21 October 2018
A bright spark with absolutely no point
Hyundai Kona Electric
At some point everyone has faced that moment when they know the day ahead is going to be fraught with misery, angst and swearing. They know that something has gone wrong with their laptop and that after flailing around in parts of the menu reserved only for people with body odour, they are going to have to spend the next few hours on the phone to someone who uses acronyms instead of speech.
‘Where does it say Tools?’ you plead. ‘There is no Tools in the Options list and, no, I don’t know what a bar is in this context, or rich text, or plain text, or HTML. All I know is when I send an attachment, it arrives at the other end as a file marked “winmail.dat” and that no one can open it.’
All of us have spent a morning with our arses in the air, turning the wi-fi router on and off and trying to get the bloody phone to work, and all of us at some point have wondered, out loud, if life wouldn’t be better if we went back to typewriters and postmen.
And that’s just so we can keep up to speed with what the lefties are saying on Twitter and how well our friends’ dogs are doing on Instagram. Imagine, however, what life will be like when we face similar problems every time we want to pop to the shops for a pint of milk.
The electric car is coming. Be in no doubt about that. We’ve had Teslas for the past ten years and in the next two just about every mainstream manufacturer will jump on the bandwagon. Saying it won’t happen is not even worthy of a metaphor. It will.
I recently borrowed an electric Hyundai Kona, which the company will not be selling in Portugal any time soon. Not with a name like that. But what about here? If you’re thinking of going pure electric, is this the sort of thing you should be looking at?
Well, let’s get to the problem straight away. There simply aren’t enough charging points. Jaguar asked the government about this before it began work on the electric I-Pace and was told that by the time the car emerged this year, everything would have been sorted out. It hasn’t. And if more people start buying electric cars, things will get worse long before they get better.
The Hyundai arrived with no cable that allowed it to be plugged into a simple domestic socket. I’m not surprised. I know someone who did that and his home caught fire. Also, the charging time from a simple domestic circuit is measurable in weeks.
Instead, I was given a cable that allowed me to plug it into one of the charging stations you see in supermarket car parks and motorway service stations. Frankly, though, I didn’t think I’d need it. I mean, the Kona has a range, Hyundai says, of up to 300 miles and I was planning a round trip of barely half that.
However, the range-ometer in an electric car is a weird and speculative thing, so after I’d done a bit of pottering about in London and driven to Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, it said there was only 130 miles left. That should have been enough to get back. But what if the motorway was closed by the Wombles? This is known as range anxiety. It’s a thing with our friends electric.
I didn’t want to take the risk so went to the nearby Soho Farmhouse, where six charging points are provided. One was broken and one of the spaces was occupied by a black Bentley Bentayga with a personalized registration that I won’t tell you to save the owner embarrassment. In Portugal the man who left it there might be called a Kona.
Eventually, though, I was having some lunch, knowing that the batteries were being topped up nicely, which of course they weren’t. An hour later, only 17 miles had been added, so I carried on with lunch until I was too drunk to drive the car anyway.
Eventually I found someone to take me home in it, and then asked him to pop to the supermarket, where the batteries could be fully charged up. He plugged it into the port, which said he must download an app that would let him pay for the electricity he used.
And this is where things go into meltdown. The app wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the charging point. And neither would anyone on the number provided. So he had to waste all the power gleaned from the Soho Farmhouse looking for an alternative.
Unfortunately, the cable would not release from the charging point, or the car. Apparently, this is so ragamuffins can’t unplug your car for a laugh. Only you can do that with your app. But the app wouldn’t work. He called the emergency number again to say the car was firmly tethered to the port and was told to wait with it until a maintenance team arrived. But that this wouldn’t happen until the next day as the team didn’t work weekends.
This is far from a unique experience. Last month we read about an author called Isabel Hardman who arrived at a literary festival late because none of the chargers on her route were working. James May went home last night in his electric BMW i3 and I notice today he’s not at work.
