven seats and superb reliability then this car remains a very
good bet.

Towing With a 3,500kg capacity, the Amazon is popular with the equestrian fraternity.
The presence of stabilisers and twin electrics can indicate a history of heavy lugging

Warranty The three-year/60,000-mile warranty on new cars can be extended annually

until the vehicle is seven years old

Upholstery VX models have leather as standard. GX cloth upholstery is hard wearing

Brakes Huge ventilated discs all round with ABS as standard mean stopping power is
massive, essential if you are towing

Gearbox Permanent four-wheel-drive system comes with high and low ratio settings

Suspension On cars fitted with adjustable suspension the ride is bouncy and body roll is
prevalent when the “comfort” setting is selected

Rear seats Third row of seats needs to be removed to free up boot space

Satellite navigation Dealer-fit option only until 2003, when factory-fitted touch-screen
DVD system was introduced as standard

Off road Good ground clearance and an auto-locking centre differential ensure excellent
off-road ability

Tailgate Split opening tailgate similar to that of a Range Rover

VITAL STATISTICS

Model Land Cruiser Amazon 4.2TD VX auto

Engine 4164cc, turbodiesel
Power 201bhp
Transmission Four-speed auto
Fuel 22.4mpg (combined cycle)
Acceleration 0-60mph: 13.1sec
Top speed 109mph

THE ONE TO BUY

Toyota Land Cruiser Amazon 4.2TD VX auto 2002 02 registration with 60,000 miles.
Pay £24,000 at a franchised dealer or £22,500 privately

OR, FOR THE SAME MONEY...

2002 02 Range Rover 3.0 Td6 SE
2003 53 Volvo XC90 D5 SE
2004 04 VW Touareg 2.5TDI Sport
2004 54 Mercedes ML 270 CDI
2005 05 Mitsubishi Shogun 3.2 DI-D

It was late, dark, cold and pouring down. But even though I was
soaking wet, I simply couldn’t get into the car you see photographed
this morning. My wife was screaming at me, saying the rain was
ruining her hair and making her dress see-through and would I please
stop being so stupid and just unlock the damn doors. But I couldn’t
because it would have been just too embarrassing.

Had I been at the annual general meeting of the Ray Winstone

Appreciation Society, then things would have been fine. I would have
been proud of the car’s gigantism, and its black bonnet stripes and
its flared wheelarches and its own-brand badge. But I was outside
the New Theatre in Oxford, and Oxford theatre crowds, with their mad
hair and their cycling helmets and their hairy sports jackets,
really don’t take kindly to cars like this. Or the people who drive
them.
Especially as it sported the numberplate DE51RED.

Frankly, ATW4T would have been less blushingly awful. So I stood

there pretending it wasn’t mine until they’d all wobbled off on
their stupid foldaway bicycles.

Things were a bit quiet on the way home, and they remained that way
until, with just two miles to go, the engine coughed. I thought at
first I’d fluffed a gearchange. But then it coughed again. And then
it ran out of fuel. And it didn’t matter how much I pointed
defensively at the gauge, which showed I had a quarter of a tank
left; the facts were these. It was the middle of the night. It was
the middle of nowhere. And the raindrops were now as big as rabbits.

BACKGROUND
Vauxhall Astra
Vauxhall Astra SRi
Vauxhall Monaro VXR
Vauxhall Tigra
Vauxhall Zafira GSi
So the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst S did not get off to a good start. It
had made me very wet, then it had made me very angry and now it was
in the process of making me very divorced. So what is it, then, this
tattooed bouncer with a neck like a birthday cake and, you suspect,
a pickaxe handle down its trousers?

Well, in short it’s the result of an Australian civil war. In Oz,

everyone is either a supporter of Holden, part of General Motors, or
a supporter of Ford. Oh sure, there are solicitors and accountants
who will claim they are above such nonsense, but when pressed they
will
say: “Of course, I’m a GM man by birth and I would never allow a
Ford onto my drive because” — and at this point they start to get a
bit red in the face — “they are all raving poofters and” — by this
stage they will be banging the table — “I hate them. I would gladly
lay down my life and the lives of my children for Holden and I will
kill anyone with a hammer if they disagree.”

