Clarkson on Cars (19 page)

Maybe, if everyone made a budget-priced mid-engined two-seater, it would be to the class what the Escort is to Euroboxes or what the Croma is to executive saloons.

I am beginning to despair of the European motor manufacturers. Where is the investment? Where is the initiative? Where’s the bloody pizzazz?

If Toyota was run by Europeans, its range would include the Starlet, the Corolla, the Carina and the Camry. And that would be it.

But Toyota is run by people who can see their ears and, as a result, there’s also the Previa, the MR2, the Celica, the Supra, the Land Cruiser and a whole host of other stuff it doesn’t export to Europe because of import restrictions.

Which brings me on to the next ?really puzzling’ thing. Why is everyone involved in Western automobile manufacture sound asleep?

Before reading beyond the first paragraph of this story, ensure that you are sitting down. Also, loosen all items of clothing, take off your spectacles and remove your dentures.

Volvo has made a good car.

It still has typical Volvoy looks but they disguise the fact that it goes like stink and handles like the sort of dream where you spend six hours making love to Daryl Hannah AND Patsy Kensit.

It is called the 850 and it will be appearing at a Volvo dealership near you early next year. Price-wise, the GLT version I drove should cost about £18,000.

So, you’ve read this far and you’ve seen the photograph and doubtless, you’re wondering how on earth a car that looks pretty much identical to the old 700 series can be demonstrably better than almost anything else in its class.

Well, for a kick off, it has front-wheel drive. Yes, Volvo has used the expertise gained by making the 400 series and applied it to its new machine – but to make sure it all works properly, a new rear suspension has been developed.

It’s so complicated that the press conference needed to explain everything went on for six days. All you need to know is that it’s the subject of a Volvo patent, that it works and that it’s called the Delta System.

On the devilish piece of road Volvo calls its test track, mid-corner bumps, hideous adverse camber and awesome pot holes failed to unsettle the 850 in any way whatsoever, though a Spanish journalist did manage to turn one over. It has extraordinarily high levels of grip, stunning turn-in, no torque-steer worth mentioning and a ride comfort to rival all but the Citroen XM. You want more… good, because there is some.

And it comes in the shape of a new engine. While Ford is busy telling us that you need eight years to develop a new power unit, Volvo is out and about proving this assumption wrong. Just after the introduction of a new 3-litre six with four valves per cylinder, which, incidentally, took four years to get into production, comes a development of that engine – a 2.5-litre, 20-valve five cylinder engine which took even less time to get from the drawing board to reality.

There are no signs, however, that even hint at an abbreviated or rushed development. It’s a gutsy unit which produces lots of that stuff real road-testers call torque and which you and I call grunt. Moreover, most of it is available from just above tickover.

Power-wise, even the most ardent BMW aficionado is left gasping. In a body that weighs 300 lb less than a similarly priced 24-valve 520i, there is a transversely mounted engine which develops 170 bhp – that’s twenty more than the Bee Em.

It equates to excellent performance, 0 to 60 takes, we are told, 8.9 seconds and on Volvo’s high-speed test track, I reached an indicated 216 kph (135 mph), with the sunroof open. In more normal conditions, you can expect 25 mpg from the catalysed motor unless of course you go for the clever four-speed auto.

The other good toy, of course, is air-conditioning which rounds off a pretty impressive list of gizmos. Even the dash, a traditional Volvo weakness, looks solid and tasteful. It even has an LCD computer.

But, when all is said and done, it is a Volvo and that means safety. To that end, there is a new B pillar and a door design which, in a side impact sends much of the energy, that would ordinarily be used to kill those inside, down to the floor.

Knowing this new system was in place and knowing it was backed up with anti-lock brakes and an air bag, I dispensed with the usual Clarkson reserve and found the Volvo to be great fun. And you’ve never read that much about such a car before.

The new engine sounds more like an Alfa V6 than a humble ‘five’ but it is the quality of power of delivery that impresses most. The whole car feels like a fluid extension of your limbs, responding to driver input like all performance cars should.

