Clarkson on Cars (20 page)

Having shown Detroit that such a thing could be achieved, the State of California announced that by 1998 any manufacturer wishing to operate in the world’s seventh-biggest economy must ensure that for every hundred cars sold, two must produce no emissions. And that means battery power.

If I was a car manufacturer, my knee jerk reaction would be to pull out of California and let them use the bus but sadly, we can be assured that what happens on the west coast of America today will happen in the rest of the US tomorrow, and in Europe next year.

There is no escape. Every manufacturer has to make electric-powered cars. And to make sure the simply enormous costs can be recouped, they have to be desirable. They have to sell which means they’ll have to be as good as a petrol-engined car or significantly cheaper.

Now while every car firm in the world is scurrying around trying to make hitherto untouched technology as desirable as the internal combustion engine, which can trace its roots back to the last century, you can bet your bottom dollar that the amount of investment in the kind of cars we’ve come to know and love will dwindle to diddly squat.

Take Jaguar for example. Every penny it has must now be poured into the development of a battery-powered car. You can kiss goodbye to the notion of a new petrol engine because there won’t be one. The oil industry can pull its hair out until it looks like Telly Savalas but we are facing, right now, the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine.

And Marvin is to blame.

Now when the world’s third-biggest industry is forced into a corner by technology-forcing legislation, you can rest assured that technology will come, and fast. Eventually, we will have cars propelled along by dylthium crystal batteries, cars that can perform just as well as the S-class Merc of today, cars that will go for 20,000 miles between recharges and cities with power points at every parking meter.

And as a result, the air will be cleaner and cities will be quieter, and we’ll wear flowers in our hair and not eat meat.

Or maybe not. You see, charging up the millions and millions of electric cars that Marvin hopes will one day roam the roads, will require a lot more effort on the part of power stations which, at present, are responsible for 90 per cent of ‘greenhouse gases’.

By running an electric car, all you are doing is displacing the pollution from your exhaust pipe to a power station somewhere else. Even the LA goody-goodies admit this by stating that 64 per cent of the city’s power is not generated in the LA basin. In other words, we clean up our act and to hell with those who’ll suffer as a result.

Now I don’t dispute that LA has a dreadful smog problem because I’ve been there and I’ve seen it. Nor do I dispute that motor vehicles are to blame but why is LA’s smog worse than anyone else’s?

It seems that the prevailing winds from the Pacific are blocked by the mountain range behind LA. Consequently the smog doesn’t get blown away.

Rather than make all the world drive around in milk floats, surely Marvin would have been better off seeking the advice of a demolition team. He’s already said he doesn’t mind pollution so long as it isn’t in LA so why doesn’t he simply blow up the mountains?

In the prologue to
Look Stranger
, W. H. Auden said: ‘Far sighted as falcons, they looked down on another future; for the seed in their loins was hostile.’

Marvin probably thinks he’s being a falcon but it might be a good idea if he had a good look between his legs.

I find myself wondering whether the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the good Doctor George Carey, has ever been scrumping.

Without wishing to sound like Frank Muir,
to scrump
is to break into an orchard and steal apples.

I used to do it. My father used to do it and I’d bet a wedge of Melvins that old George cannot put his hand on his heart and say that, at one time or another, he hasn’t climbed over a wall and helped himself to the odd bit of somebody else’s fruit.

However, times have moved on and this is what George and all the other weirdos who go on television to talk about ‘social issues’ fail to understand.

In the fifties, people would queue for hours to see
Way to the Stars
, a dreadful black and white film where people said ‘bother’ if they trapped their thumb in a door and, apart from people trapping their thumbs in doors, nothing much happened.

Today, youth is not satisfied unless strange metal aliens chop whole limbs off. Furthermore, those who do get de-legged do not say bother.

Then there’s sex. In the fifties, the merest hint of an ankle would have the censors reaching for their scissors whereas these days no film is complete unless it features at least six panty hamsters.

