Of course there are other large cars in which a brace of musicians could perform – many, in fact, if they are built like the Rolling Stones – but very few are so good at everything else as well.
Let me give you an example. When you fill the tank in a normal car, you are informed by a readout on the dash that you have a range of … what? Three hundred miles? Three hundred and fifty? Well, after you fill the tank in the 530d, you’re told you can go 550 miles before you need to stop again. And that, if you hate filling stations as much as I do, is enough of a reason to sign on the dotted line.
But there’s more. The head restraints in most cars are designed to be just that. Restraints. Tools to prevent you from becoming an insurance fraudster by complaining that you have whiplash. But in the BMW they are also headrests: big soft pillows into which you can nuzzle when Alex and William are serenading you with a gentle ballad.
Or what about the satnav system? In your car you have to sit there twiddling a knob to spell out where it is you’d like to go. You can do that in the BMW if you like living in the past. Or you can write it out longhand on the so-called touchpad – it works better if you are left-handed – or you can just say where you’d like to go. Three alternatives to do one thing.
It’s the same with quite a few of the controls. You can either push a button or you can make a gesture. Seriously, you just wave your hand about and something happens. This car, then, has all the best tech to be found anywhere.
In other cars you often find this blanket of electrical engineering sitting there like a distracting shroud to smother and blind the owner from some fairly ho-hum mechanical engineering – a hot sauce to mask the fact you’re eating a rat – but in the BMW that is emphatically not the case.
If you turn off all the nannying systems that are on hand to stop you crashing, you find that it is the real deal. You sit there doing big, easily controlled smoky tail slides, thinking: ‘Er, I’m in a big five-seat diesel estate. How can this be possible?’
And it’s the same story on the road. You know it’s a diesel that’s powering you because you heard the familiar clatter when you started. But now you can’t hear it at all. BMW has done something fancy here with the acoustics, because I’m not exaggerating. At a cruise the engine is silent.
And not because it’s broken. You know this because when you put your foot down it’s as if you’ve been caught up in a giant wave of torque. The TwinPower turbo is spinning and the six pistons are causing God knows how many explosions a minute, but all you can hear are the tyres as you lunge – and you really do lunge – towards the next bend.
And that’s something you’re looking forward to, because the steering is perfectly judged, the brakes haul down the speed with infinitely variable feel and, thanks to that four-wheel-drive system, there is almost never any understeer. It’s all just grip. Even when the snow falls.
This has always been an Achilles heel for BMW. And no one is really sure why. But when the thermometer drops below zero, the first cars to slither into a ditch are always the Beemers. The xDrive system answers that, and now it’s available across the range, I’d tick the box, especially if I lived somewhere rural.
At the very least it’ll be useful when you have a rock star in the boot and you’ve been directed to park in a muddy paddock.
Finally, there’s the business of quality. BMW has always had to play second fiddle to Mercedes in this area, but I just don’t think that’s the case any more. If you push and pull all the trim in the 5-series, it feels as though you are pushing and pulling a barnacle that’s been welded in place. Everything gives the impression it’s there to stay. For ever.
I could go on, but there’s no point, because until there is a breakthrough in what we drive and who drives it and what powers it and what controls it, this is as good as it gets. It’s 130 years of development brought together in a package that’s as faultless as current technology permits.
Mercedes, Audi and Jaguar can sell you cars that are similar. But they simply don’t do everything quite as well as this BMW does.
20 August 2017
Hey, Hans, Miguel’s done better than you
Seat Leon ST Cupra 300 4Drive
What springs to mind when you think of Spain? Well, for me, it’s the excellent medical care when you have pneumonia, but for everyone else, I suspect it’s a blend of things. You have those who’ll conjure up images of bank robbers burying other bank robbers underneath their swimming pools in Marbella. And then you’ll have those who’ll think of the cathedrals, and Guernica and cooking freshly caught percebes on the untouched Atlantic beaches.
