by James May
So far this has been a distinctly German thing, and I suppose it could be worse. It could be the British. Then the new Aston V8 would be fitted with a couple of spring-loaded horsewhips and you'd be scouring the cabin for a suitable piece of leather to bite on. Instead, it's the French who are now at it.
I've been driving the new Citroen C4 VTS, and I have to say there's quite a lot I like about it. It's a great-looking car, it has a sweet motor, it steers quickly and it's even reasonably quick. Obviously it's a bit sporty for my tastes but I imagine it would be ideal for the sort of people who regard trainers as shoes.
What I didn't like was the preponderance of buttons and knobs in the cabin. This sort of thing makes me nervous in a French car, since I've always believed the French to be poor at gadgetry and much better suited to pre-industrial activities such as cheese-making and erecting lavatories that don't flush.
You may remember, if you were watching Top Gear, that the C4 features a novel steering wheel on which the rim rotates but the middle remains stationary. As well it should, since I counted 17 buttons on it and even then I'm not sure I remembered to include the horn. If it went round and round as well you'd be in big trouble.
In fact I was so preoccupied with the steering wheel that I completely forgot about the C4's vibrating seat. Then I joined a motorway and the French got to work on my jacquesie.
This car is fitted with a device that senses the white lines of your motorway lane, and if you stray beyond them the seat performs a brief drum-roll on your bum. Not only that, but it's buttock-specific. Stray right and your right cheek gets a drubbing, stray left and so on. Unless you indicate, in which case the system reasons that you meant to change lane and leaves your derriere mercifully alone.
It sounds like a good idea, and in many ways it is. If you'd nodded off it would wake you up, certainly. For the lady motorist it may be a safer and more comfortable alternative to the vibrations that are apparently to be enjoyed on the pillion seat of any V-twin Italian motorcycle. Trouble is, I'm a chap and there are times when I don't actually need to signal to change lanes on a motorway, such as when I enter an empty contraflow in the middle of the night. Then it's a right pain in the butt.
I can't keep indicating for no obvious reason, or I'll end up looking like my mate Paul, who indicates even when he's turning out of a supermarket car-parking space. Or someone from the Institute of Advanced Motorists. Maybe you can turn the thing off using one of the buttons on the steering wheel, but at this point I was still trying to retune the radio.
I have to say I'm disappointed. I saw the genesis of this technology years ago on something called the Prometheus Project, a sort of non-competitive multi-manufacturer initiative to develop the driving aids of the future. This gave us sat-nav, intelligent cruise control, head-up displays, swivelling headlights and the lane-sensing system at the core of the Citroen's vibra-seat.
By my reckoning, all these things could be combined to allow me to join the motorway in London and then climb into the back for a kip until I arrive in Scotland. Instead, I've been given something to keep me awake. The motor industry has, as usual, aimed low, and humankind has been reduced to fiddling with each other's bottoms like the apes of the trees from which we have supposedly descended.
I think these people should stop arsing around and do something useful.
THE FUTURE OF IN-CAR ENTERTAINMENT
Some years ago I attended the launch of a new Daewoo MPV people-carrier type recreational vehicle, and realised immediately that I was at the dawn of a new era made dark by the lights of a perverted science.
Nothing to do with the Daewoo per se, since it was a perfectly conventional one-box family bus aimed at the sort of people who didn't see Marie Stopes for the true saint she was. At least, that's what I gleaned from the mutterings of my coevals. Couldn't say as much with any certainty myself, since I didn't actually drive it.
No – from the moment we arrived, it was quite clear that the new Daewoo was not aimed at the driving enthusiast, or indeed any sort of driver. It had been designed to keep your kids quiet on a journey, and to that end was equipped with video screens, DVD players, gaming consoles and individual headphone sockets, all of which were installed in the back. So that's where I spent the test drive, having recruited a journalist and photographer partnership from a rival publication to act as surrogate dad and dad up front.
And I hated it. I'm not a Luddite, but these X-boy things really do drive me up the wall, and if I were a parent I would worry that my children were going to grow up with hideously overdeveloped thumbs and atrophied fingers. I also can't quite see the pleasure in watching a film in the car, since it will almost certainly have been made in America and why would you want to look at that when England is just outside the window?
These days everyone is offering this stuff. You can have it as optional equipment on dozens of cars, and you can buy after-market sets that end up looking as though they were wired up by Italians. It's all very well, but I can't help thinking that this kind of thing will drive us further into the hideous embrace of the Dr Mengele of our times, i.e. Dixon's.
And so, as we creep inexorably towards what the AA always calls the Great British Bank Holiday Exodus, here are a few simple (and free) in-car games designed by me and my colleague Richard Hammond on long journeys. All are resolutely rooted in an era when we made our own entertainment.
That's your car (2 players)
Drive along normally. When you spot a really hideous car, either parked or in the next lane, shout, 'See that? That's your car!' before the other bloke does. At the end of the journey, the player with the worst car is the loser.
