Yes, I am an impetuous young fool in a souped-up Escort who should exercise patience and restraint, but then the caravanner is a selfish idiot who doesn’t understand human nature. If he’d made his journey at night, or better still, had worked hard enough to have been able to afford a proper holiday, there would have been no crash.
Besides, speed is essential. In today’s profit-motivated world we need to get hither and thither quickly. We want jets that can get us to America in five hours and trains that can get us to work in twenty minutes. And fast cars. Yes, this must be balanced with safety, but the cost of accidents must be weighed against the cost of going down the Guardian’s ozone-friendly route and buying ox carts.
I would never condone the behaviour of those who drive recklessly, but there is a world of difference between that and doing a ton on the M1 once in a while.
The trouble with the Guardian is that it just doesn’t understand the real world. War is awful, but you absolutely can’t stop it happening. It is unfair that Paul Raymond has more cash than he could possibly need while poverty drives thirteen-year-olds into prostitution, but in a democracy that will happen. Aids is terrible, but you can’t spend two hours looking for an all-night chemist when you want sex now. Speed does kill, but no matter how many articles appear in vegetarian newspapers people will continue to drive their cars quickly.
It is not the most heinous crime in the world.
What’s That Then?
When I was two, I used to have a book called the Ladybird Book of Cars and on long winter evenings my mother would keep me amused for hours by covering up all but one bit of a photograph and then asking me to tell her what sort of car it was.
She’d show me the tiniest bit of rear-light cluster and I’d know it was a Triumph Herald. When confronted with a grooved hubcap, I’d bounce around the room, clutching my part and talking loudly about the Rover 2000.
OK, by current standards this is a fairly tame way of passing the time, but we didn’t have Super Mario Game Boys in the early sixties. Today, of course, the only bit of a car that most two-year-olds can identify is the steering lock.
But that has little to do with the decline of moral standards or the breakdown of family units and quite a lot to do with car design.
There is no way a Triumph Herald looked like anything (on earth) in the same way that no other car on the road had grooved hubcaps like a Rover TC. No one ever mistook a Ford Corsair with its pointy and very shiny nose for a Ford Classic. Volkswagen Beetles had about as much to do with Vauxhall Vivas as Vauxhalls did with anti-corrosion treatment.
I’ve harped on about this before, I know, but even as recently as a year ago I had no idea how bad things were going to get, and how soon they were going to get as bad as they have. In short, they are now dreadful.
For the first time since I was two, I cannot tell you what every car on the road is at a glance. The eyes may be getting a bit piggy as the years and the beers take their toll on the fleshy bits, but they still work fine. The cars, on the other hand, do not.
I noticed this for the first time last week when I was following a K-reg hatchback up the M40. For the first 30 miles, I thought it was a Mazda 626 but then, when things got very boring indeed, I started thinking about it a bit harder and realised it didn’t have that funny rear spoiler.
So I reckoned it must be a Toyota Carina and went back to ‘Our Tune’. However, when that finished, I realised it was not a Carina at all and that it had to be something else. It was with a Benny Hillesque slap to the forehead that I finally realised what it was. What it was was a new Mondeo. Definitely. Probably. Perhaps. Nope, it wasn’t that either.
At this point, I began to get a little angry. This was something that had never happened before.
I have always prided myself on a sure-fire certainty that if I ever witnessed a crime, I’d be able to give the police a perfect description of exactly what sort of car the thieves used, what sort of engine it had, what level of trim it featured and where the knob for the heated rear window was.
But here I was, following a car up the M40 and I had no idea what it was. Shergar could have stuck his head out of the boot. Lord Lucan could have waved from the back seat and, later, I’d have had no idea at all what sort of car they’d been in.
So I closed right up to have a look and found to my horror it was a Renault Safrane, a car I hadn’t even considered.
The next day, in the pub, while discussing cars with a colleague, I told the tale and he simply pointed over my shoulder and asked me to name the estate car that was pulling out of a side turning. I knew it was Japanese and reckoned it was a Nissan Sunny. It was, in fact, a Mazda.
So I was half right.
Since then, I have been counting the number of cars that I can’t name. And there are bloody hundreds.
This is going to have repercussions because one of these days I am going to review a car, be it in Performance Car or even on Top Gear and I shall spend the entire time talking about the wrong model. Hell, maybe it’s already happened and the Vantage was in fact a Wartburg.
And even if I don’t and it wasn’t, how the hell am I going to find anything interesting to say about it. If car A looks exactly the same as car B and both have the same equipment levels, the same sized 16-valve engines and the same price, how can anyone form any kind of decent reason for buying one rather than the other?
The next time someone asks me whether the Nissan Primera or the Ford Mondeo is the better bet, I shall have to respond with a rather unhelpful ‘Haven’t a clue mate’.
If anyone asks me what the Nissan Sunny estate is like, I shall have to admit that I simply don’t have the faintest idea.
But here’s the deal. There is nothing we can do about it because cars are simply catching up with everything else in the world.