At the Bathurst race from which this limited-edition Vauxhall takes

its name, there are pitched battles between gangs of Ford and GM
fans.
Proper bike-chains-and-flamethrower, Hell’s Angel-type stuff. And
the only time they ever came together was when a chap called Jim
Richards won in a Nissan Skyline. Such was the torrent of catcalls
as he climbed onto the podium, he leant into the microphone and
called the entire crowd “a pack of arseholes”.

That’s the background from which this big Vauxhall comes. A rough,
partisan sink estate, where there are no women and even the spiders
are frightened. It’s a car deliberately built to be uncouth. To
stick its face into anything Ford might do by way of response. It’s
designed to keep those bike chains whirling.

Strangely, however, it’s not actually Australian. It’s built there

but it was engineered by a Scotchman called Tom Walkinshaw. So since
he’s a neighbour I thought I’d go to see how on earth such a quiet,
reserved chap could possibly have come up with something so ...
wilfully ocker.

It’s easy to find his house. You go left at Alex James’s agreeable
cheesery, straight on past David Cameron’s delightful wisteria,
right by Ben Kingsley’s lovely gable ends and through the dry-stone
walls that mark the entrance. But I didn’t want to go past all those
places — and people — in a car with stripes and DE51RED written on
the back.
So I stayed at home.

The next day I was due for lunch at a friend’s house. And I decided
that since he lives down a long private drive, it would be okay to
turn up in what was essentially a bull-necked version of Crocodile
Dundee. But, for no reason, the battery was flat and it wouldn’t
start. So I went in a Range Rover. As did everyone else.

Eventually, though, when it was dark and the nation was asleep, I
did sneak out to see what on earth this car was like. And I found
after a very short space of time it was like being in 1978. There is
no refinement at all.When you dip the clutch pedal to change gear,
you can feel and hear the entire driveline moving around. Something
I haven’t felt to anything like this degree since the Chevette HS
went west.
Then there’s the steering wheel. It’s made from the cheapest plastic
in the world and has a diameter exactly an eighth of an inch bigger
than the outer ring round Saturn. You don’t steer this car. You
flail.

And finally there’s the noise. Oh. My. God. There has never been a
car that sounds like this. Not ever. Obviously the V8, lifted
straight from the latest generation of Corvette, is quite a noisy
thing, but when you accelerate you don’t hear it at all. What you
hear is the supercharger. It’s not a whine or a whistle, as you
might expect. It’s as though someone is feeding a million squirrels
into an industrial wood chipper.

It is a deafening sound and it’s at a pitch that could shatter

Katherine Jenkins’s hair. So after a while you can take no more and
you lift off, whereupon you are treated to the sound of distant
artillery fire as traces of unburnt fuel ignite in the exhaust’s
tailpipe. It is the most glorious noise in the world.

So you find yourself gritting your teeth through the squirrel

mincing phase and then sitting there, with your foot off the
throttle, waiting for the revs to drop to 1800, when the sound of
far-off warfare comes.

BACKGROUND
Vauxhall Astra
Vauxhall Astra SRi
Vauxhall Monaro VXR
Vauxhall Tigra
Vauxhall Zafira GSi
There are other good things too. For something that produces an
almost insane 564 horsepower, it is surprisingly easy to drive. You
put your foot down, the squirrels die, and you expect you’re going
to spend the next five minutes wrestling with the ship’s wheel,
trying to keep in a straight line.

But no. It just squats and goes. And it’s not like it’s being held
in check by all sorts of clever stability controls. All you get is
traction control that is on, or off. And that’s it.

