Next, they decided that every single one of the 4 million people who’d arrived on the underside of a Eurostar train after a long and difficult journey from North Africa or the Middle East should be given a Toyota Prius, a smartphone with Uber on it and a licence. To kill. And yet, despite all this pedestrianized, camera-monitored idiocy, the capital continued to grow and flourish.
Now the maniacs have come up with a new wheeze. It’s a biggie. They’ve decided that every single road in London should be dug up simultaneously. It’s so far beyond a joke that it’s actually funny.
Every residential street is clogged by someone digging out a basement. Every side road is having calming features installed. And every main road is subject to traffic control so that Crossrail can be built. They’ve even shut half the Embankment so they can install a new cycle way. Honestly, they have. If this lot were doctors, their solution to a dangerously clogged pulmonary artery would be to open it up for six months so that it could be filled up with Chris Hoy.
This time, they really have scored a blinder, because even I have reached the bottom of the pit of despair. I view the onset of every meeting with a crushing sense of dread. And I lie in bed at night seething about how much time I’ve wasted by sitting in a completely unnecessary jam.
And I feel so powerless. I can’t use a bus because I don’t like being murdered. I can’t cycle because it’s too cold and wet at this time of year. I can’t go on the Underground because … just because. And that brings me neatly on to the Fiat 500. This, you may think, is the solution. Something small. Something that can make its own lane. Something that will fit into even the tiniest parking space. Surely this is the antidote to the panicky monkeys on the bridge.
Hmm. This may well be true in a city such as Rome, where any piece of ground that isn’t occupied by a structure can be viewed as a parking space. But here in London it doesn’t work that way. Parking spaces are all marked clearly and are big enough for a Range Rover. So using something titchy makes no difference.
Then there’s the business of lanes. Yes, in a small car you can make new and exciting lanes in European cities, but not here. On a road such as, say, Holland Park Avenue, in west London, there are two. And if you try to make a third you’re going to get looked at. And being looked at in Britain is worse than being eaten.
So there’s no point driving a very small car in London, because you’re going to be just as stuck as if you were driving something much larger. The only real difference is that in a small car such as the Fiat you are more likely to be injured in a crash. Unless you are in the back, in which case you can be injured without a crash being involved. Ooh, it’s a squash.
So the only reason for buying the little Fiat is that you like it. And I get that. The version I drove had a matt-black flower pattern stuck on to the shiny black paint, and green ears. This was a good look – even as a £460 option.
Under the bonnet it had the clever twin-cylinder 0.9-litre engine, which, thanks to all sorts of jiggery-pokery and witchcraft, produces 103bhp. That’s not far short of what you got in the original Golf GTI.
There is a fair bit of turbo lag, which is annoying, because just as the blower has fully girded its loins and the fun’s about to begin, you run into a set of roadworks and have to stop again. Only once in a week did I get the full shove, but it was worth the wait. There was a tremendous wallop and a whizzy racket from the clackety-clack engine, and for a moment it felt as though I were inside a mad, flowery, home-made go-kart.
It’s a hoot, this car. It’s nicely equipped and electronically savvy. Many of the details will be a bit beyond the elderly, but anyone under twelve will be quite content with all of the submenus in the submenus. It will give them something to do in the jams.
Me? I just sat there thinking two things: that I’d quite like to peel the people responsible. And that if I’m going to be stuck for two hours, I’d rather be in a Fiat 500 than something bland and anodyne from the Pacific Rim. Because sitting in a car such as the Fiat is like walking through the park on a sunny day with a cute dog. Sooner or later someone is going to lean out of their window and say: ‘I love your little car’s green ears.’ And who knows where that might end up?
That’s what this car is, really. Tinder. With windscreen wipers.
22 November 2015
Not coming to a young boy’s bedroom wall near you …
Renault Kadjar
As you know, I try every Sunday morning to brighten your day with some frivolous and not-at-all important observations about the car I’ve been driving the previous week. But today is different. Today I need to be a bit serious.
