But then I took it for a drive, and now I am speechless. Without a doubt it’s the best, most complete car I’ve ever encountered. Whether you’re in the back, slithering around W1, or in the front, doing a ton on the A66, it is utterly magnificent. Take the seats, for example. Naturally they move about electrically, and of course they’re heated. But they also have little fans buried deep in the upholstery which cool your buttocks on a hot day. And they pulsate. As you drive along, little pockets of air move about in the fabric, kneading your weary back. This means you can get all the way from London to Bassetlaw without having to stop off in Northampton for a bath. So it’s pretty comfortable, and that’s before we get to the air suspension. You don’t drive this car; you float around in it.
Which brings me on to the handling. You’re probably expecting to hear that it’s a bit of a liner, but it attacks corners with the agility of a small speedboat. If the Titanic had been built like this she would have missed the iceberg.
I’d love to tell you what happens in extremis, but way before the passengers are treated to anything so dramatic as tyre squeal, all sorts of electronic whiz-kiddery intervenes to slow you down. Good thing, too, because I was still playing with my seat, and the cruise control, and the satellite navigation, and the television, and the phone, and the trip computer, and the Tiptronic gearbox and all the other features you find listed in the three-inch-thick handbook. They even fit voice activation for various controls, and to make sure the computer is not baffled by accents Mercedes tested it on 180 people from every region of Britain. I’m told it even understands Geordie.
And then there’s the keyless ignition. You simply keep what looks like a credit card in your wallet, and as you approach the car the door-locks silently slide upwards. Then, to start the engine, you press a button on the gear lever.
But what sort of engine should you choose? The 280 and 320 have six cylinders, a bit mean in a car of this size, and while the 5 litre V8 and 6 litre V12 may be sublime, they are also ridiculous. I’d go for the 4.3 litre V8. It comes with three valves per cylinder, offers 280bhp, gets you in complete silence to 140mph, and in my hands returned a remarkable 22 miles to the gallon.
And here’s the clincher. There are 145 motors in the S-class – only one of which is the engine – and you are left in no doubt that for year after year none will break down. Not until the car has been sold 16 times and is finishing its days cruising the Melton Road in Leicester will there be any form of malfunction, and even then it’ll probably amount to nothing more than loose stitching on the upholstery.
I do wish it still had the presence of the old model, but these are leaner, cleaner times, and anyway the weight loss is translated into a price loss. At £57,000, the new S430 is £3000 less than the old, which means you get unbeatable value from what is quite simply an unbeatable car.
One car the god of design wants to forget
Sometimes I send this column in to the newspaper knowing full well that it’s not very good. I set out to make something as smooth as the Queen’s lawn, but somehow I end up with northern Cornwall, all craggy and inaccessible. I go over it again and again, but all this does is create half a dozen meaningless oxbow lakes and a millstone grit outcrop. And before I have a chance to straighten things out, the deadline passes and I have to send it in anyway.
But let’s be honest: everyone can look back over his work and know which bits are best forgotten. Even God, I suppose. With the south of France, he can say: ‘I did OK there. I like the way you can ski down to the beaches and all the women have no tops on.’ But we must never let him forget Australia, a vast and useless desert full of spiders that’ll kill you and men in shorts. Or Florida.
Happily, though, life moves on and mistakes are buried in the mists of time. For God, earth is a distant memory as he busies himself with the planet Zarg. And me? Well, I’m writing this, and that rubbish I did last month about electric gates is at the bottom of your hamster cage. Even people who create something lasting are safe. The architects who did those tower blocks in the 1960s don’t have to live in them. And an artist doesn’t hang his most idiotic work above the fireplace.
However, when you’re a car designer there’s nowhere to hide. When you make a mistake with a car, it’s going to come back and haunt you. Every single day it’ll lunge out of a side turning and you’ll be forced to say to your passenger: ‘I did that.’ So let’s spare a thought for Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose company, ItalDesign, is celebrating 30 years as the car industry’s most prolific design house. Remember the Maserati Bora? Well, that was one of his, and so was its six-cylinder sister, the Merak. Then there was the Lotus Esprit and the BMW M1. It may have had a German engine, and its plastic body may have been made by Lamborghini, but the styling: that came from Giugiaro. As did the DeLorean and more recently the Maserati 3200GT.
