Clarkson on Cars (32 page)

The second was much smaller but after a stupidly short space of time, the ‘2’ button jammed down which meant I could only call the person whose number is 222–2222. Sorry mate.

Then there was the Sony which, thanks to its tiny dimensions, was nearly thrown away with all the fluff at the bottom of my pockets every week.

Plus, because it was so tiny, there was no read-out and therefore no way of knowing what number I’d actually dialled. I even called the man at the local launderette Mum the other night.

And now I have the digital, pan-European Ericsson which enables me to make and receive calls from a boat in Monaco harbour. Well, it would if I had a boat in Monaco harbour.

It works in Australia and the Middle East too, but not Eastbourne, or High Wycombe which, frankly, is a nuisance because I spend much more time in Buckinghamshire and Sussex than Dubai.

When it’s not receiving a signal, it can do tricks like diverting incoming calls to my home number and making tea. I’ve just got to the bit in the instruction book where it explains how, if I press the hash button, it becomes an AK47. Useful.

But like all my phones, useless when it comes to finding a transmitter.

And what makes this especially irritating is that no one else has the same problem. My phone sits on a table in the pub, casting its tentacles out and only finding pylons, while someone else’s, on the same table, is bulging with signal.

If I may be permitted to liken these phones to people, I always seem to end up with Kenneth Williams while everyone else has a Chippendale.

I sat in a traffic jam last night, desperate to call my wife with a progress report but the Ericsson just sat there, its signal sac empty and wizened. And yet, in every other car, other people were laughing and joking with far-away colleagues and loved ones. I could almost hear them: ‘I’m alongside that bloke from
Top Gear
and he’s got no mates.’

It’s the same story down at the autobank. Why is it that whenever I get to the head of the queue, it is unable to mate with the computer in Doncaster, where my account is held. The card comes back and as I walk away, people are saying: ‘There’s that bloke off
Top Gear
. He’s got no money.’

And now, my new Philips Routefinder is playing up. The idea is that you give this small black box your starting point, and where you want to go, and it gives you the best route.

But it doesn’t. I live in Battersea and after fifteen years in London, I know the best way to the M1 is straight up through the middle of town unless it’s rush hour, in which case, you go through Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush, Willesden and Cricklewood.

But the Routefinder reckons that no matter what, I head out of town on the A40 and go round on the North Circular.

The only people who go on the North Circular are people who are frightened of the M25 and stark staring terrified of Central London. It’s bad enough having people think I have no mates and no money without being labelled a tourist.

My electronic jinx even struck the computer this morning. The screen had become a bit boring so I was staring at the washing machine and couldn’t help noticing that all my computer discs were busy being washed. Can computer discs walk? Do they get BO? Can someone write in and tell me.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of writing in, thank you to all the people who say the number plate PEN1S was issued. It wasn’t – you’ve all seen PEN15 which belongs to Steve Parrish, the truck-racing driver.

And thank you too to the hundreds who wrote to say that we shouldn’t buy Korean cars because the Koreans eat dogs. There’s another reason too – Korean cars are crap.

Deep in the Florida Everglades, where the men are men and the crocodiles are frightened, a chap called Wild Lyle runs an air-boat rental company.

Wild Lyle’s stomach is considerably larger than his vocabulary. He spits more than he speaks and he only eats what he runs over. He wears a camouflage jacket and likes guns. Naturally, he drives a pickup truck.

In rural America, everyone drives a pickup truck. Kids from the Montana flatlands to the dusty plains of New Mexico can walk right past a Ferrari but will stop and drool quite openly when the latest flat-bed Ford burbles by.

The best-selling car in America is the Ford Taurus but even its huge sales are eclipsed by both the Ford F series pickup and its Chevrolet competitor. Between them, these two alone found nearly a million buyers in 1994:

Indeed, ‘light trucks’ now account for a staggering 40 per cent of the total car market in America, and there just aren’t that many rednecks. So who the hell is buying them all? And why?