Right now, all the world’s big car-makers are engaged in a mad dash to replace the petrol engine with something more in tune with the times. Honda and Hyundai are rushing towards hydrogen fuel cells, and BMW is looking at electric propulsion with small generators to keep the batteries charged. Elsewhere, there are pure electric cars, plug-in hybrids and ultra-low-emission diesels.
It all sounds very interesting, but it’s pointless, I’m afraid, because in ten or twenty years the three biggest car-makers in the world will not be Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors. They will be Google, Apple and Uber. That’s because they have come to understand something more important than what goes under the bonnet. They’ve come to understand that you don’t need a car. But you do need one tomorrow morning, at about ten past eight. And on Thursday afternoon for a couple of hours.
Think about it. This morning your car is parked outside your house doing nothing except costing money. You probably won’t use it at all until tomorrow morning, when you’ll be forced to drive through all the roadworks and all the jams so that you can leave it outside your office all day. Where it will probably be keyed, or broken into.
Life will go on like this for months until, one day, it needs a service, or it breaks down, and that’ll be a nuisance because then you’ll have to make alternative travel arrangements, which will be a chore. You’re paying thousands of pounds a year, then, for something that you use for – what? – 5 per cent of the time? Two per cent?
The car, therefore, has become like a fondue set. You have one because that’s the done thing. But if you actually stop for a moment you can’t for the life of you work out why.
It’s the same story with your fridge. Why do you have one today, taking up a corner of your kitchen and making noises, when you can have milk and butter delivered every day and there’s a supermarket on every street corner? Why not let Waitrose pay the electricity bills to keep your food fresh?
It really is the same story with your car. Wouldn’t it be better if you had access to some wheels only when you needed them? Of course it would, and that’s what Google and Apple and Uber have grasped. We won’t buy their cars. We will share them.
So if you decide on a whim to visit your parents one afternoon, you tap a few passwords into your phone and, in minutes, a car arrives. Maybe it will have a driver. Maybe it will be driven by nobody at all. Maybe it will run on electricity from the mains or electricity created by hydrogen fuel cells. All you care is that a) it will get you where you’re going and b) when you’ve finished with it, it will cost nothing at all.
Never again will you have to look for a parking space, or worry about the meter running out, or pay for insurance, or book an MoT test, or break out the bucket and sponge on a Sunday morning.
If I were running one of today’s big car companies, I’d be worried sick about all this, because the whole business model on which their empires are founded is daft. They’re making us pay thousands and thousands of pounds to buy something that we won’t use 95 per cent of the time.
And that in the remaining 5 per cent is a bloody nuisance, because of the jams and the buses and the cyclists and the Gatso cameras and the CCTV-monitored junctions and the speed-awareness courses and the 20mph limits that are being imposed because every council is now being run by a bunch of frizzy-haired lunatics.
Of course, in our minds, the
car is still glamorous and exciting. It’s a big Healey sweeping through the lanes at 100mph. It’s an Alfa Romeo on the Amalfi coast with a young woman in a headscarf in the passenger seat. It’s a growl and a roar.
But it isn’t. Peel away the history, put down the rose-tinted spectacles and you’ll see very clearly that it’s just a tool. And that because it’s just a tool, it’s vulnerable to pressure from a newer tool that makes personal mobility cheaper and easier.
The only way today’s big car companies can fight off this new pressure is to make their cars more glamorous and more exciting than ever before. They need to accept that, on a practical level, they can’t compete with Google’s silent igloo and must inject their new models with the sort of pizzazz that will make a grown man drool. They need to rekindle the spirit of the big Healey and the convertible Alfa Romeo.
Watchmakers did it when Casio came along. Restaurants did it with the dawn of fast food. Airlines and supermarkets are trying to do it now to fend off budget alternatives. But car-makers are not doing it. They are so obsessed with eco-twaddle and new propulsion systems that they are forgetting about the one thing that will keep us buying their products: excitement.