The upshot of all this is that you cannot buy an electric car at the moment. Well, you can, but it will be very expensive – even with the government’s £4,500 plug-in grant, which drops to £3,500 next month – and you won’t be able to go anywhere in it, not with any certainty. Electric car fans boast on forums they’ve covered 500 miles in a day in their Nissan Leaf as if this is incredible. But I once drove from London to Oslo in a day – more than 1,000 miles.
One day, if charging points are as reliable and as common as petrol pumps, and top-up times have come down to minutes rather than hours, then you can make the plunge. But now? No. You’d be mad.
And that’s a shame, because the Kona is an extremely likeable little car. It is completely incapable of putting its 291lb/ft of torque on to the road, which means every time you stand on the throttle, it torque-steers like a 1980s Saab Turbo. This is hilarious.
It is also bloody fast. It’s not the 0 to 62mph time that impresses, or its top speed; it’s the immediacy with which it takes off. One minute you’re doing 40mph and then you’re doing 400mph. And the steering wheel has been wrenched from your grip and you’re in hysterics. And a ditch.
It’s good-looking too, and for an electric car in which every joule is precious, it’s very well equipped. My test car even had a heated steering wheel. You’d need a very long lunch to charge that up.
It’s not quiet, though. This is because about 85 per cent of the noise it makes on the motorway comes from its tyres. And you notice it more in an electric car because you sense much of the sound-deadening has been removed to offset the weight of the batteries.
It’s not horrific, however. Nothing about the Kona is. In fact, I loved a lot of it very much. It’s practical, far too powerful, spacious, nicely finished, well specced and handsome. Plus, you don’t have to give that halfwit Sadiq Khan any money when you drive into central London.
This, then, is a car that can run. But unfortunately this country hasn’t learnt to walk yet. So like all electric cars at the moment, it’s completely and utterly useless.
28 October 2018
So bouncy I daren’t break the speed limit
Abarth 695 Rivale convertible
When you first clap eyes on an Abarth 695 Rivale convertible, you’ll immediately think: ‘Well, I’ve certainly got to have one of those.’ It doesn’t matter whether you earn a living delivering rockets to the launchpad in Kazakhstan or soil to garden centres in north Wales, you will be so consumed by its looks, you’ll spend all night convincing yourself that it’s just the job.
At three in the morning you’ll sneak downstairs to see how much it costs, and when you learn that prices for the hatchback start at £23,380, you’ll be on the phone to a dealer by eight.
I get all that. When my test car was delivered, I hadn’t even climbed inside before I was thinking of exactly why I needed a small Italian runaround in my life.
You know those watches you see when you’re a bit bored in an airport departure lounge? You already have a watch. It was a present, so it carries some emotional value. And it works well. So you don’t need a new one. Definitely. ‘But could I just have a look at it?’
So out it comes, and then you notice the price
and it’s far too much. You’d be better off using the money to buy a dog for a blind person, or a lifeboat. But you just like it. So you want it. And you’ll probably buy it.
The 695 Rivale is like that. Painted in a nautical mix of dark blue and metallic grey, it’s supposed to pay homage to the Riva boats we all covet so much. That’s why the interior has the option of a mahogany pack, to give you a sense that you’re ferrying Claudia Cardinale from Le Club 55 in St Tropez to her yacht on an Aquarama.
All very clever, but if you’re going to create a homage to a Riva, why call it a Rivale? That’s like Aston Martin doing a special edition called a Sunseekle.
More understandable is the scorpion badge. Abarth is to Fiat, its owner, what AMG is to Mercedes. It’s the skunkworks that adds the chillis. So this car looks like a Riva and goes like a scalded cock.
But you won’t be thinking about any of that, because you’ll have noticed that, at the touch of a button, the whole roof and the back window folds away to create what is very nearly a proper convertible. And that’ll be the clincher. Even if it were called Il Duce, as a homage to Mussolini, resistance would be futile. You’ll buy one.