Translate that sort of progress into the real world and it becomes a damn sight easier to understand why the modern-day equivalent of scrumping is ram-raiding.

We do not need hairy social workers and do-good churchmen looking for complicated reasons why the youths of Newcastle and Oxford want to steal cars, because it’s patently obvious to anyone under the age of 100. They do it because it’s bloody good fun.

Why do you think rock stars throw televisions into swimming pools? Why can I not walk past a stack of beans in Safeway without getting a sometimes uncontrollable urge to push it over?

Glass makes a satisfying noise when it breaks but I bet it makes a hell of a more satisfying noise when you’ve just driven a Range Rover through it.

And I absolutely cannot think of anything which would be more fun than racing a Golf GTi round Woolworths.

George Carey has the bare-faced effrontery to claim that the recent spate of rioting is because of ‘social deprivation’. His sentiments, inevitably, are echoed by various beardies who have been invited to wax lyrical on
Newsnight
in recent weeks.

But ram-raiding has as much to do with social deprivation as pork pie. What it does have a lot to do with is risk.

I would steal apples because if I was caught, and the chances were slim, the worst I could expect was a pair of boxed ears. And I reckoned that the thrill of nicking a Granny Smith easily outweighed the possible consequences.

The youths of Newcastle drive Range Rovers into electrical wholesalers because if they get caught, and again the chances are slim when you remember Plod spends most of his time and manpower trying to catch you and me speeding, the worst they can expect is some magistrate applying a metaphorical blackboard rubber to their knuckles.

However, I am not prepared to leave it at that.

Even if the police did begin to understand that speeding is not the most heinous crime and that they are wasting precious resources trying to stamp it out, they still would not be able to patrol every shop, in every town, every night.

And anyway, they’ve let the youths get away with it for too long. When, as a child, I was told to stop doing something I’d been doing for ages, I’d have a tantrum; that was the way in the 1960s. Tell them to stop ram-raiding and there’d be a riot.

So how do we tackle it? Well, we have to ask ourselves what differentiates those who steal cars on a Saturday night with those who don’t.

We have to ask ourselves, also, why scrumping is the preserve of pre-pubescent schoolboys who stop doing it when they get older?

Why don’t I nick a car tonight and do some handbrake turns outside the pub? Why don’t you hot-wire your neighbour’s Cavalier and go for a spin in Currys at the weekend? Why doesn’t George Carey nick fruit any more?

We don’t do these things because we are intelligent. We understand about the notion of ownership and we can see that if we steal and destroy things, insurance premiums will rise, pushing up the cost of living and thus increasing the chances of a Labour victory in the next election.

Those who do indulge in ram-raiding and hotting handbrake turnery of a Saturday night are incapable of logical thought like us because they are stupid.

And how do you stamp out stupidity? Simple; you don’t allow dim people to breed.

What I propose is that at the age of sixteen, everyone has to take a simple IQ test. If they can’t name four cabinet ministers, three American rivers and two characters from
Cannery Row
, then it’s vasectomy time.

For sure, we won’t reap the benefit for a number of years but eventually, when Britain is freed from the shackles of having to support a whole bunch of stupid people, ram-raiding will cease to be. So too will the Church and British Rail.

Carey and his mates at the DSS believe in giving these kids what they want. They say that if a child won’t stop nicking cars, he must be given a car and the opportunity to race it at weekends.

Yeah well, I want a boat in the South of France, a flat in Paris, a house in California and while you’re at it George, a jet.

You will never have stayed at the Prince de Galles hotel on Avenue George V in Paris because it is too upmarket, but I was there last weekend, and so was Brigitte Nielson, and yes, they really are as big as they are in the photographs in
Hello
.

Can it really have been a coincidence that the three films available to guests on the pay-as-you-watch video channel were
Tango and Cash, Rocksy IV and Cobra
? I think not.

Over the course of the weekend we ate in two restaurants that you will not have been to because they are far too expensive and we saw England absolutely stuff the French at a game called Rugby.