You get none from the car I am writing about today. It started out in life as the perfectly sensible but dreary Nissan Kumquat and was then turned, for accountancy reasons, into a Renault Kadjar. A name dreamed up by an agency when all the other names have gone.
No one is going to yearn for the day they own a Kadjar. No one is going to spend hours on a configurator, seeing what it would look like in orange or with bigger wheels. No one will search for it on YouTube. It will never be seen in a Fast and Furious film. It’ll never be an option in the Forza Motorsport video game. It’ll never be a poster on a small boy’s bedroom wall. There will never be a Renault Kadjar Airfix model, or a fast ‘R’ version that will sweep to victory on a racetrack or in a rally stage.
The Kadjar offers absolutely nothing that would make you buy one if you could use a Google Igloo instead. Both are soulless tools. But one is much, much cheaper.
I’ve singled out the Kadjar because that’s what I’ve been driving for the past week. But the same thing is true with the majority of cars you can buy these days. They’re just an expensive, awkward hassle that you can do without.
Of course, the car as we know it will survive. Niche manufacturers such as Ferrari and Bentley will soldier on, perhaps making luxury or speedy versions of the Igloo. And you’ll still be able to buy classics.
But I can assure you of one thing: many, many years from now, when people gather at a racetrack to give their old self-drive, self-owned, petrol-driven ‘cars’ a bit of a blast, no one will turn up with a Renault Kadjar.
29 November 2015
Et voilà! School-run mum slips into her thigh boots
Peugeot 308 GTi
You were supposed to be reading about some kind of new Mitsubishi pick-up. But at the last minute a chap from the company called to say he would not be lending it to me because a workaday car such as that with its good turning circle for builders’ yards would not be of much interest to the readers of the Sunday Times.
In his mind, then, builders and plumbers and gamekeepers read the Daily Mirror and are too busy lamenting the demise of Nuts magazine to be thinking about buying a new pick-up any time soon. Which will surprise the builders and chippies who are currently making noises in my sitting room because they all read the Sunday Times and they all drive vans and pick-ups.
To make matters worse, the chap from Mitsubishi also says that my booking to drive some kind of electric car in a few weeks has been cancelled as well. ‘Dom Joly has already written about it in the Sunday Times,’ he says by way of explanation.
I’m not sure that argument stacks up. Film companies do not ban Claudia Winkleman from reviewing a movie because Camilla Long has already written about it in the Sunday Times. Restaurants do not ban A. A. Gill because Giles Coren has already done a piece in The Times. Of course, he gets banned for lots of reasons, but not that one.
I think it’s fairly obvious what’s happened. The man from Mitsubishi is peeved about the firm-but-fair review I wrote about his Outlander PHEV plug-in electric vehicle last year and I’ve been cast into the wilderness as a result.
That’s his right. And I don’t mind. Secretly, I’m rather proud. It shows I’m doing my job properly. And certainly I’m not going to wake up every morning from now on thinking, ‘Oh no. I won’t be driving a Mitsubishi today. I shall have to make do with a Mercedes-AMG GT instead.’
It’s not even much of a professional bother because if I really do need to test a Mitsubishi, I shall simply rent it. Or if I need it for the new Amazon show, buy it.
Over the years, I’ve been banned at various times from driving Toyotas for saying the Corolla was about as interesting as a fridge-freezer, Vauxhalls for refusing to say anything at all about the Vectra, and BMW for saying its cars were driven by cocks. Weirdly, however, I have never been banned by Peugeot.
I’ve not had a kind word to say about any of its products for many years. I even devoted a large chunk of Top Gear last year to ridiculing its customers. And yet still the PR department keeps on coming back from more. Secretly, I think its press fleet manager is Anastasia Steele.