Of course, it is a very big car. So massive, in fact, that very

often those on the left-hand side are going through quite different
weather from those on the right. And the people in the back are
still in bed.
But as a result of this vastness, there is room to lounge, and space
in the boot for several grandfather clocks. It’s got a good ride
too.

Equipment? Yes, it’s got some but not much, and the little there was
didn’t work.

And you know what? I didn’t care. I’m ashamed to admit I loved this
car. Yes, it’s vulgar and terrible but it’s almost ridiculously
exciting and there is no other car that offers this much space and
this much power for less.

So you go ahead. You buy yourself a BMW M3 instead. In the meantime,

I’m going to join the Ray Winstone Appreciation Society. And go to
its meetings, in Spain, in what can only be described as the real
sexy beast. Ghastly but utterly, utterly lovable.
____
The old Civic Type R won favour not because it was the best hot
hatchback but precisely because everyone’s parents - me - were still
harping on about the brilliance of the Golf GTI and how sad it was
that Peugeot had gone off the boil. But once the youth moved into
Honda-land they found that, actually, the Civic had a number of
things going for it. It was relatively cheap to insure and there
were many performance and styling parts on offer.

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Related Links
Honda Civic Type R
There was something else, too. It was actually very good fun to
drive.
For the money, there was very little else that could put such a huge
smile on your face.

So what about the new one? Well, it does look fantastic. The Type
R’s wheelarch-filling wheels transform the Civic into a properly
exciting-looking car. The sort of thing you’d buy for your son, and
then keep.

Don’t, though. Because almost everything else about it is rubbish.

First of all there’s the rear spoiler. From the outside it looks
great, arching across the rear window like that, but from the inside
it means you cannot see the car behind.

Engine? Well what they’ve done is taken the 198bhp unit from the old
Civic and popped it, pretty much unchanged, into the new one. That,
of course, would be fine if the new one weighed the same as the old
one, but it doesn’t. It weighs a whole lot more.

The fact is that Ford, Renault, Vauxhall and Volkswagen can all sell
you a hatchback with much more get-up-and-go. Cunningly, Honda has
tried to mask this lack of oomph by fitting the new Type R with a
suspension system that, plainly, is made out of bricks.

All things considered, then, I pretty much hated it. It is nowhere

near as good as a Golf GTI because, to be honest, it’s nowhere near
as good as walking.
____
The cars you will find on this page do not necessarily cost more
than Caribbean islands, they are not unduly thirsty and none has a
steering wheel that falls off every day or killer scorpions in the
seat fabric.

Some are even quite spacious and practical and mostly they emit very
small carbon dioxides. This, of course, makes little difference to
the weather but does give you a warm glow of sanctimonious pride at
least.

However, I don’t like them and, as often as not, there’s a very good
reason for that . . .

It’s not that hard to make a car. You go to a company that makes
brakes for the brakes, to a company that makes glass for the windows
and to a company that makes seats for the seats. Then you get a
subsidy from the Malaysians to clear a bit of jungle, pop up a
factory, employ some locals to nail all your pieces together and
Bob’s your uncle.

Making a car, then, is like following one of Jamie Oliver’s recipes.

You take so many eggs, cook the cress for so long, drizzle so much
jus onto the finished product and yum yum, you have a delicious and
nutritious dinner for four.

There is, however, a small problem. I have followed many of Jamie’s

recipes over the years and I have ended up with something that looks
nothing like the incredible creation in the pictures. What’s more,
when I serve it to guests, it usually makes them vomit copiously all
over the floor.

I’m willing to bet that if Gordon, or Anton, or Marco, or Heston

were to follow the same recipe using the same ingredients and the
same utensils, the guests would drown in their own dribble long
before they’d picked up a knife and fork.

And this is the thing with cars. The new Tata Nano, that 40p
commuter runabout launched in India recently, has all the right
parts. There are wheels, windscreen wipers, an engine (sort of) and
places for people to sit. But do you want one? I don’t. In fact, I’d
rather kiss Nicholas Witchell. With tongues.

