So come coffee time, which do you settle down to flick through? The FT? Or the Sun? And which car would I rather take home tonight – the M5 or the Jag? Absolutely no contest.
Shopping for a car? Just ask Rod Stewart
Time. For centuries, mankind’s greatest minds have tried and failed to explain its secrets but, so far, only Rod Stewart has come close. ‘Like a fistful of sand, it slips right through your hand,’ he once sang.
Pink Floyd reckoned that each time the sun comes up you’re shorter of breath and one day closer to death. But for those unschooled in the ways of 1970s rock, it remains a mystery with no tangible beginning and no foreseeable end. All we know is that, despite its abundance, there’s never enough around when you want some.
If you live to be 70, you have just 600,000 hours to play with, and that isn’t enough, I’m afraid, to mess about on mainland Europe trying to buy a cheap new car. I’m sorry, but the only way you can save money on a car is by wasting time. And time is the most precious commodity you’ll ever have.
The experts say that ‘all’ you have to do is phone round a few dealers in, say, Holland, getting quotes. Then you ‘simply’ wire them some money and, six weeks later, fly over to pick up your shiny new right-hand-drive car. Never mind that it will have had its stereo stolen; you bring it back to Britain, contact the VAT man, fill in some forms, pay Customs whatever they want, go to the post office, write to Swansea, fill out some more forms, buy some registration plates and – hey presto! – job done.
Well, most of us haven’t got time to clean our teeth properly, leave alone take two weeks off work to save £4.50 on a poxy Rover 216.
I’m forever watching programmes on the television where men with improbable hair busy themselves with money-saving tips. Don’t call in a plumber for that burst pipe; ‘pop’ over to your local DIY store and buy a welding torch. Then ‘simply’ dig up your drive using a pile-driver, repair the pipe, encase your handiwork in concrete and you’re back in business.
I read a report in the newspaper last month which said that men spend only 15 minutes a day playing with their kids. Well, of course we do. It’s because we’re all in the shed building DIY microwave ovens to save money.
Now, look. The clock is ticking. You’ve only got 300,000 hours left and you’ll spend 100,000 of those asleep, and another 25,000 watching period dramas on TV. Then there are the queues caused by Mr Prescott’s bus lane and, whoopsadaisy, your arterial route map has just exploded. Tilt. Game over.
I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not certain you can save money by buying abroad. This is because, when we want a new car, we usually decide how much to spend, rather than what model we want. Who cares that you can buy a Rover for £10,000 in Copenhagen? You don’t want a Rover, and you don’t want to spend even a tiny fraction of your short life in Denmark.
Say you have a £12,000 budget and, wisely, you decide to buy a Ford Focus. But then you hear that such a car is available in The Hague for £8000. So are you going to buy the Ford and save four grand? Or are you going to go over there and get something a little more tasty? An Alfa 156, perhaps, or a swanky, posh Lexus IS200.
Or – and this is what 92 per cent of new car buyers actually do – are you going to read about the great deals over there, then buy your car in Britain because you’ve got better things to do with your day than haggle with a dope-smoking pornographer in a bad jacket?
Well, don’t worry, because help is at hand from Kia, a Korean car company that has just announced that it will slash its prices to bring them more in line with the EU norm.
Of course, buying a Kia in Britain has its drawbacks – you end up with a Kia for a kickoff, but, hey, there are worse things in life. Certainly, you should avoid the Pride, which will endow you with none, and I’m not sure the four-wheel-drive Sportage is terribly good either. The new four-door Shuma I can see would work well on the cab rank at Nairobi Airport, but here in Britain it belongs on Call My Bluff with Alan Coren trying to convince his opponents that a Kia Shuma is a sort of kebab.
Kia has never managed to get its names right – a trend that goes back to its first vehicle, the Bongo. But the prices are low, so I’ve had a good look through the range to find the least nasty and have chanced upon something called the Clarus 1.8LX. It’s a four-door saloon that comes with air-conditioning, seats and a big, ugly radiator grille.