Perhaps in an attempt to suffer more pain and humiliation, the company last week sent round its new 308 GTi, which was red at the front and black at the back. Instantly, this aroused the eye-rolling cynic that lives in my head. ‘The only reason it would do that,’ it said, ‘is to take your mind off all its shortcomings.’
Inside, there was more. The steering wheel is about the size of a shirt button and sits below all the dials in the instrument binnacle. Until you raise it so that it’s no longer between your knees, at which point it sits right in front of all the dials in the instrument binnacle. Revs? Speed? Fuel level? No idea.
‘It’s done this on purpose,’ said the eye-rolling cynic. ‘Because if you’re focused on the invisibility of the dials and the two-tone paint, you won’t notice that the door mirror has fallen off and that the radio’s broken.’
The thing is, though, nothing did break. In fact, everything felt a lot more solid and well made than is normal in a modern-day Peugeot. By which I mean any car the company has made since 1971.
There’s more. Most of the functions are now controlled by the centrally mounted screen, which is a triumph of common sense. Except for the Sport button that makes the car more zingy. That sits in the centre console and, when you press it, all of the dials in the instrument binnacle turn red. Apparently. All I could see was the steering wheel.
And it was annoying me because the actual system it controls isn’t that brilliant. There’s no real feel. It gives no sense that it’s concentrating on the job in hand. It’s fine around town but when you’re zooming along it delivers no real joy, which is a shame because the rest of the package delivers it in spades.
It may have only a 1.6-litre engine – most of its rivals come with 2 litres – but there’s no shortage of oomph. And it may come with an old-fashioned manual rather than a flappy-paddle system, which can be a chore sometimes, but ooh, it’s fun.
Finally, it seems, Peugeot has managed to recapture some of the magic that made the 205 GTI such a monster hit back in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook days of Mrs Thatcher.
This is a car you want to drive. It’s a car you will find an excuse to drive. Yes, it’s practical and sensible on the school run but, on the way home, after you’ve dropped off the kids, it pulls off the traditional hot-hatch trick of slipping out of its slippers and into a pair of PVC thigh-high boots. It becomes a raunchy, up-for-it playmate.
Weirdly, you can buy the new car with less power and a less sophisticated limited-slip differential, but I really can’t see why you would want to do that. Because it’s not like the full-fat version is expensive. Compared with its rivals from Volkswagen and Ford, it’s very good value indeed. But all things considered, is it as goo
d?
Ah, that’s the big one, isn’t it? I have a Golf GTI for several reasons. My mum always had Beetles. I want to support Volkswagen in the emissions saga. And it reminds me of the good old days in the White Horse in Fulham when everyone had one, with Val d’Isère mud up the side and an army cap in the boot.
It’s possible – probable, even – that none of these things matters to you. Maybe you’re a working-class boy done good, in which case you’ll want the Ford Focus ST. You see it as a metal embodiment of yourself. A blue-collar car with humble origins that can mix it with the blue bloods. Bruce Springsteen with windscreen wipers.
We all have our reasons for wanting to buy one brand more than another. My son has a Fiat because he likes Italian football. I used to have a Mercedes because it annoyed Richard Hammond. My grandfather had a Bentley to irritate those with Rolls-Royces. Some people choose Mitsubishis because, er, I can’t help you with that one at the moment. Sorry.
And then we have those people who want to buy a French car because, in these troubled times, they want to be supportive. They fancy a Peugeot because back in the day they had a 205 1.9 GTI and they reckon its modern-day equivalent would help rekindle some of their lost youthfulness.
Well, the good news is that, today, for the first time in ages, you can. You can follow your heart, buy a 308 GTi and not spend the next couple of years regretting it.
6 December 2015
Think hard before you hit the throttle in the camber gambler
Nissan GT-R Track Edition
In my most recent review of the Nissan GT-R I said it was pretty much perfect in every way and declared at the end that it’s not a five-star car. It’s the five-star car. I stand by that. If you want to go fast, in any weather, on any road, there is simply nothing else that even gets close.
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