I’ve just bought a house which is exactly the same as the houses on either side of it and indeed as every other house I’ve ever been to in London. The estate agent described it as unusual because the bathroom roof slopes a bit. Wow.
Go to the City and see if you can find anyone whose haircut is anything other than sergeant-major neat or whose suit is anything other than suitish.
I was out last week in a sort of West End singles-bar type place called Caspars where every single man who wandered into the place had half a tub of what looked like lard in his hair. Every girl had had her clothes sprayed in place, but this, on reflection, wasn’t so bad.
And although I’m sure they’re all very good, I can’t tell the difference between any of the new generation of Hollywood stars. Who is Kiefer Sutherland and why is he any different to Emilio Estevez or Charlie Sheen?
Fridges all look the same. We all look the same. Everything is the same as everything else. So small wonder that car designers are responding by making our cars all look the same.
Tomorrow, I’m going to wear my Levis back to front. And I will paint my fridge green.
I Had That Geezer from Top Gear in the Back Once
Word is that Prince Charles will never be King. However, this has nothing to do with his marital difficulties, even though anyone who lets Princess Diana go is obviously barking mad.
Nor does it have a great deal to do with his predilection for talking to trees or his alleged obsession with tampons, or even the fact that Brenda might cling on to the crown jewels until he’s got a bus pass.
And then the cost and pomp of a coronation would be wasted, bearing in mind the little time he’d have before William could take over the orbs.
No, the reason Charles will never be King is this: the way things are going, there will be no such title. He may, however, become Emperor.
In this role, he could preside over a nation where it is an offence not to be yellow and Westminster Abbey sells raw fish to passers-by at weekends.
You may have noticed, over the years, that I am fiercely proud to be British and that I hope the Maastricht Bill ends up where it belongs: up Jacques Delors’s backside. But I am also a re
alist.
I know therefore what is coming. The Queen’s head will be lopped off the stamps, the pound will be replaced with an ECU, peanut butter will be renamed peanut sauce and sausages will be banned.
But this isn’t so bad. At least we understand the Europeans; we know, for instance, that the Germans have no sense of humour and that the Greeks are completely useless. We know also that the French are rude, the Italians are mad and the Dutch are a bunch of dope-smoking pornographers.
We can maintain our sense of English aloofness, obeying the letter of Maastricht but none of its spirit.
Far worse is the concept of Great Britain becoming Japan’s third island.
We should, I suppose, be deeply grateful that Japan’s car makers have chosen to invest their billions here – though we should never forget that Ford has nearly 30 per cent more tied up in the Land of Hope and Glory than Honda, Nissan and Toyota combined.
But I don’t understand the Japanese. I don’t know what makes them tick and cannot easily understand how they’ve been so successful in such a short period of time. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m scared shitless of them.
That’s why I want someone to call a halt. We have their hi-fi factories and their car plants and their shops on Lower Regent Street. We have courses for businessmen in how to speak Japanese and restaurants that serve fish that are still wobbling. This is enough, thanks.
But no, even the institutions are now under threat. According to a report in my local newspaper, The London Taxi Drivers’ Club, open to anyone called Reg, Sid or Archie, is asking the carriage office – its licensing department – if it can use Nissan Serenas instead of the black cab.
This is by far and away the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.
Chairman of the club, Jim Wells, is reported to have said that he wants to be in a position where he can buy a vehicle and, within a year, sell it on the market for the same sort of money. Hey, Jim, don’t we all mate.
He also says that a black cab costs up to £22,000 and that a Serena is £7,000 less than that. And finally, he points out that a Nissan people carrier is able to carry eight passengers.
Which it can’t.
Let’s look at that bit first. If Archie is behind the wheel, he doesn’t want anyone next to him so that front can, in fact, carry no passengers at all.
Behind, there is space for five but there is no way those in the very back can get out unless those in the middle make way. In a normal London cab, there is space for five and anyone can get in or out without anyone else having even to twitch.
Then there’s the turning circle. A London cab can do a U-turn whenever and wherever it wants. A Nissan Serena can also do a U-turn whenever and wherever it wants, providing it is in a field at the time.
And where does the luggage go in a Serena? In the driver’s mouth? And what about wheelchair access? And how would everyone else who buys a Serena feel about being flagged down every 30 seconds each time they come to London.
Now these are practical reasons why the Serena has about as much to do with taxi cabbery as a cauliflower.
But then there are emotive reasons too. In my experience, London is unique in offering specialist cabs. In Milan, for instance, a taxi can be anything from a Fiat Mirafiori to an Alfa 90, while in Geneva it is as likely as not to be an S-Class Benz. Just about the only clue you really have is the light on the top and the colour. In London, you can make a cab look like a newspaper (and they do) but you know immediately it’s a cab, even if you’ve never been here before.
Americans are constantly amazed by the way our cabbies know everything, and how they let you know they know everything by talking about everything all the time. Certainly, I don’t feel like I’ve had a good day unless a black cab has carved me up at least twice. I love the way you can flag them down, and how they absolutely will know where you want to go and how the rules say that if it’s in London, they MUST take you there.