Now sure, when you park it on the driveway your neighbours will come round for a good laugh, but you’ll be able to wipe the smile off their faces when you explain that it cost just £10,995 and that you bought it in England. Then you’ll be able to go inside, slam the door and spend some quality time arguing with your children about Doris Troy.
Gruesome revenge of the beast I tried to kill
The Chrysler Voyager is like that creature from Hallowe’en. You can stab it, shoot it, throw it out of the bedroom window and six months later it’ll be back in the sequel – School Gates II.
You were told in 1997 that Mr Blair and the wide-mouthed frog were using one to ferry their children to and from school. And even though you know the man is a war criminal, you still went ahead and bought one.
In 1998 you were told that it came stone-dead last in a survey to find Britain’s most environmentally friendly cars. And in early 1999, in this very column, I announced that the Vauxhall Vectra had lost its crown. ‘The worst car you can buy now,’ I wrote, ‘is the Chrysler Voyager.’ I hated it.
But still the queue to buy one stretched out of the dealership, round the corner and halfway up the inner ring road past Asda.
Last week, though, I really thought its time had come. In official crash tests, part-sponsored by the government, it was described as ‘appalling’. In a frontal impact at 40mph, the steering column was forced up into a driver’s head and the footwell split open. It scored zero.
Surely, I thought, this would be it, the end of the road. No more rearing up out of the bath to stab Michael Douglas. It would be dead. Finished. Roll credits; not that it has ever earned any.
But no. An owner told me yesterday that he wouldn’t be getting rid of it because it was only the driver who’d be killed, not the kids in the back.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such collective lunacy. You know it will kill you, your family and the planet. You know that it’s uncomfortable and ungainly. You know it’s the choice of Mr Blair, and still it is the second best-selling people carrier.
Of course, those with four children will say there is no alternative, that no people carrier is desperately safe, except the Toyota Picnic, and there’s no way you will drive around in something called a Picnic. Quite right, too.
Well, I’ve just bought an eight-seater that could run into a house at 40mph and everyone inside would look up quizzically and say: ‘Did anyone feel a bump just then?’ It is a Toyota Landcruiser, and it is so vast that, if our dog were to die in the back, it would be three months before the smell reached our noses in the front. I saw some footage the other day of what happens when a big off-roader hits a normal car, and it was incredible. It just rides up the ordinary car’s bonnet, ripping the roof clean off and severing the heads of anyone inside.
The commentator was trying to tell us we should all buy Golfs as a result. But me? I was jumping up and down on the sofa shouting: ‘I have got to get me one of those.’ I wanted the biggest off-roader that money could buy. You can keep your Land Rover Uzis and your Shogun AK47s. It’s a war zone out there and I wanted the Toyota Howitzer.
New, a Landcruiser costs £44,000, but I got round that by buying a P-registered model with 30,000 miles on the clock. It cost £22,000 and, no, I didn’t spend extra on a warranty. As it was designed to go from Adelaide to Darwin, it should be able to manage the school run without exploding in a maelstrom of cogs and wire.
So, short of buying a tank we now have the safest, most reliable car in which to move our children around. Which makes me all warm and gooey and new-mannish. I may even bake a cake this afternoon and do the hooveri
ng.
But there are drawbacks, chief among which is the sheer cost of keeping it going. The school is 18 miles away, which equates to 72 miles a day, and that adds up to £150 a week in petrol. I worked out yesterday that if I drive one mile into town for papers, it costs 50p for the papers, 60p for the fuel and £400 for the remedial dental work.
I’m sure you need hard suspension for trips across the Nullarbor Plain, but it doesn’t half get wearing on the A44. The Landcruiser’s like a suit that’s been lined with sandpaper. With its air-conditioning and leather seats, it’s outwardly smooth, but the slightest bump and you’ll be needing a Band Aid.
It is so uncomfortable and thirsty, in fact, that I tend to avoid driving it, and, to make matters worse, so does my wife, who says it’s a big, ugly grey box and refuses to go anywhere near it. Last week she hammered the point home by taking our four-year-old to school in her BMW Z1 that offers all the protection of a Kleenex. It doesn’t even have proper doors, for crying out loud. And yesterday, when a near neighbour called round and offered to do the school run on our behalf, we agreed with the sort of vigour that dogs display when you offer them a quick snack.