However, don’t think his talent lies solely in the high-horsepower world of the supercar. He also did the 1970s Alfa Romeo GTV, the Subaru SVX, the Lexus GS300 and the Saab 9000.
I’ve just finished a book that lists his creations and it’s incredible: the original Golf, the Scirocco, the Isuzu Piazza, the Renault 21, the Daewoo Matiz and, best of all, the Alfasud. All his. And the Ford Escort Cabrio. And the Lancia Delta. And the Fiat Panda. Been on a bus while you were in Italy? If it was an Iveco there’s a strong chance Ital styled it. He does vans, trucks, tractors – even pasta.
I met him once and decided, quite quickly, that I’d like to punch him in the face. He was punctual, polite, and though it was over 100 degrees up there on the roof of Fiat’s Lingotto building he never broke into a sweat. His clothes were immaculate, and he was ridiculously handsome, despite some magnificently daft graduated sunglasses. We talked about our sons, how mine has a habit of mincing round the house with a pink handbag and how his has just designed a 12-cylinder roadster for Volkswagen.
He’s funny, too. When Triumph launched its TR7 at the Geneva Motor Show, Giugiaro stared for some time at the profile, walked round the car, and said: ‘Oh, no. They’ve done the same thing on this side as well.’
I just knew that I was dealing with a man who’d slept with more women than me, but despite everything I felt sorry for him. You see, his path to righteousness does contain one particularly large and virulent mistake. Flick through the book that celebrates his work and it’s there: a small picture tucked away on page 46 – a verruca on the foot of greatness. I’m talking, of course, about the 1974 Hyundai Pony, which is almost certainly the ugliest car of all time.
Quite how this happened I have no idea. Maybe the design was inadvertently torn up by an overzealous cleaning lady and she glued it back together all wrong. Or perhaps the clay model was damaged en route to Seoul, and the people over there were too full of spaniel to notice. Either way, Giugiaro has to get up every morning and have breakfast knowing that on his way to work he might pull up at the lights alongside the result of his darkest hour. And as he peers inside, the occupants will peer back, their faces saying it all. ‘You bastard. Why?’
Then, when he dies and gets to the pearly gates, there’s a chance that all the receptionist angels have Ponys as company cars. And it doesn’t matter how much he stands there saying he did the Bora and the Esprit, they’re still going to put him, for all eternity, in a room next to the lift shaft.
Can a people carrier be a real car? Can it hell
This morning, pretty well everything went wrong. The electric gates broke again, trapping the postman in our garden – a garden that was being systematically eaten by some cows that had escaped from the paddock. The baby was screaming, the three-year-old had put an entire loo roll in the lavatory, the four-year-old was refusing to eat her cereal and the nanny was in Canada skiing.
Me? Well, I was lying in bed thinking that, all things considered, I was pretty damned glad to be a man. I suppose I wouldn’t mind being a single girl, because I could tour the country, sleeping with all my friends. And there’s more. Your stomach is flat and your teeth are shiny. But
all this has to stop when you’ve calved a couple of times. I don’t care what it says in Cosmopolitan; you can’t be expected to have a job, clear up sick and, when the kids are in bed, come downstairs looking like Caprice.
I ran into an old girlfriend the other day after 20 years, and though she was still pretty enough to turn heads in the airport terminal she had the harried look of a woman who’d been up since six herding cows. It was as though someone had stencilled ‘mother’ on her forehead.
And this, I think, is a fitting metaphor for that automotive Alice band, the people carrier. No matter how many times motor manufacturers tell us that their new breeder wagon has ‘car-like dynamics’, we know they’re talking rubbish. A people carrier may be built on the same platform as a car, but it is still desperately and unswervingly mumsy.