Take five (2 players)
The object of the game is to secure the best car from the next five that pass in the opposite direction on a quiet road. Selection cannot be revoked, and either player may go first. Player 1 may choose the first car to pass, in which case Player 2 must choose from the next four. There may be a better one, there may not. He has to have the fifth car if he has not chosen already. Player with the best car wins that round.
Longest finger in the world (any number)
This is ideal for Channel Tunnel crossings, ferries to the Isle of Wight or any other circumstance in which passengers are confined to a stationary car with a roof-mounted whip aerial. Remove the aerial and hand to player 1. Holding it by the threaded end, he must perform a pre-ordained facia task using the bendy opposite end, against the clock. Tasks can include retuning the radio or setting automatic climate control to a particular temperature and stratification. Fastest time wins. Note that the radio retuning on auto seek may be compromised by the missing aerial.
In-car air-vent virtual fountain (any number)
Another one for a stationary moment, or even for children in the back. Take an irrelevant page from the owner's handbook – say the one about the dangers of eating any part of the battery – and tear it into thin strips, three per player. Find a role of sticky tape. The object of the game is to secure your three strips to your personal air vent and adjust the airflow and angle such that the paper strips form a perfect Prince-Of-Wales feathers display. Best one wins.
Dashboard spot-the-difference (2 players)
Player 1 studies the dashboard and centre console for 15 seconds, noting the position of all knobs and switches and the reading on any displays. He then looks away while Player 2 alters one thing. On a given signal Player 1 then has another 15 seconds to spot the difference. Things that may be changed include settings for heater controls, the time, the radio display, the position of column stalks and so on. On old Range Rovers some knobs can be removed altogether. This may happen anyway.
My, how the long miles fly past!
THE TECHNICAL REVOLUTION IN THE TOYSHOP
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the motor industry is at the molten core of that white heat of technology thing we've heard so much about. But I'm not so sure.
A cursory investigation into the progress of the car reveals that
it has actually been a pretty cautious and conservative affair. There have been a few highlights, such as the Mini and the Citroen DS, but none of the quantum leaps we've seen in aviation. And so much of what we considered new developments in the car – supercharging, turbocharging, fuel injection, variable valve-timing, anti-lock brakes, composite materials, sat-nav, fuel cells – were handed down from above.
Now it turns out that the situation is worse than I thought. I recently worked on a BBC programme about my favourite childhood toys, and it transpired that much of what the motor industry has touted as new ideas over the last decade could be revealed as old hat after a quick rummage around the attic.
Take the business of platform sharing. If this has ever confused you, I should explain that a car's 'platform' is essentially the floor of its bodyshell, plus perhaps a bulkhead or two. The platform is responsible for much of a car's structural integrity and crash-worthiness, and therefore its design consumes a disproportionate amount of the total engineering effort. Sharing them between several models makes obvious sense.
Students of fashion and advocates of greater choice will say this is a good thing, since it spawns a greater variety of cars. The Audi TT, for example, is essentially a Golf underneath, and would probably have died on the drawing board but for this simple manufacturing expediency. The outgoing Alfa Spider was based on the Fiat Tipo, and the previous generation Porsches Box-ster and 911 were more closely related than you might think.
Meanwhile, connoisseurs of the car say it's a bad thing, because all these so-called 'niche models' are hamstrung by the dynamic attributes inherent in the common platform. Both groups have a point, but neither should imagine this is anything new.
If you have a Tri-ang Flying Scotsman kicking around the house (it was their best seller, so you may well do) you already own an exemplar of platform sharing; by which I mean the platform on which the engine is built, not the one at which it stands. At the advent of Tri-ang Railways in the early '50s, the model railway was already a very old idea, but model railways were either very crude or very expensive. Tri-ang's genius was in producing something convincing and accessible, and they did this by reducing the number of rolling stock 'platforms' they needed. With a relatively small handful of locomotive chassis, electric motors, coach bogies and wagon frames they produced the biggest range the world has seen. It was all affordable, too. Closer to home, Scalextric was up to something similar. And VW thinks it's been clever in using that Golf platform for a handful of Skodas.
'Modularity' is something else that the motor industry has been very smug about, especially in relation to engine designs in which one cylinder 'unit' can be multiplied to form a variety of configurations. But what is Lego if not unutterably modular? Architects love the stuff: it can be used like real bricks to build miniature houses, large bricks can be used to replicate the sub-assemblies of pre-fabs, and individual bricks can even represent whole buildings in models of entire towns. This stuff has been around since the '40s.
Interchangeability of parts? It sounds impressive but Meccano showed the way over 100 years ago. Indeed, its creator Frank Hornby (later of trains fame) was inspired by the apparent standardisation of components used in the day-to-day machinery of late Victorian Britain – cranes and so forth. Any two parts from any two Meccano sets in history are completely compatible, even the nuts and bolts. Will Mercedes-Benz be saying that in 2105?
Remember all that fuss about the Japanese technique of poke yoke? It's a system of foolproofing, of designing components such that they will only go together in the correct way. Build the Airfix l/72nd-scale Heinkel 111 and you will understand it perfectly. The locating pins on the two engines are positioned in such a way that you simply cannot build them the wrong way around. That kit came out in 1962, by the way.