And guess what she was driving? Yup, a Chrysler Voyager.
Out of control on the political motorway
At the British Grand Prix last Sunday, 150 helicopters ferried 11,000 photocopier salesmen into the circuit, making Silverstone, officially and for one day only, the busiest airport in the world. But after the race finished, there was a lengthy and unexpected pause in the incessant takeoffs and landings. I sat in our Twin Squirrel listening over the headset intercom to our pilot endlessly telling the tower that ‘Brown Pants One’ was loaded with passengers and ready to go.
But the clearance just wouldn’t come because away to our left, in the takeoff zone, a chopper was straining at its leash, swivelling this way and that as its pilot turned to the wind for help. The engines were screaming and the blades seemed set to break free from their mountings, but it was obviously too heavy to get out of everyone’s way. Because there in the back was Jabba the Hutt himself. Man of the People 1999: his fatness, John ‘Chopper’ Prescott.
Yes, having messed up the roads with his traffic-calming flowerpots and bus lanes, Taffy Two-Jags was now doing his level best to screw up the airways as well.
Of course, he may well have been supported in this quest by the vast hordes of ordinary grand prix fans who faced a four-hour wait to get out of the car parks. But as he’d gone on television before the race to say he was secretly hoping the event would be won by someone called Damien, I rather doubt it.
Most people at Silverstone, I suspect, would quite like to see Chopper replaced by the sinister Mr Spock, who this week outlined the Conservative Party’s proposals for getting Britain moving again.
They may have taken the greyness out of the leader, but now they want to put it back – on the M4. And that’s good enough for me. I don’t care that William Hague seems to be growing cress on his head; I’d vote for anyone who promised to tear up that stupid pinko bus lane.
They also say they will freeze petrol prices, abandon plans for a workplace parking tax and ban local authorities from building scaled-up models of K2 on every suburban back street.
It’s all good news, but there are no proposals to paint speed cameras yellow and relocate them outside schools, where speeding matters, rather than hiding them in bushes in the middle of nowhere. And this motorway business is absurd. They want a minimum speed limit of 50mph, which is unenforceable because everyone will claim the traffic was heavy, and a maximum of 80, which means everyone will do 95. And that’s way too fast. Quite apart from the speed differential between caravans, which will be exempt from the minimum restriction, and the faster traffic, there will be no time to react when a pensioner drives the wrong way down your carriageway.
There would be carnage, and we’d face the horrifying spectre of Chopper boarding his Huey and riding back to power to the strains of Jim Morrison singing ‘The End’. Which it would be.
He’d want to replace cat’s-eyes with tubs of luminous flowers, put petrol up to £7 a gallon and use Apache gun-ships to police the bus lanes on Silverstone’s Hangar Straight. And where would that leave the new BMW Z8?
I know I say that everything is the best-looking car in the world, but this new two-seater convertible really is. Honestly, I mean it this time.
It’s part Austin Healey, part 507, and all man, with its chromed door mirrors, its aggressive air intakes in the front wings and its cat-like haunches at the back. When you see Pierce Brosnan use one in the next 007 film, The World Is Not As Big As My Hair, you will want this car so badly that it aches, and you’ll keep on wanting one right up to the moment when you hear it’s likely to cost between eighty and one hundred thousand of your pounds. That puts it in direct competition with Aston’s new DB7 Vantage and Ferrari’s 360 – two cars I’ll be comparing next week, incidentally.
Now I know the BMW badge cuts ice at the lodge and makes golfers churn up the tee, or whatever it’s called when you miss. But in the real world, BMW is in Division Two, an easyJet in a squadron of F-15s.
You might but struggle therefore to think of the Z8 as a rival for the 360, but under the aluminium body is the same 400-brake V8 you get in an M5. And the same electronic whizbangs to keep the driven rear wheels in check.