And it’s not a problem restricted to cheap cars either. Other cars I
don’t want include the Mazda2, the Subaru WRX, the BMW 3-series, the
Mercedes GL, the Vauxhall Vectra, the Porsche Boxster, anything with
a Seat badge, and even the £117,500 Bentley Flying Spur.

The Bentley may tick all the boxes. It may be the fastest four-door
saloon car in the world and it may have exquisitely machined heater
vent knobs. What’s more, it uses many of the same parts as the
Volkswagen Phaeton, a car I like very much indeed. And yet it lacks
the vital final ingredient. Call it what you will: flair, élan,
passion. It’s not there. It is a car with no soul.
There’s a very good reason for this. Volkswagen made the Continental
GT because it wanted to make a good large car. And having done that,
at very great expense, the marketing people and the accounts
department obviously pointed out that a few more could be sold if a
cheaply reengineered saloon version was added to the lineup. The
Flying Spur, then, was created not to be brilliant. But as a sop to
the economies of scale. It was built to make money. And that never
works.

Why do you not lie awake at night yearning for the day when you can
own a Hyundai? Simple. Because Hyundais are not made to plunge their
hand into your pants. Only to plunge their hands into your bank
account. It’s the same story with the Tata Nano, and the Vauxhall
Vectra, and the BMW 3-series, and the Mercedes GL. All the cars you
don’t like and don’t want were made, like white goods, solely to
make money.

As a general rule, Japanese cars have no magic “want one” factor.

Except for various Hondas, which do. And it’s no coincidence that
Honda was started by one man with an engineering vision while Toyota
was started by a committee to make Japan rich. Subarus, for God’s
sake, are made by Fuji Heavy Industries.

Ooh, the romance. I’d like to bet the top brass don’t even know they
make cars.

Ever wondered why so many people genuinely love Jaguars and why
Lexuses are always thought of as being a bit dreary? It’s because
Jaguar was started by Sir William Lyons, who had a vision, and Lexus
was started in a meeting driven by PowerPoint presentations and
accounting principles.

And don’t think that the days of Lyons are over. You need only look
at the Bugatti Veyron to know that mad, dream cars are still
steamrollering their way through the profit-and-loss accounts.
Forced into production by Volkswagen’s boss, Ferdinand Piëch, who
wanted to make a car that did 400kph, it costs almost a million quid
to buy. But it costs Volkswagen nearly three times that much to
make. You can feel this when you drive it. You can even sense it
when you turn on the wipers, because you’re using a stalk that cost
£4,000. Very nearly as much as an entire Perodua Kelisa.

Other modern cars that still have soul where you’d expect to find
nothing but expense are the Mercedes CLS, that swooping four-door
coupé-lookalike that seems to have no place at all in a lineup built
on granite and common sense. So what’s it doing there?

Simple. A Mercedes designer was doodling away one night wondering

what a Jaguar might look like if Mercedes were to make such a thing.
His boss saw it and the rest is history.
Then there’s the Golf GTI. Created back in the late 1970s by a small
team of enthusiasts who were fiddling about putting big engines into
little cars, it was ruined over the years by the marketing
department who thought that a good badge would act like yummy gravy
if poured over a poor car. But then, with the new one, they asked
the engineers to break out their slide rules, and put the magic
back. The result is a fantastic car.

What fascinates me about this simple principle most of all, though,

is that sometimes soul can be like chilli sauce. Pour enough over
the mix and it’ll mask the fact that underneath you’re driving
around in the automotive equivalent of two dead rats.

This brings me on to the Ford Mustang. It’s a terrible car. Bouncy,

underbraked, nowhere near as fast as it should be and equipped with
a live rear axle. Something that went out of fashion at about the
same time as the Bailey bridge.

Ford argued that it had fitted museum technology because that’s what
America’s drag-racing fraternity had asked for. I see, so you wreck
a car’s handling and ride simply to keep half a dozen fat men in
Kentucky happy. Sure, I believe you. And the decision had nothing to
do with the fact that live axles cost 4p whereas more modern
alternatives don’t.