But all this is by the by because the best bit is that we drove to and from Paris in the most coveted car sold in Britain.

It was not, however, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, as you might imagine, and nor did a flying ‘B’ embellish the radiator grille. And no, it was not an Audi S2, which as you all should know, is the
best
car in Britain.

I am talking about the Ford Sierra Sapphire 2.0i Ghia, complete with air conditioning and compact disc player.

Of course, all of us want a Ferrari 348 in the same way that all of us want a million in the bank, a mansion in the country and a nymphomaniac in one of its bedrooms. But, not to put too fine a point on it, none of us will ever achieve even one of the above. We can only strive for what is achievable. That which is not is a fantasy. Thus, a 348 is a fantasy while a Sierra Ghia is a goal.

If you are a divisional sales manager for one of the major food manufacturers and each day you ply the motorways in your Sierra GL, you can dream all you like about owning a Ferrari, but it will not happen. And nor will you get home that night to find your wife has been transmogrified into a salivating teenage sex machine.

You can, however, strive for the Sierra Ghia because you know that if you could only find a supermarket manager who would return your calls, you’d meet the targets, get the promotion and thus, get the Ghia. It’s a hell of a depressing way to go through life, I know, but that doesn’t stop thousands of people from doing it.

And as there are more people out there driving humdrum Fords than anything else, there are, logically enough, more people out there striving, day in and day out, to make it to Ghia status than there are people striving to get a Volkswagen Corrado or a Mercedes.

Now, those of you with cars from outside the Ford stable will, by now, be howling with derisive laughter at the small-minded nature of our reppy brethren. You will dismiss the notion of a Sierra Ghia with a casual wave of the hand as you seek to explain that your Corrado will out-corner and out-perform any jumped-up sample-transporter.

Indeed it will, but then the ventilation in your Corrado is not that brilliant is it? And when you put a biro on the front seat, it always slips down onto the floor behind, doesn’t it? And there aren’t
that
many places in the cabin where you can store maps and chocolates and cans of Coke and fags and so on, are there?

You see, with a Corrado as with all other performance cars, only three things matter: How much does it cost? How fast does it go? Can I pull birds in it?

But repping requires a specialised tool. Over the course of my weekend, I drove the Ford for more than 500 miles and it did not irritate me once. I have never, and I mean never, encountered a better heater, and the driving position is even more perfect than lovely Brigitte’s bits.

Now sure, the rev counter should be red-lined at 3000 rpm and if you attempt a corner at anything like breakneck speed, you will probably crash and break your neck. But handling is of no concern to the man whose boot is filled with precious samples.

Go round a corner too fast in a car that must double-up as your office and your cassettes will fly off the dash, your briefcase will fall over and your can of Coke will tip up, spilling its contents all over your polyester suit. Your wife will then be cross with you, reducing still further the chances of her becoming some kind of Lolita.

Same goes for performance. On the rare occasions when you take your Corrado out of town, sure, give it some wellie, but if you drive for five hours a day, five days a week, and you’re always giving your car some stick, you run the hugest chance of losing your licence or crashing so often that whatever chance you may have had of promotion evaporates, along with the chance of your Ford Sierra Sapphire 2.0i Ghia.

You can, of course, take a colleague out to lunch in your Corrado, but with the Sierra you can take two of his friends as well.

And though it is of no concern to our friend in the suit-of-man-made-fibres, the Sierra is easy to service, easy to mend, cheap to operate and, if rumour is right, pretty reliable as well.

Now don’t think the leopard has changed his spots and that all of a sudden I’m about to claim Ford makes the best cars in the world, because of course it doesn’t – Audi does – but I believe that we performance car fans ought to remember that the average car is made up of some 15,000 parts and that the chassis is only a few of them.

On an RS2000, it is probably the most important bit, but on a Sierra Ghia it is less crucial than the upholstery. If you were told you had to drive for 25 hours a week, your major concern, above all else, would be ease of operation.