But that said, Peugeot is different. Tell Peugeot to design a small hatchback and they’ll give you a sports car. Tell them you want a sensible family saloon and they’ll give you a sports car. Explain that you’re fat and that you want a slushmatic machine for getting to the golf club and they’ll give you a sports car. Someone deep in the bowels of Peugeot’s chassis department understands what the enthusiastic driver wants: razor-sharp turn-in lift-off oversteer, seat-of-the-pants message delivery, and a ride-handling balance that’s just so.
Peugeot engines are nothing much to write home about, and they cannot compete with Toyota’s on the important question of reliability. But when you stick your Peugeot into a corner and feel that passive rear-wheel steering kicking in, you’ll forgive it anything. So, truth be told, I was expecting big things from the Peugeot 806 people carrier. I was expecting a bit of a Yasmin Le Bon, a car that manages to be mumsy and phwoar all at the same time.
To behold, the 806 may be identical to the Fiat Ulysse and the Citroën Synergie, but I knew that with a wave of his magic wand Peugeot’s brown-coated Mr Suspension would have turned Wendy Craig into Mimi MacPherson. So I ignored the curious – some might say ugly – styling and climbed aboard. And then I ignored the cheapness of the trim, telling myself that this was the ordinary £18,000 2.0 litre CLX, not some motoring journalist special.
I had no sunroof, no air-conditioning, no leather trim and no CD player, but I wasn’t bothered because you don’t expect this from Peugeot. It may be a van, I thought, but it’ll go like Van Halen.
And it didn’t. It went like Van Morrison. I tried, really I tried, to push it hard, but driving the 806 quickly felt all wrong, and now I know we’ll never have a sporty people carrier. If Peugeot can’t do it, nobody can.
So what’s it like, then, as a device for moving large families around? Well, it’s got the usual array of flexible seating, the usual small boot, the usual oddment tray under the passenger seat and the usual woeful performance: 0 to 60 takes 13.7 secondzzzz. It’s so inoffensive that given half the chance it would drive down the middle of the road. And this way you could test the usual airbags.
As you may have gathered, the 806 failed to light my fire, but, again, this is nothing unusual. People carriers just don’t cover themselves in margarine and rumble around in my underpants. Making me choose the best is like making me choose which limb I’d most like to have amputated.
I can, however, tell you which ones to avoid. The diesel-powered Nissan Serena is a no-no because with a 0 to 60 time of 28 seconds it is officially the slowest car on sale in Britain today. Then there’s the Chrysler Voyager, which is ghastly, and the Ford Galaxy, which is unreliable.
The trouble is, though, that you still have a list of possibles that stretches from here to the seventh seat way over there in the offside corner. I’m tempted to be obtuse and suggest you have a look at the Mercedes V-class because it’s the biggest, but then the Seat Alhambra is just about the cheapest and comes as standard with air-conditioning. Or better still, avoid the need for such a car in the first place.
Might I suggest the rhythm method?
Hell is the overtaking lane in a 1 litre
Have you ever driven down the motorway at the speed limit? No? Well, don’t, because it’s not big, it’s not clever and nor, surprisingly, is it desperately safe.
You may have seen me trundling down the M40 at 69mph with a bus fastened to my rear bumper and a face the colour of parchment. And I’m sure you wondered what on earth I was doing. Well, I’ll tell you.
Since Gordon Brown decided to knock £55 off a tax disc if you buy a 1-litre car, I thought it might be a good idea to try one out, to see if an engine this small can actually be used to propel a car. I would expect to find a 1-litre engine in a cappuccino machine. I believe my hedge clippers have a 1-litre engine, and that seems about right. For pulling the leaves off a bush, 1 litre is sufficient, but for moving around I’d always assumed you needed 4 litres, preferably with some kind of forced induction.
Needless to say, there aren’t that many 1-litre cars on the market. If you discount the ridiculous selection from our dog-eating friends in Korea and the stupid Wendy houses from Japan, there are, in fact, six. And the best is Toyota’s Yaris. This does 50mpg and comes with a 3-year mechanical warranty, a 12-year guarantee against rust and whopping 20,000-mile service intervals. Prices start at £7500, but if you go for an £11,000 CDX you get air-conditioning, two airbags, a sunroof, a CD player and, if you want, satellite navigation and a clutchless gear change.