This is a peculiarly English thing and that’s why no postcard of Westminster Bridge is complete without one big red bus and two cabs in it.
People come here from all over the world and when they get here they want to go in a black cab with a driver who knows, without being told, where their hotel is and how to get there. They would not find the concept of a ride in a Portuguese-built, Japanese-designed people carrier quite so ‘quaint’.
The first time I was driven in a black cab, I was an eight-year-old Yorkshire boy, and I got an erection with all the excitement. The first time I went in a Nissan, I was 24 and I was sick.
Part 2
Acceleration Times are a Bit Nonsensical
I spent half an hour in a computer shop this week and only when the salesman said ‘goodbye’ did I realise he hadn’t been talking to me in Norwegian.
I don’t know what DOS is. I don’t know how many megabytes this Mac has and even if I did, I wouldn’t know whether it was a lot, or not. They say I need more Vee Ram. Gosh.
There is nothing wrong with this of course. Every group of like-minded people always dreams up a new language so that lesser mortals can’t understand what they’re on about.
Police people can have an entire conversation and you wouldn’t recognise a single word. They call cars ‘vehicles’ and they never walk anywhere. They ‘proceed’. Doctors are as bad, solicitors are worse. And then there’s the world of film and television. I know what ‘Roll VT’ means and you don’t, so I am brighter and cleverer than you.
I also know that a car which can get from o to 60 in five seconds is fast. And that a car which takes 14.7 seconds is likely to be a Volkswagen.
You cannot be a car person unless you understand what 0 to 60 actually means. You need to be impressed when friends tell you that their new car does it in 6.9.
Basically, the metrestick was dreamed up in continental Europe where road testers measure the time it takes for a car to accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometres per hour, which near as dammit, is 0 to 60 miles per hour.
Similarly, we’ve always rejected the American habit of referring to the standing quarter, a stupid system which comes from their drag-racing scene. When someone says they have an eleven-second car, they mean that it gets from rest to a marker post a quarter of a mile away in eleven seconds which, incidentally, is pretty fast.
But it’s myth-exploding time again because judging a car on its ability to get from 0 to 60 is completely daft.
First of all, you have to be absolutely brutal with the clutch and the gearbox in order to get the best possible time. And no car can stand treatment like that for long – the mile straight at the Millbrook proving ground in Bedfordshire is littered with broken drive shafts and gearboxes and the air hangs heavy with the aroma of cooked clutch plates.
You see, what you do to get a car going quickly is build the revs up to, say, 4000 rpm and then you just move your left foot sideways off the clutch pedal. This means the full power of the engine is applied, very suddenly indeed, to the rest of the moving bits.
I once did six full-bore take-offs in an Aston Martin Vantage, whose undersides are tougher than the hinges of a seventeenth-century barn door. And on the seventh attempt, the diff exploded.
Now the Vantage has rear-wheel drive which is what you need for a fast start on grippy tarmac. Getting a powerful front-wheel-drive car off the line quickly is harder because if you drop the clutch pedal with too many revs, the wheels just spin. Too few and you’re not going to get the best time. Too many attempts and something will break.
But let’s just say you do manage to get rolling without a mechanical mishap; you are then faced with a gear change. And what you do here is simply wrench the lever from first to second without using the clutch.
Now come on, are you really going to do that sort of thing with your own car? Of course not, so you look in the back of a car magazine to find out… and it says your car does it in, say, 7.6.
Well, a few points spring to mind here. First of all you need to know whether the track was we
t or dry when the road tester tried it because dampness underfoot can add a second and a second in the world of 0 to 60 is a light year.
Second, there may have been a bit of floor mat behind the throttle pedal when the run was timed.
Third, how many gear changes were needed? Some cars can do 60 in second gear whereas others need another shift to get into third.
And finally, it doesn’t really matter whether your car does it in 7.2 or 7.7. Just look at the second hand of your watch and tell me that half a second is a long time.
Top speed is equally meaningless. I regularly test cars on the two-mile runway at Greenham Common and you wouldn’t believe how much difference a slight breeze can make.
In a Lotus Esprit, I coudn’t make it go faster than 120 mph when going from east to west but the other way round, it damn near went off the clock. So what is the car’s top speed? Haven’t a clue.
Quite apart from the wind, I’m fairly sure the runway isn’t completely level and anyway, I was relying on the speedometer which almost always lies. When my old Escort Cosworth said it was doing 140 mph, it was, in fact, travelling along at a mere 129 mph.
So, if the 0 to 60 time is meaningless and you can’t achieve your car’s potential without breaking something, and if the speedo can’t be trusted, and if a little wind can affect top speed so much, what measurement should we use?
I suggest four simple categories: terrifying, fast, average, and Volkswagen Diesel.
There are other advantages to this system too – non-car people will understand what we’re on about.
Adverts Versus the Truth
Clarkson on Cars Page 19