I sat in it most of the night, playing with the switches. Well, moving the heater controls back and forth. And I can still remember every detail of the dash. I can even remember the registration plate: KHY 579E.
I also know it was no ordinary model. It was a ‘super’, which, though I didn’t know it at the time, must have meant my dad was selling more timber than had been expected by his bosses. That’s how a good performance was measured back then. Not by a pay rise or a lunch at the Berni Inn. But by a Cortina that had a clock or a rev counter. Or maybe both.
A company car was a perk, a reward, a doggy chew and a pat on the head for good behaviour. And because it was such an enormous thing – to be given an entire car by your company – it became the measure of your worth. And because of that, about 80 per cent of all new cars back then were company-bought. Which meant in essence they were either Fords, Austins or Vauxhalls.
I remember Simon Shepherd saying his dad was going to get a Sunbeam Rapier. And Nigel Thompson reckoned his dad had a BMW CSL, but these were playground myths. Nobody’s dad sold that much timber.
Then, back in the 1990s, the government decided that it couldn’t have companies handing out cars willy-nilly and made them part of a person’s tax structure – before then only directors and the highest-paid employees paid tax on them. So while company cars still take about 60 per cent of the new-car market, they’re not really perks any more.
What’s more, people get to choose what they want. And what they want is an SUV or a BMW or something that tells the neighbours life is good and they’re the top-performing IT specialist at Siemens Staines. What they emphatically do not want is a Ford. That’s why the car giant’s market share has dropped to about 12 per cent. And if they don’t want a Ford, they definitely don’t want a Vauxhall.
I have only once met someone who wanted one. I was doing vox pops for the old Top Gear – the William Woollard years – and I asked a young chap with weird Nottinghamshire hair what car he would buy if he had all the money in the world. And he said: ‘A Vauxhall Calibra Turbo.’
No one else has ever said that. No one has wanted an Astra of any kind or a Cavalier or even a Senator. And it’s for damn sure no one wanted a Vectra. They were given to salesmen who had sold no timber and who had goosed the boss’s wife at the Christmas party.
The Vectra was Vauxhall’s darkest hour. Built at a time when the company car rules were changing and people were no longer taking what they were given, it appealed to no one. Even James May, whose first car was a Cavalier, says that the Vectra was no good. It was worse than that, though. It was hateful. The last word in ‘That’ll do’ design.
Since then Vauxhall has been making a range of extremely good-looking cars – the Astra coupé springs to mind here – but no one is paying attention. They’d rather have a Kia Sportage. Or a Boris bike. Or nothing.
The only way Vauxhall can get people to pay attention is to build an absolutely superb car and sell it for 9p. And that’s nearly what it has done with the Insignia Grand Sport that I tested recently.
The SRi badge had me fooled. I dimly recall some mildly sporty Vauxhalls with that handle in the 1990s. And I dimly remember thinking that they’d be sort of all right – if they weren’t Vauxhalls. But my hopes were dashed when I noticed the rev counter’s dismal span of ability. Yup. It was a diesel. A diesel in running clothes. And how dreary and depressing is that? Because that’s like a fat man in a tracksuit.
I was a bit miserable as I set off, especially when I noted on the first turn that the steering needs more turns than the wheel on a child’s toy. You need to whirl away like a dervish to achieve even the smallest change in direction.
And then there was the performance. I had the most powerful diesel engine available – 168bhp – and Vauxhall claims this means 0 to 62mph in eight-and-a-bit seconds. That’s pretty sprightly, but from where I was sitting, it didn’t feel that way. ‘Average’ is how I’d describe it.
But then I noticed the crease in the centre of the bonnet, a styling gimmick, for sure, but it gave the front of the car a solid feel, as if it had been made from thicker metal than is actually the case. And then I saw a reflection in a shop window and I thought: ‘You know what? This is not a bad-looking car.’
It’s also spacious on the inside and very well laid out. You’re never fumbling around like how women do when they’ve lost something in their handbag, saying: ‘Where’s the button to turn the damn parking sensors off?’ Everything is where you expect it to be.
And that’s quite an achievement because, ooh, there was a lot of stuff on my test car. It had its own wi-fi router and head-up display. It also had tools to make sure you didn’t drift out of lane on the motorway and all the stuff that you normally find only on top-notch Mercs and Beemers.
Obviously a lot of it is listed as an option. Even the paint, which Vauxhall calls ‘brilliant’ but is in fact just ‘red’, will set you back £285. The front seats were very good, too, but then they needed to be because they add a further £1,155.
And yet, despite all this, the total cost of the car I tested, which has a base price of £23,800, was a whisker over £30,000. It’d be a whisker under that figure if Vauxhall had ditched the £160 wireless mobile phone charger.
And there’s no getting round the fact that £30,000 for a roomy 140mph five-seater with all the trimmings is not bad at all. It’s just a shame you don’t want one. Because it’s no longer 1967.
8 October 2017
Oh what a hoot to be Britain’s worst driver
Audi RS 3 saloon
I saw a dead man recently, and it made me sad. He’d obviously got up as usual and had breakfast with his wife. They’d have talked casually about what they were doing that night, whether the kids would be home and maybe made some plans for the weekend. Then he’d gone out, climbed on to his motorcycle and set off for work. Except he never got there because at a busy junction, he and a Toyota Prius had a coming-together. And that was that.