It’s a handsome little car, too, which causes girls to go oooh and aaah as though you’d just driven past in a baby seal. Blokes like it, too, because it has alloy wheels and a badge saying VVTi. Which sounds aggressive. But it isn’t. Sure, the engine, which is Welsh, comes with variable valve timing, but there’s no getting round the fact it displaces just 1 litre.
Now, the quoted top speed is 96mph, so theoretically it could keep up with the traffic in the outside lane of a motorway in the same way that Stephen Hawking, theoretically, could sing La Traviata. But at outside-lane cruising speeds the Yaris is loud. You can forget about conversation and the fancy stereo, because all you can hear is a wall of white noise. Couple this to a digital dashboard that acts like a strobe and you have a mobile torture chamber.
After a mile I was ready to admit that I’m useless in bed and that Jeffrey Archer ghostwrites this column every week. After two miles you’d have learnt that I fancy Esther Rantzen. And after three miles, begging for mercy, I slowed down to 69 and sought sanctuary on the inside lane. I’d never been there before, and frankly I never want to go there again. You end up sandwiched between two trucks, and in a Yaris, with its miserable engine, you don’t really have the power to build up enough speed for an overtaking manoeuvre.
I tried it once, lunging into the middle lane, and immediately my entire rear-view mirror was filled with the front of a massive, snorting coach. And what are you supposed to do then? You can’t get back on the inside lane because you’re overtaking a lorry. You can’t slow down or the bus will come through your rear window, and because you only have a 1-litre engine you can’t go any faster either. Still, you’ll be saving a pound a week on your road tax, so I guess that makes it all worthwhile.
At this point I don’t doubt that people who live in London are running around the room waving their arms and telling everyone who’ll listen that the Yaris sounds just perfect for inner-city life. To which I say: Pah. If you only want to move around London, why have wheels at all? Ten grand puts a taxi outside your door 24 hours a day. The whole point of having a car is that it can get you away at weekends, and the Yaris can’t. It’s terrifying on the motorway, and on normal fast A-roads it’s even worse.
You come up behind a tanker and a quick glance shows that the road ahead is clear for 2000 miles. So you drop down to third, bury your foot in the carpet and pull out to overtake. One hour later you’re alongside the tanker’s rear axle and there’s a queue of cars behind, their drivers wondering why you’re on the wrong side of the road, making no attempt to overtake. But you are. You’ve even gone down to second, but with the engine revving its head off and blood spurt
ing out of your ears, you’re still not making any progress. And now there’s a car coming the other way, so with much apologizing to those behind you give up, back off and get behind the lorry again.
In my week with the Yaris I arrived everywhere 20 minutes late, bathed in sweat. It could be a really good car this, brilliant even, but it desperately needs a bigger engine.
And a better name. Yaris sounds like Paula Yates’s dog.
Forty motors and buttock fans
Last weekend, Andy Wilman, that human carpet you sometimes see on Top Gear, asked if he could borrow the keys to a Mercedes S-class I had on loan.
No surprises there. People who come to stay are always asking if they can try out whatever cars are parked in the drive. And the S-class is big news. Some say it’s the best car in the world. Some say it’s even better than that, so Andy wanted to get out there to see if the reality lives up to the legend.
Strange, then, that after just a few minutes he was back inside the house having not driven the car at all.
‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘Because there’s no need,’ he said.
And he might be right. When you’re presented with a new Mercedes S-class, you sort of know it’s going to be utterly silent and effortlessly fast. You can be assured there will be no twist in the tale or, thanks to the traction control, the tail. So, really, what’s the point of actually driving the damned thing?
What you want, frankly, is to be amazed by the toys – and, believe me, the S-class amazes, and then some.
I mean, the seats come with a grand total of 40 motors apiece and small fans that cool or heat your buttocks as you move along. And it gets better, because as you adjust the temperature a small bank of blue and red lights illuminate. That’s great. You don’t have to sit there thinking: ‘Is my arse hot or is it cold?’ A simple glance will tell you.
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