Spain is so many things. It’s mountains and deserts and wearing tight trousers while you stab a bull. It’s clubs that stay open until dawn, pounding the night with a pulsating beat that only makes any sense if you’ve ingested a bucketful of what, the other day, I mistakenly called MDF.
It’s beautiful, flavoursome olive oil and it’s old men sitting in white plastic chairs at the side of the road, living to be 120 because Angela Merkel pays them to not do anything all day. And then there’s paella, which is made by cooking up a bag of rice and then emptying the contents of your bin into it. Prawn shells, used teabags, fag ends, the tops and the bottoms of carrots and all the rest of it. God knows how this works but it does. I love it.
Oh, then there’s sport. On the one hand you have Rafael Nadal grunting his way into the hearts and (they imagine) knickers of every woman in the world and on the other you have Barcelona and Real Madrid, all-conquering powerhouses of world football.
Spain’s great. It’s my second favourite Mediterranean peninsula. Which is odd because when it comes to cars, it’s up there with Ethiopia and South Sudan. Yes, it has given the world Fernando Alonso but he now spends his time driving round at the back, making jokes over the radio. Or turning up at the wrong racetrack altogether and doing the wrong sport.
Then there’s driving in Spain. I’ve done this many times and I’d love to tell you what it’s like but I can’t remember. Normally, this is because it’s 4 a.m. and I’m in a hire car that pulls to the left or won’t stop and I’m tired. I had a Nissan Micra, I think, this year and I hated it very much. Quite an achievement since I was too ill to drive it.
Someone, and I would like to meet him so that I can poke some cocktail sticks into his eyes, reckoned, plainly after the car had been finished, that it should have a cigarette lighter. And he decided to mount it in the passenger footwell so every time it goes round a right-handed corner, the passenger’s left leg is smashed.
So what about Spain’s actual car industry? Back in 1898 an outfit that became Hispano-Suiza began. But that went bankrupt in 1903 and later became French. And after that? Well, put it this way, the history of the Spanish automotive industry takes up four lines on Wikipedia. At this point, Spanish car enthusiasts – both of them – will be jumping up and down, reminding me out loud there is Seat, and they’re right, of course.
Seat is Spanish. Apart from the fact that it’s owned by Volkswagen, which is German, and its cars are made in the Czech Republic, Belgium, Argentina, Portugal, Ukraine, Slovakia and, naturally, Germany.
However, this car was made in Spain. Using many of the same parts that Volkswagen uses to make the Golf R.
It’s called the Seat Leon Something or Other 300 4Drive estate and when I came out of my office and saw it sitting there in a car park, my shoulders sagged as if I’d suddenly got a puncture. The Golf R estate isn’t much to behold but this somehow was even worse. They should have called it the Fat Girl’s Ugly Sister. It would have been an easier name to remember. And more honest.
Inside, it’s a Golf, except it had been fitted with some enormous front seats that were extremely comfortable. That made me happy as I set the fiddly Golf satnav, fired up the 2-litre Golf engine, which, like the Golf’s unit, has received a 10bhp uplift, engaged first on the Golf DSG gearbox and set off to the countryside.
It felt pretty much like a Golf on the motorway,
apart from the excellent seats, but when I reached the Cotswolds it did something strange. Right at the top of the rev range, which is somewhere no Seat driver has been before, it made an absolutely wonderful noise.
Not from the back, which is the usual thing these days, but from the front. It wasn’t electronic acoustic trickery in the exhaust pipe. It was the sound of an actual engine enjoying itself.
I liked this noise so much that I spent my entire time with this car deliberately in completely the wrong gear. And the result of this was that it did about one mile to the gallon.
It was probably even worse than that when someone folded down the rear seats and loaded up the enormous boot with bits of furniture that needed to be moved to somewhere else. Which I did. In second, most of the time.
Other things? Well, it is more comfortable than you’d imagine, given that it has sporting pretensions, the four-wheel-drive system will be useful if you have a horse enthusiast in the family and it seemed to be fitted with all of the things you’d expect in a car of this price.