It even excels in town where good visibility, a stupendous turning circle and well-defined corners come into their own. The seats are pretty damn comfortable too.

Equally useful in day-to-day life is the rear seat’s armrest which can be converted into a baby seat and the passenger’s front seat which, like those in the rear, can be folded down enabling long things to be carried around. It’s a simple idea and one that leaves you wondering why no one else has ever thought of it.

Mind you, less clever, is Volvo’s product policy. It keeps introducing new cars without deleting anything. This means we now have to choose between the ancient 200, a large estate car, the 700, a large estate car, the 900, a large estate car which looks just like the 700, or the new 850 which, one day, will be a large estate car even though for now, it’s only a saloon.

Not only are they all the same size but the new 850 is indistinguishable from the 900. I just cannot understand why Volvo’s stylists did this and, having talked to people in the company, it seems, neither can anyone else.

But we can’t moan because here at last is a car that looks like a Volvo, feels like a Volvo but goes and handles like a BMW. And that is so astonishing that it just has to be reported.

Iceland, Norway, China, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Hong Kong, Maui, America, Japan, Italy, Sardinia, Sicily, Cyprus, Chad, Niger, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.

In five years, I’ve been to them all and it’s cost me the grand total of no pounds, no shillings and no pence.

There isn’t a car you can buy I haven’t driven and that small feat didn’t cost anything either.

Tomorrow, at Castle Combe, I shall be playing with a Countach, a Miura and a Diablo and then I shall come home in a helicopter. And the bill? Zero.

I have stayed in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and the Hyatt Regency on Kanapali Beach. I have jet-skied in the Pacific, snow-skied in Italy and skidooed in Finland. I have drunk Mouton Rothschild on the shores of Lake Annecy and Barsac with
foie gras
.

You name an expensive restaurant in Europe, and I mean so numbingly expensive you would be struggling to pay for a lettuce leaf, and I will have eaten lobster in it. Think of your dream hotel and I’ll have been there already.

I have been in the sharp bit of a Cathay Pacific Jumbo and helicopters have taken me round the Alps, into the Grand Canyon, from Nice Airport to the Loews hotel in Monaco and over the queues you sit in to get to the British Grand Prix.

Day after day, week after week, year after year, I live a champagne lifestyle that would quiver the shivery bits of even the most hardened Fleet Street gossip columnist. Compared to me, Joan Collins is like a walk-on extra in
Coronation Street
.

I redefine excess. Princess Stephanie is to me what a Fiat 126 is to a Bentley Turbo, what a Peter and Jane book is to
Othello
, what a plankton is (
get on with it
– Ed.).

But do not despair because all you have to do to join me on this caviar and Krug roller-coaster is find a newspaper or magazine which, each week, will give you a column inch or two to write about cars.

Then, motor manufacturers will compete with one another to ensure you write about one of their products rather than someone else’s.

It is motor manufacturers who pay for the first-class travel and the helicopters and the fine wines and the
foie gras
and the Carlton Hotel and the trips to China. And then to make sure we all remember our trips, it is motor manufacturers that give us all going-home presents: telephones, briefcases, jackets, fish, whisky and so on.

There are 56 million people in Britain. Excluding those who are too young and those that have begun to wear fur-lined boots with zips up the front, that leaves maybe 40 million. Then take out those that can’t read or write and you’re left with six. And I doubt there’s one who wouldn’t sell their children into slavery to do what I do for a living.

Or is there? According to an organ produced by the Northern Group of Motoring Writers, this job is not all it’s cracked up to be. More than that, it smells a whole lot worse than an anchovy’s wotsit.

It seems that some of my northern colleagues are angry because first-class travel, Barsac and the Carlton are just not enough.

One of their number, who claims to write a column in the
Pig Breeder’s Gazette
(no, I’m not) suggests in a recent edition of the Group’s newsletter that it is a bloody disgrace that he is unable to get a Ferrari to test for a week. Diddums.

But this little snippet is small fry compared to the front-page lead which begins thus: ‘The tendency among PR departments to expect journalists–especially north of Watford–to attend product launches at their own expense is a growing and worrying trend.’