And it’ll be a terrible mistake, because, ooh, this is a horrible car. The first problem is that it’s actually a Fiat 500. And that was quite cute when it was introduced to Edward VII. But the cuteness has been somewhat undermined by the knowledge that its underpinnings were also used to make the Lancia Ypsilon, the Ford Ka and the Fiat Panda.
I sometimes think that if you peeled away the body from an Iveco lorry, there’d be a Fiat 500 chassis under there.
Then there’s the Fiat 124 Spider. Lovely car. Captures the spirit of Rome in the 1960s. But is, underneath, a Mazda.
You probably think that I’m being obtuse and that nothing can detract from the buzzy charm of the little 500 and especially its titchy and charismatic 2-cylinder engine.
Yeah, well, sorry to relieve myself all over your retro bonfire, but that 2-cylinder engine was dropped a while ago because it didn’t really work.
The problem was that it had been billed as a brilliant way of saving fuel – but it didn’t. Not really. It didn’t matter where you drove it, or how slowly: it always returned 39mpg, which in a little car such as the 500 wasn’t good enough.
Today the 500 uses a 4-cylinder engine, and the 695, which is also a 500, obviously, is no exception.
It’s a 1.4-litre T-jet Abarth unit, which produces a fabulous noise from its carbon-tipped exhaust system and 177 brake horsepower. That’s quite a lot. It means that you’ll get from 0 to 62mph in less than seven seconds and that flat-out you’ll be doing about 75mph.
Abarth says it will do 140mph, but I’d like to meet the man who achieved this, because he must have testicles like solar systems. Yes, the car is fitted with big-name Koni suspension, but I found the whole thing so bouncy and frightening that I didn’t dare break the motorway speed limit at all.
There’s another problem. Because the metal roof is gone, there’s only a strip of canvas holding the body together, and it’s not enough.
In the olden days convertible cars such as the Saab 900 and the Ford Escort XR3i had what’s known as scuttle shake, but modern technology means it’s no longer an issue. Except in the Abarth, where it is. It genuinely feels as if the car’s not connected up.
None of this will be apparent in town, so if that’s what you want the car for, fine. However, there’s one problem that will be an issue everywhere. The seating.
The seats look lovely and are richly upholstered in fine leather. Unfortunately, however, they offer the support and comfort of milking stools.
I know that Italians do not suffer from obesity to anything like the degree that we do in Britain, but even a size-zero clothes horse in Milan would struggle to get both her buttocks on to the squab at the same time. If you’re fat, it would be like sitting on a washing line.
To recap, then, the 695 convertible is wobbly at speed, and bouncy and hard to drive unless you’re used to wearing a thong. Also, when I went out one night with a male friend, we had to get the roof down and play George Michael loud on the stereo, because why fight it? It’s what everyone assumes anyway.
I really didn’t like this car. The company can do better, and did with the Fiat Strada Abarth back in the 1980s. That remains one of my favourite hot hatches. And what was Riva thinking of?
I met Carlo Riva once. He told me how, when he was penniless, he conned Chrysler into giving him engines for his boats, and how quality meant everything.
The Aquarama was the result of his fastidiousness, and I maintain that it’s up there as just about the best-looking manmade thing ever.
I saw one once, early in the morning, coming out of the mist on Lake Iseo in Lombardy, and it was like watching the birth of a butterfly. Only with a twin V8 soundtrack.
Carlo, who died last year, used to ban fibreglass boats from marinas he ran, saying nobody should have a boat made from the material used for lavatory seats, and he sold a Riva to Gianni Agnelli, the former head of Fiat, by saying that if he could turn it over, he could have it.
And now, in 2018, Riva’s name is being used as a rubbish marketing tool.
I mean it. That’s what this car is. A tool. And it’s what you’ll look like if you drive one.
Unless you really are an Italian actress and you live in Portofino. But you aren’t and you don’t.
11 November 2018
Forty-nine shades of grey and one glorious red
Mazda6 Tourer
When I was growing up, everything was in black and white – the weather, the moon landings, my photo album, policemen, my television and everything on it – apart from the things that were all black, such as the Houses of Parliament and everyone’s lungs.