And that raises an interesting point. If you grow some troublesome adenoids and pull on the sort of jumper that all cost-conscious motorists seem to wear, you’ll note that the Seat is £1,215 less expensive than the VW sister car. Unless you buy it with red paint, which for some reason adds £650 to the bill.
Ignoring the weird paint issue, this price differential makes sense. Millions of people all around the world would want a hot, fast four-wheel-drive Volkswagen estate. And the number of people who want a hot, fast four-wheel-drive Seat is about none. So there has to be a price incentive. The Seat salesman has to be able to say: ‘You can have this car and a DFS sofa for the price of a Golf R.’
However, if you examine the price business more carefully, you’ll notice that VW has some seriously big deals on the Golf R at the moment. Two people in our television production office drive them for that reason.
They even park them sometimes in the space reserved for my less expensive Golf GTI and I never mention the fact that they are staff and they have better cars than me and that they should learn their stations in life. Well, not often, anyway.
However, in future I will be mentioning, quite a lot, the Seat Whatever It’s Called has better seats than their cars. And makes a nicer noise. And that they’ve been fools for not buying Spanish.
24 September 2017
Dreaming to screaming in an instant
BMW M760Li xDrive V12
Hello? Hellooooo? Is anyone still out there? Or has everyone glossed over these pages and become engrossed in the recipes? I only ask because you could be forgiven for thinking that there are now fewer car enthusiasts in the country than there are registered ventriloquists. That means three, in case you were wondering.
Car magazine sales have dwindled to virtually nothing. Fifth Gear went into the outer reaches of satellite television and has now disappeared altogether. Top Gear’s audience figures are way down. And as far as I can tell, most of the mainstream car makers are now offering cash money for you to scrap your car and buy an Oyster card instead.
My children are fairly typical, I suspect. They couldn’t care less what they drive, just as long as it does a million miles to the gallon. Speed? Handling? Style? They can’t even get their heads round the idea such things could matter. My son wanted a Fiat Punto, not because of the Ferrari connection, but because the manager of Chelsea is Italian. And I bet Fiat’s top brass hasn’t factored that into its marketing strategies.
In the wider world we have governments saying that petrol and diesel-engined cars will be banned from the roads completely by … (pick a date shortly after the people making the announcement have died). And the news coverage of motoring-related issues focuses entirely on the need for lower speed limits and driverless cars.
When I go out to dinner these days, people often say: ‘If you’re going to talk about cars, I’ll sit somewhere else.’ Seriously, being a car enthusiast is like being a Tory. You just don’t admit it in polite company.
And yet there are Tories out there. And plainly there are car enthusiasts too. I met one last week. He was a young removal man, who looked at the BMW M760Li xDrive V12 that I was driving and said, quietly, so his mates couldn’t hear: ‘Why has that got less power than the M6?’
I was staggered. So staggered that I was unable to correct him. The M760Li has 601bhp, which means it has more power than any BMW since the time of Nelson Piquet. And that raises a question. Why? Because this is a long-wheelbase, super-comfortable limousine full of soft headrests and adjustable interior lighting. So why on earth has BMW fitted it with a bonkers 6.6-litre V12 engine with TwinPower turbo?
Why has the company made it accelerate from 0 to 62mph in less than four seconds, which is faster than most Porsche 911s? Why has it given it four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering, so that on country roads you can drive as if you’re in a Caterham? Surely the people who buy cars such as this ride around in the back, and any chauffeur who uses the launch control system would be sacked before he’d hit 40mph.
Ah, well, that’s the thing, you see. If BMW had made it silent and smooth, above all else, what would be the point of spending even more on a Ghost from Rolls-Royce? Which is a BMW company, remember. And, let’s be honest, anyone who wants a silent and smooth car in which to arrive at Heathrow is going to choose a Mercedes S-class.