He cites a recent BMW launch, saying that some members had to get up at 5 a.m. and drive for up to 90 minutes to get to an airport. He goes on to add that lunch was too brief and concludes with the astonishing revelation that many members had an 18-hour day!

So let’s look at this 18-hour day shall we. Our man wakes and after a pot of piping-hot coffee, climbs into that week’s press car, a Rover perhaps or maybe a Calibra. Either way, it has a tank full of fuel paid for by whoever delivered it. He drives to an airport and boards a plane to Scotland, using a ticket sent to him by BMW. At Glasgow airport, he climbs into a waiting 325i and drives through breathtaking scenery for an hour or so, arriving at Inverlochy Castle. There, he wolfs down some salmon before driving a 3 18i back to the airport for the plane home.

I don’t know how he survived. Ranulph: forget your Transglobe Expedition, forget walking to the North Pole. Just you try being a Northern motoring journalist for a day or two.

This front-page exposé suggests that the manufacturer should pay for petrol to and from the airport (though why the newspaper can’t do this is beyond me), that it should pay for car parking and that overnight stays should be incorporated if it looks like being a long day. I thought Northerners were supposed to be gritty.

But the best bit I’ve saved till last. Our lead writer says he was invited to London by Pirelli for the launch of a new tyre and that to get from Lincolnshire to the capital would have meant a £70 experience on the train or a £120 plane ticket.

It is up to an editor to decide if a new Pirelli tyre is news. If he says it is, he must pay for his motoring writer to attend the launch. If he decides that the good people of Grimsby are able to get by without knowing the tyre exists, then the motoring writer cannot go.

The notion that Pirelli should pay £120 so that half a dozen Grimsby-ites can read all about their new tyre is nonsense.

There is only one thing in the world worse than a whinger and that’s a whinger with a Northern accent. And to think I was born there. Eugh.

I wonder whether history will be kinder to Karl Benz or Councilman Marvin Braude. The man who invented the motor car. Or the man who killed it?

At the Frankfurt Motor Show, the world’s motor manufacturers and assorted secretary birds showed off no fewer than 24 cars powered by electricity.

Ford, Chrysler and General Motors announced that they had joined forces to spend half a billion dollars of their own money and another half a billion from the US Treasury on research into advanced battery design.

And the talk was not of Toyota’s new factory in Derby but of the new Chloride plant in Manchester.

The latest Japanese concept car and the usual crop of hopeless Italian design studies were completely ignored. All anyone talked about were electric cars, sodium sulphur batteries, fast charging and other assorted pieces of what bulls do.

Believe me, in twenty years’ time, you won’t be reading
Performance Car
and even if you are, we will not be writing about how fast the new Nissan goes from 0–60 mph but how fast you can recharge its power pack and how far it will go before such recharges are necessary. And the most important of all, how many miles you can do before you need to spend £2000 on a new set of batteries, and whether it’s worth leasing them from the LEB.

And Councilman Marvin Braude is to blame.

Marvin lives in Los Angeles. Marvin is a city councillor in Los Angeles and Marvin doesn’t like the fact that children are not allowed to play on his streets because of the smog.

Marvin places the blame for this smog squarely at the door marked Detroit. Apparently, Marvin is fed up with excuses from Motown so a couple of years ago he instigated the LA Initiative whereby companies large and small from all over the world were invited to design an ultra low-emission car which could later be converted to zero emission. He said it must have freeway performance, i.e. a top speed of 60 mph, that it must have a range of 150 miles and that it should be a quality product aimed at the lower luxury market.

The prize was a sackload of cash from the city of Los Angeles who would also market the car, guarantee big sales and ensure that charging points would be installed throughout the city to cope.

The competition was won by a British-designed vehicle which has a range of 50 miles if you use the electric motor only or 150 miles if you use the 650 cc petrol motor as well. This has two catalytic converters and produces less bhp than a Kenwood mixer.

It has a top speed of 70 mph and 0 to 50 mph takes 17 seconds. It is therefore about as advanced as a Ford Anglia, circa 1961.