Anyway. None of this matters, because whenever I see a Mustang I’m

filled with a sometimes uncontrollable urge to buy one. I know the
stripes are silly, I know the wheels are slightly wider than is
strictly necessary and I realise the big bulge on the bonnet is as
laughable as the hosepipe attachment Robert Plant used to sport in
his pants.

I’m also aware that the seats are made from UHT leather, that the
dash is made from materials that Lego would reject, that it can be
beaten off the lights by a Golf (cart) and that in England such a
car would mark me out as someone who in pubs says, “I’ll take a
Bud,” because secretly I want to be American.

And yet the feeling persists. Maybe it’s the badge and all that
Bullitt nonsense. Maybe it’s the style. It is a good-looking car.
But mostly it’s the fact it’s the only Ford made today with rear-
wheel drive. That shows that beneath all the rubbish it was designed
by someone who cares.

In every way, it’s worse than a dull-as-ditchwater Kia Rio. But

because it was plainly created by an enthusiast it has a heart and a
soul. That’s why I’d buy a Mustang and why, even if my dog’s life
depended on it, I wouldn’t buy a Rio.

So, hopefully, when you read this round-up of the cars I’ve liked
least since 2003 you’ll see the thing they have in common – or
rather the thing they haven’t got.
__
The old MX-5 was a phenomenon. The bestselling sports car the world
has ever seen. Probably because it always felt just a teensy bit
gay.
That’s why we all liked it so much. It wasn’t threatening.

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BACKGROUND
BMW 135i M Sport coupe
Alfa Romeo Brera V6 coupe
Mazda MX-5 1.8i
Mazda RX-8
Volkswagen Golf R32
Related Links
Mazda MX-5
With its wider body and flared wheelarches, the new version looks a
bit more beefed up, as though they haven’t evolved the old one so
much as sent it to the gym. It now looks like it means business.

What’s really brilliant is that despite the stronger body and the
greater number of toys, it weighs only 45kg more than the old one.
Computer geeks didn’t do that. Engineers did.

And it was engineers who did the roof. Oh I’m sure there was
pressure to fit an electrically operated soft top, but this would
have added weight. So what you get is a canvas top that can be
raised and lowered, using one hand, from the driver’s seat.

And because they’ve kept the weight down, the new car still feels
gay, in both the new and the old sense of the word. The balance, the
poise, the gearchange, the exhaust note: they’re all spot on.

Everything about the new MX-5 is perfectly judged, so that what you
end up with is a slightly more practical, slightly better-looking
version of something you loved anyway.
__
You climb into a Fiat and even though the headlining has fallen off
and is draped round your head like a nun’s hat, and the engine
sounds as if it’s being fuelled with gravel and there’s a smell of
melting glue, you always think: “This is fun.”

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BACKGROUND
Nissan Murano
Citroen C4 VTS coupe
Fiat Bravo 1.4 TJet 150 Sport
Mazda CX-7
Mazda6 MPS
Related Links
Fiat Bravo
It’s much the same story with the new Bravo. It’s available with a
wide range of engines, but inevitably I asked for the most powerful.
It’s a turbocharged 1.4 that chucks out 150bhp and that’s a lot from
a small amount of space. But maybe because it’s quite a porker, it
really isn’t a fast car.

I don’t care, though, because it is a fun car to drive. There’s a

looseness to the controls that you may interpret as poor build
quality or a slackness in the system, and I’d be the first to agree
that the steering’s not that great and the handling isn’t especially
noteworthy. However, somehow, it puts a smile on your face.

There are many issues in a Bravo that you won’t find in a

Volkswagen.
So to buy this car you must decide that what you really want is
something that’s not quite as good as a Golf.

Except for a couple of things. The way it feels and the way it
looks.
If these are important to you, try one. You might like it. I did.