BMW, then, was forced by marketing and its own history of making the ‘ultimate driving machine’ to come up with something different. Which is why the car I borrowed was finished in the sort of matt-black paint the drifting community love so much, and a red leather interior. And I don’t mean subtle red. I mean bright red. Very bright red – 1950s-film-star-lipstick red.
It looked hilarious. And everyone who climbed inside said the same thing: ‘It’s fantastic.’ Then they found the iPad-type thing mounted in the rear armrest that controls the rear displays, and they liked that too. And then they found the fridge and were all swooning about that when I put the car in its Sport setting and put my foot down. ‘Aaaaaargh,’ they all said. ‘That’s horrid.’
This car blows your mind with its turn of speed. Not because the turn of speed is so vivid. A Lamborghini or a McLaren is faster still. No. It blows your mind because you’re just not expecting it. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but it reminded me of those bespectacled and rather fierce-looking women in old-fashioned porn films. You cannot believe the transformation when she takes off her specs and lets her hair down.
And neither can you believe how planted it all feels when the going gets twisty. Some of this is down to the four-wheel-drive system and some to the clever-clever suspension, but, whatever, as you sit there with your passengers vomiting into their handbags, you really are left open-mouthed by the way BMW’s engineers have made a 2¼-ton limo handle, grip and go like a hot hatch.
But then, when I was leaning forward to adjust – oh, I don’t know what it was: the night-vision cameras or the massage-seat facility perhaps – I accidentally hit a button and everything changed. The car slowed down. The readout from the satnav became a Toyota Prius-style diagram full of arrows and dotted lines telling me that the engine was off and I was charging the battery. And the dash? Well, that went blue and was full of stuff that I couldn’t read if I wasn’t wearing spectacles and that made no sense if I was.
There was a diagram of a petrol pump on the left with a symbol saying +0.6mi, and a dial that read from 90 down to 50 and then, for no reason I could work out, 16.2.
Plainly, I had put the vehicle in some kind of eco-mode. This required some investigation, so I went on to BMW’s website, where I couldn’t find anything about an eco-mode in the M760Li. I therefore rang the BMW PR man, using the number listed on the publicity material. But was told his number isn’t listed any more.
It’s all a bit of a mystery. Not just the way I activated something that doesn’t seem to exist in this car. But what it’s doing there anyway. Because who wants Uber-driver fuel efficiency
in a turbocharged 6.6-litre supersonic boss wagon?
It’s true. Using this mode would save a few pounds over the course of a year, but the fact is, anyone who’s interested in not wasting money would never in a million years think about buying a big-engined, super-complicated large Beemer. Because history has taught us that they depreciate like a piano falling down a mountain. The car was supposed to be collected the other day at eight. And I suspect the reason it’s still with me is that it’s now worth less than the cost of sending a man to pick it up.
So there we are. A very expensive, pointless car that will, in this Uberized world of average-speed cameras and silly insurance premiums, appeal only to one removal man who can’t afford it and who would rather have an M6 anyway.
But still, there’s nothing like going out in a blaze of glory, is there? For what it’s worth, I thought it was tremendous.
1 October 2017
All mod cons, but fifty years too late
Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport
I remember it so vividly. I was seven years old and my dad had just announced over our evening bowl of tripe and onions that the next day he’d be taking delivery of his new company car.
I was beside myself with tinkle-clutching excitement, because what sort of Ford Cortina would it be? The old model with the CND-badge rear lights that I’d seen racing once on a friend’s television? Well, I thought I’d seen it. It could have been a Mini. Or some footage from inside a beehive.
Or would it be the new Mk 2 model, which none of my friends’ dads had?
The next day, after school, I raced home as quickly as possible and gobbled down my bread and dripping sandwich so that I could wait in the drive – my working-class northern roots imagery has taken a bit of a hit there – to see which one it would be. Some of me wanted it to be the Mk 1. But most of me was delighted when it turned out to be the Mk 2.
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