So, it will be just as fast as the Ferrari. And yet it looks even better. Which means it’s hard to find a reason for saying no. Yes, the steering wheel’s on the wrong side, but that’s less of an issue than you might think. And yes, it’s German, but so what if it just sits there in the Fast Show, not laughing.
I can think of only one reason for steering clear. The only way you could enjoy it is by voting Conservative.
Old sex machine still beats young fatboy
Let’s be honest: the Ferrari 355 is not a comfortable car. The headroom is tight and the driving position awkward. And you can’t have lightning without some thunder, so it shrieks and creaks and bellows and rumbles. Certainly, you can’t hear the radio.
I’ve had a 355 for three years and in all that time I’ve done just 5000 miles. Which is a problem for Ferrari, because when it’s sitting under a dustsheet for 355 days a year, it won’t go wrong, it rarely needs servicing and it’s unlikely to crash.
To make more money out of its customers, Ferrari needed to make its cars more usable. Dealers can’t survive when they see the cars they sell coming back for a paltry service only once a year. They want things to go wrong. They want us to go out and crash into a wall. They want to sell us spare parts.
So the 355 has gone, and in its place stands the bigger, softer, more user-friendly 360 Modena, which even comes with space behind the front seats for golf clubs. It’s a car for commuting, for trips to the shops. It’s dipping its toes in the real world… and that’s unfortunate, because they will be bitten off by Aston Martin’s new DB7 Vantage.
The DB7 has always been a looker, but its 3.2-litre Jaguar engine was never quite good enough. Well, the Vantage comes with a monstrous 6-litre V12, which churns out 420bhp. In a straight drag race with the 360 there’s almost nothing in it, and flat out both will exceed 180mph. Only when you turn the nanny state traction control systems off and get to a corner will the Aston pull ahead. Sure, it’s a big soft old Hector but, when you reach the limits of adhesion, it’s so damned easy to control that even someone with the anatomical properties of Kali could manage.
The Ferrari has more grip, for sure, along with less roll and a more precise steering setup, but when it reaches its higher limits all hell breaks loose. It is almost impossible to handle and, as you fight the wheel, you will knock the paddle-operated gear shifters, making matters worse.
People go round corners, not at the speed the car will go, but at a speed at which they feel comfortable. And the Aston feels comfortable at a higher speed. It’s as simple as that.
Then there’s the question of price, and again it’s a victory for the Bri
t. The Vantage costs £92,500, while a 360 is £101,000. And you have to add another £6000 if you want the stupid, jerky, F1 semiautomatic gear change.
So what about comfort? Well, amazingly the Ferrari is more spacious, but it’s bloody noisy and, no matter what you do with the adaptive suspension, it’s always more vicious over the bumps. For a trip to Bulgaria, I’d prise myself in with a shoehorn and take the Aston.
The Vantage is a spectacularly good grand tourer. You ride around on a wave of torque waiting for the road to open up, and then you drop a cog on the six-speed gearbox and let the awesome power strut its stuff. It is Dr Jekyll with Mr Hyde seats. It’s like drinking ultra-hot Bloody Marys in a gentleman’s club. It’s just great.
So what of the 360? As an everyday car it is birched, to within an inch of its life, not only by the Aston but also the Porsche 911 and the six-speed Alfa GTV. For the drive to work, you’d be better off with a Nissan Micra.
However, despite Ferrari’s silly attempts to take it into the comfort zone, the 360 would still be my choice for a two-hour blast on a sunny Sunday morning. Its new 3.6-litre V8 isn’t heavy metal, but it’s not soft rock either. In fact, as the revs soar towards the stratospheric red line, you’re left wondering how on earth something this loud can possibly be legal in softly softly Euroland.
As you pull on the left-hand paddle to change down, the engine management system double-declutches on your behalf and the exhausts bark like amplified dogs. Then you turn the wheel and find Ferrari’s party piece. The steering may be light, but the diamond-sharp precision enables you to put the car exactly where you want it on the road.
Born to Be Riled Page 38