Two days later I saw a stupid man cycling along the Earls Court Road in London. You could tell from his corduroy jacket and huge beard he was an ecomentalist, a point he was determined to prove by pedalling along with his three children in a flimsy, virtually invisible trailer behind his bike. I presume they were his children; it’d be worse if they weren’t.
Then an hour later I saw a stupid woman who’d gone one step further. She only had one child but it was in a basket contraption mounted on the front wheel of her bicycle. Yup. She was actually using her baby as a human crumple zone. Simply to make a political point. And that is insane.
There was a time when this might have been fine. London’s roads felt safe, partly because the speeds were so low but mostly because everyone sort of knew what they were doing. That certainly isn’t the case any more.
The motorcyclist had been hit by a minicab. And it was a minicab that bloody nearly wiped me out last week when I went to buy the newspapers. He was on completely the wrong side of the road.
Uber, as we know, has been told that it can’t operate in London any more because it doesn’t take its responsibilities seriously. I don’t doubt that the company will clean up its act before the case reaches appeal. But I wonder whether the driving will get any better, because at the moment it beggars belief.
The problem is this. There’s much globalization these days. The Big Mac you buy in Los Angeles is the same as the Big Mac you buy in Moscow. Coca-Cola is the same. Sunglasses are the same. Phones are the same. Cars are the same too, but the way they are driven definitely is not.
If you’ve been to Rome you’ll know what I mean. The driving there is completely different from the driving you find in, say, Houston, or Bournemouth. Then you have Vietnam, where everyone gets into fifth gear as soon as the car is doing 3mph, which is in direct contrast to Syria, where no one drives anywhere unless the engine is turning at 6500rpm. Eastern Europe is naked aggression, Paris is belligerence and India is dithering.
And people who’ve learn
t the skills needed to get by in their own country are now in London, in a Prius, and it doesn’t work at all. Any more than it would work if you put chefs from all over the world in a single kitchen and told them to make supper. You’ve got the chap from India hesitating nervously, not sure what lane he should be in, behind the chap from Poland who reckons that the traffic lights signal the start of the grand prix, and both are being deafened by Johnny Syrian, who’s sitting there with one foot hard down on the clutch and the other hard down on the throttle, which is actually a blessed relief because it means that no one can hear what Reg Crikey the black-cab driver is actually saying.
When the lights go green, everyone crashes into one another, except the southeast Asian man, because he’s going at 4mph, in fifth, the wrong way down a one-way street, wondering what the bump he just felt was. And then is alarmed to find it was a bearded cyclist that he’s just run over.
And the problem is you can’t lump all minicab drivers into one pot. They all do different things all the time. The only thing you know for sure is if the Prius is in the left lane, indicating left, it doesn’t mean it’s going to turn left.
The upshot is that the Prius is now the worst-driven car in Britain. Or, rather, it was until I borrowed an Audi RS 3 recently. You probably heard me, because every time I started it up, the exhaust system made machine-gun noises at the sort of volume that scared birds five miles away. It was fun the first time but a bit wearing after six days. No matter. It has the same 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo engine you get in the Audi TT RS, and that’s a car I love very much.
It produces nearly 400bhp and in a car the size of the RS 3 – think Hot Wheels – that means 0 to 62mph is dealt with in about no time at all. The potential top speed is 174mph unless you want it to be 155mph. I’m not sure why the former is an option, but it is. Of course for many years there have been Audis that could travel quickly in a straight line, but in the recent past we’ve started to see Audis that can go round corners quickly as well. This is another. With sensors and algorithms on hand to decide which of the four wheels gets the power, the RS 3 is a car that just flies down a country lane. It’s a joy.
It also feels beautifully made and, provided you leave it in Comfort mode, it’s firm but not hideously bumpy. However, there are two reasons why I could not and would not buy this car. Well, three, if you include the £45,250 price tag. That is a lot for a car of this size, no matter how much grip’n’go it’s got.
But worse is the satnav system. Even when you’re used to it – and I am – it’s a fiddle to use. You have to take two steps backwards all the time to move one step forwards. It needs to be simplified.
And then there are the brakes, which screeched every time I went near the pedal. You may say this is a one-off and that the car cannot be dismissed because of a scratched pad or an errant pedal. True enough, but this is the third Audi RS on the trot that’s come to me with the same problem.
To try to drive round it, I found myself coasting in neutral up to red lights, but this is tricky in London because a Prius usually arrives on the scene from nowhere and you have to brake to miss it. So then I adopted a last-of-the-late-brakers attitude, cruising up to the stop sign and then jamming on the brakes at the last moment.
This rarely stopped the screeching, but at least when you do a sudden emergency stop, you don’t have to put up with the racket for long. It did, however, alarm quite a few other road users and I’d like to take this moment to apologize for being, for one week only, the worst driver in the country.