I said in my programme that the story of toys is the story of everything: of society, of the economy, and most importantly of new manufacturing techniques. Closing the lid on my virtual toybox and returning to my normal day job, I find myself somewhat disillusioned.
I think it's high time the car industry stopped playing around and gave us something really new.
THE BEST DRIVING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER
Of all the senses, smell has the greatest power to evoke. It is impossible to remember a smell and you cannot imagine a new one, so there are no smells in the future. That means a particular scent, such as a perfume that once wafted from the dove-like neck of a loved one, has the power to come crashing through our ordered lives like a lager lout at an elegant cocktail party.
Next to smell comes sound, particularly music and especially pop music. Even now, somebody, somewhere, engaged in something menial such as washing up, and with the radio on in the background, has been transfixed because the distant and obfuscated memory of some personal reckoning has just been thrown into crystal-clear relief by the Electric Light Orchestra's 'Mr Blue Sky'.
I mention all this because for the new series of Top Gear we've devised a survey to find the nation's favourite driving song. The people send in their suggestions, we whittle them down to a shortlist and then you vote for the overall winner. Usual sort of thing – we got the idea from some other programme about houses or famous inventors.
Since we intend to arrive, once and for all, at the best driving song of all time, this is worthy of some thought. We would urge you, for example, not simply to think of a song with 'car' in the title (e.g. 'Driving in My Car' by Madness), or to nominate the Sweet's 'Blockbuster' because it has a police siren at the beginning, or the Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women' because there's a car horn in it that still takes you by surprise. Essentially, the competition is open to any song, so something by Black-Eyed Peas is up there against the Elizabethan lute song 'Fair, If You Expect Admiring' by Thomas Campion.
But we all know that this is really about pop – old pop, which was at first ephemeral, being of a time and for that time, but later has the power to mug you simply because it has lain outside the sphere of your existence for so long, having been borne away and dispersed on the very ripple that made it meaningful.
To placate the pedants, I should say that by 'pop' I mean anything that might once have been played on Radio 1 or your local station, and which is now heard on Radio 2. The radio is where pop belongs.
Contrary to the beliefs of my Top Gear colleagues, my music collection does extend beyond 1750 and does include quite a bit of pop. Some of it is even on CD. Curiously, they have almost all been bought on or for car journeys, because your standards are different in the car: what you listen to, what you eat, whether or not you shove your finger up your nose. I would never listen to AC/DC's 'Let There Be Rock' at home, but the other day I bought it for the car, thinking it might usher in some forgotten moment from the memory of a memory that is my teenage years.
But of course, it didn't work, because I knew what was going to happen. It may have made me drive a bit more vigorously, but then, so does The Archers.
Compare this with an experience I once had in Detroit, driving around in the evening in a Cadillac I'd borrowed. The radio was tuned to the local pop station and chuntering away in the background, when suddenly I heard, and immediately turned up, Wang Chung's 'Dance Hall Days'. I had lived constantly with this song for a few months when I was 16, but then it had disappeared. Here it was again, completely unexpected, and the benign ghosts of my own dance hall days filled a car thousands of miles from home and over two decades removed from the original events. The effect was so electrifying that I turned on to an empty freeway and just cruised, not caring where I was, until it was over.
That night a DJ didn't save my life, but he did remaster a crackly old part of it so that I could enjoy it again.
That's why pop is best on the radio, and why pop on the radio is best in the car. The car is like a giant personal stereo, but one over which you should never have control. Instead, it's left to someone in a dark, stuffy booth somewhere to press the buttons that reprise snippets of your life that you would never h
ave been able to recall so clearly without the right soundtrack.
Please vote in our greatest driving song survey. Just write your suggestion on a postcard and send it in, no explanation necessary. I'm thinking about it even now, and I have a feeling that my best driving song will be something I haven't heard for 20 years.
HOW TO DEAL WITH VAN DRIVERS
I'd like to do my bit to promote the spirit of goodwill this Christmas by proposing a new solution to the age-old problem of road rage.
I have to say that one part of me doesn't actually believe in road rage. Recently, I narrated a BBC series on this very subject, and it struck me that no one involved actually suffered from road rage at all. Judging by the testimonies of their wives, children and friends, they simply had rage. They raged at home as well, and probably in pubs and shops too. They were just angry people who were especially unhappy about having to work as a sales rep or drive a diesel.
On the other hand, there are some unbelievably rude bastards out there. I've met several of them recently; not people who drive carelessly, but people who are hellbent on starting a fight for no earthly reason. What to do? One school of thought – and one I would normally subscribe to – says you should smile, wave and drive on. Then again, this is running away, and though a perfectly acceptable tactic when you're nine and you've been caught scrumping apples, it's a bit spineless when you're a grown man with principles and some bloke has just tried to kill you with his van.
I suppose that in this age of justice, no-win-no-fee legal aid and the European Court of Human Rights, the civilised thing to do would be to assemble witnesses, take action and seek recompense through the law. But this would be messy, time-consuming and a burden on a legal system that has more important things to deal with. It would probably also involve some paperwork, which is the work of Satan.