But on the road things were different. It was a rainbow nation. Your Ford Cortina was orange or green, and your neighbour’s Hillman Minx was scarlet. Your office car park was more bright and vivid than a Jimi Hendrix album cover, and Arthur Daley was tooling around in a yellow Jaguar – OK, strictly speaking, it was a Daimler Sovereign – and no one buys a yellow Jag these days. No one buys anything yellow.
I don’t know when this happened, but we have arrived at a point where the only colour anyone chooses for their car is grey. If you look at the online configurator for the Range Rover, you will see that many colours are on offer but all of them aren’t actually colours at all. There’s Carpathian Grey, Bosphorus Grey, Windward Grey, Scafell Grey, Corris Grey and Byron Blue. Which is grey, really.
And it’s not just Range Rovers. In Paris or Rome almost every single car is grey, and London is going the same way. Except in August, when the Saudis arrive.
It may have something to do with a perceived notion that a coloured car is harder to sell. People have an opinion about lemon-zest yellow in a way they don’t about grey.
Certainly this is true with interior decoration. You know you could have purple carpets and green walls and coloured glass panels in the chimney breast. You know you could paint your window surrounds magenta and your chimney pots lime green. But you fear that, if you needed to sell, potential buyers would be more interested in your neighbour’s house, which is Cotswold Green and Skidmark Brown.
All of which brings me on to the Mazda6 Tourer. As you’d expect, it’s available in white, black, grey, grey, grey, grey and grey. And in any of those non-colours I wouldn’t have bothered organizing a road test. It’d just be 15.5 feet or so of car, and I’d conclude you’d be better off using Uber. However, it is also available in Soul Red Crystal, and this is the best colour I’ve seen on any car.
I’m not a fan of red cars, as a general rule. My Range Rover is grey, for example, as was the Volkswagen Golf GTI that preceded it. And the Lamborghini Gallardo before that. I think that having a red car marks you out as weird: it’s like having a moustache. You’re hiding something.
But Soul Red Crystal is mesmerizing. And because Mazda has been extraordinarily skilful with its use of chr
ome, this simply does not look like a humdrum family estate. You arrive in it and you feel special.
But what about the bit before you arrive? The journey? Well, the version I tested was the top-of-the-range 2.5-litre GT Sport Nav+. I’m not sure why Nav is part of its name. Nav is just something it has, and I thought that sort of thing was the preserve of Volvo, which used to fit cars with badges saying ‘5 speed’ or ‘Lambda sensor’.
Anyway, the Mazda does indeed have a satnav and a million other things besides: a 360-degree camera, a little light on the dashboard that suggests a cup of coffee when you’re tired and ventilated seats. You’d struggle to find anything in a Mercedes S-class you don’t get in a Mazda6. Except perhaps headroom.
Getting through the door does require a bit of human origami, but once you’re there, all is well. Very well in fact. Mazda has been as skilful with materials on the inside as with the chrome on the outside, so that you really do feel as if you’re in a Fabergé egg. Truly, there’s no way you’d guess that the car I was driving cost only £31,695. It feels like bloody good value.
To drive? Well, it’s unlucky. I was sitting in it, outside a shop, when an elderly gentleman drove into the back of it. He then decided to attempt a reverse-parallel-parking manoeuvre and drove into it again. Other than that, though, it’s fine.
Mazda introduced the 2.5-litre engine fairly recently, and it’s easy to see why. It figures that, with diesel on the way out, it needs to offer customers as many petrol-unit choices as possible. But it may have gone too far with this one. It’s not a bad engine, by any means, but the fact is you get nearly all of the oomph without the fuel-consumption hit from the 2-litre version.
That’s possibly the most sensible thing I’ve said in a road test, but it’s what happens to you in a car such as this. You feel like your dad. I have a Mazda6 and now I’m going to join a crown green bowling club. Then I shall buy a pipe and worry about fuel economy.
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