22 October 2017
An absolute must if you’re all out of lust
Porsche Panamera Turbo
The oddest thing about getting old is that you start to lose interest in style. You look at a pair of zip-up slippers on a market stall and think: ‘Mmmm. They look warm and comfy and they’re only a fiver so I shall buy them.’ And it never occurs to you that they are even more hideous than the tartan shopping trolley you bought the previous week.
Old people have a similar attitude to everything. They buy furniture because it’s easy to get in and out of and don’t seem to notice that it’s upholstered in the material used to paper the walls in the local takeaway.
They see no reason to buy water with a lemon zest when they can get pretty much the same thing for a lot less from a tap. And why spend all that money on a snazzy telephone when you can talk to anyone in the world from the Bakelite set on the hall table? This is all because old people are not very interested in sex.
When a young person examines a new pair of shoes, they will not really care how much they cost or how many Vietnamese children were killed in the sweatshop where they were made, just so long as they look good. Because looking good is an essential first step on the road to procreation.
When you are choosing a book to read on a beach, you are, of course, tempted to buy the latest Jack Reacher tome. But you suspect that passers-by will clock you as a moron, so instead you choose something about ancient Rome. And when you are hanging pictures in your living room, you know that a poster of a Lamborghini Countach won’t do. So you go for something curious and weird instead.
Sex is behind every single thing we choose to buy: the cigarettes we smoke, the beer we drink and certainly the cars we drive. There’s a tiny bit of our brain that is constantly saying: ‘Yes, I know it does five thousand miles to the gallon and only costs 10p but it’ll make me look like a dork.’
All of which brings me neatly to the door of Porsche’s new Panamera. Yes, I know I’ve driven this before, and reviewed it on these pages, in fact. But that was a review written after a two-mile drive on inappropriate roads in Mallorca while I was suffering from pneumonia. This is an actual review, written after an actual drive and while I feel well.
You open the Panamera, you step inside and immediately you are consumed by a desperate need to buy one. You are less cocooned than you were in the previous model, but you still have a sense of being hemmed in place by the extremely light door and the enormous transmission tunnel. This sense of being cocooned is one of the things that made the old Porsche 928 so desirable.
And the transmission tunnel isn’t enormous just for show. It’s big because it houses all sorts of interesting buttons. All of which operate with the satisfying sense that they are fully German.
Then you have a widescreen television, which allows you to operate all the things that can’t be controlled with the buttons to your left. You feel, as you sit there pressing stuff, that you are Mr Sulu on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Except your hands are hotter. Much hotter.
This is because you’ve turned on the heated steering wheel. You don’t know how you’ve done this, but you know that if you don’t turn it off quickly, all the skin on your hands will melt. You have a cursory glance around the cockpit for something that might shut it down, but there seems to be nothing. And then you remember saying to your mum that you can’t find your shoes and her saying: ‘Have you looked properly?’ So you have a more careful look. You go into all the menus on the control system and you put on your reading glasses and you crawl about in the footwell.
And finally you resort to Google, where you discover the button is … Actually, I’m not going to tell you where it is. It’s a good game to while away a couple of hours next time you’re bored and passing a Porsche showroom. Get the salespeople to make you a cup of tea while you ferret about. It’ll serve them right for hiding it away so thoroughly.
Eventually, the steering wheel had cooled down sufficiently for me to drive the car, and I won’t beat about the bush. It was sublime. There are three engines on offer: at one end is a diesel that will give you an astonishing range of 800 miles between fill-ups but will cost you £10,000 a minute to park because various councils have changed their minds and decided diesel is the work of the devil. At the other is a bloody great V8 turbo that you can park for sixpence because somehow that’s OK these days.
Strangely, it is not the very fabulous V8 that Porsche’s parent com
pany, Volkswagen, uses in the Audi A8 and the Bentley Continental. It’s a completely different V8, with its turbocharging based between the cylinder banks. And it’s also fabulous. Really fabulous. It’s quiet and unruffled most of the time, but when you poke it a bit, it makes a deep, growly noise like a dog having a dream.
Naturally there is a great deal of power, all of which is fed to all four wheels by an ingenious arsenal of algorithms that makes sure no matter what you do, the car always feels planted and secure. It also feels sprightly, because much of it is now made from aluminium. That’s why the door is so light.
All of which make the gigantic brakes look like overkill. These are the sort of discs you like to envisage being used to bring an Airbus A380 to a halt. You imagine when you lean on the pedal that you are actually altering space-time in a measurable way. And on my test car they were carbon ceramic, which meant they could go on affecting nature all day long without fading.
Make no mistake: this is a wonderful car to drive. And it doesn’t feel even remotely like a large five-door hatchback with a boot big enough for a trip to the garden centre, folding rear seats and (just) enough room in the back for two adults. It even rides properly, so everyone is always comfortable.
However, there is a problem. Yes, it’s better-looking than its predecessor, but that’s like saying it’s better-looking than a gaping wound. It’s still a long, long way from being even remotely handsome or appealing. And to make things worse, my test car was painted the sort of red that speedboats go in New Zealand after they’ve been in the ozone-free outdoors for a couple of years. And to make things worse still, that’s an optional extra for which Porsche charges almost £3,000.
Really? Page 35