It all started back in the early eighties when a minor oil crisis forced the American car makers to start building small-engined, four-cylinder saloons. They gave good ‘gas mileage’ but you can’t tow a boat behind a small car. And in America in 1981, 12.5 million people owned a boat.

And then there were those with snowmobiles, and horses, and gliders.

When the cars became ‘pony assed’, everyone turned to the more powerful, go-anywhere rough-and-tumble pickup truck. Lob the skis in the back, hitch up the boat and in two hours, you’re on Lake Tahoe.

The pickup truck still sells to Wild Lyle and his cyclopic ilk, but today, Wall Street buzzes with the things. Tom Clancy has one. Arnold Swarzenegger has one. Bob Seger has one. Last time I was in San Francisco, I saw Barbara Bush arriving at the Fairmont in one.

Norma Major, on the other hand, does not have one. And nor does Gary out of Take That. In Britain, a pickup truck is what your plumber drives.

Pickup trucks, in Britain, just don’t sell and having spent a day or two with what’s supposed to be the latest and the best, I can see why. They’re horrid.

And pointless. In Britain, if you have a boat, you are a criminal and you live in Spain. If you have a horse, you are wealthy enough to have a Range Rover. And if you have a glider, then you tend to fly from place to place, rather than bounce.

Pickup trucks do a lot of bouncing. P. J. O’Rourke once described the pickup as a back porch with an engine but this is not fair. To back porches.

The average pickup truck has no suspension and the sort of steering that’s only familiar to the masters of very large supertankers. They are also crudely finished, noisy and uneconomical.

Now that’s fine for a redneck, because they only ever drive when drunk and as a result, don’t notice, but an investment analyst from Long Island wants more.

And that’s where the Dodge Ram comes in.

This is not, for instance, happy to be mildly uneconomical. No, this baby would need the back-up of a medium-sized government to keep it moving.

You can’t see the fuel gauge going down as you accelerate, but that’s only because it moves too fast. Start up. BAM. You’re out of gas.

This Ram features the 300-bhp 8000cc V10 engine you would normally find under the hood of its sister product – the awesome Viper.

Trouble is, in the Viper, there is very little bodywork to move around. In the Ram pickup, there is a lot. That not only makes it a single-figure mpg specialist but also, surprisingly slow.

Floor the throttle and the engine roars the roar of an enraged lion. Hell, this baby sounds like it’s creating its own weather but a glance down to the speedometer shows that you’re actually accelerating very slowly indeed.

And that’s because the rear wheels are spinning uselessly. There’s no weight out there at the back so when a great gob of torque suddenly arrives at the aft end of the prop shaft, they just rip up the tarmac. It’s fun, until the council comes round with a bill for repairs.

Of course, you can engage the four-wheel-drive system which removes the wheel spin, and the fun, and all the petrol in the tank.

But all this is by the by. The single most in-your-face aspect of the Dodge Ram is its sheer size. Compared to this, a Range Rover looks like a Corgi toy. To park, you need to find two adjacent bays, and even then, the road needs to be wide too. And I mean really wide.

All inner-city width-restriction poles are too close together for the Ram so you have to go the long way round, which you can’t because it keeps running out of petrol.

My wife cannot even see over the top of the radiator grille. Each one of its spotlights is the size of a supermarket trolley. This thing is just huge. Big, like two Pavarottis.

But there’s the funny thing. Despite the sheer acreage of road space, it only has two and a half seats, which, as you would expect from the Americans, are finished in the finest vulgalour.

There’s no shortage of equipment, what with the electric seats and the drink holders and the auxiliary power socket for your phone. The top-flight pickup, then, has been through the Range-Roverisation programme. With the addition of a few toys and a dash of pleblon here and there, it has become a country car for city folk.

Except for one small thing. I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that they have thieves in America who like to steal things.

Last Saturday, I did some retail therapy on the Tottenham Court Road and was able to return home with all the boxes stored away in the boot. If they’d been in the pickup, every one of them would have been nicked the first time I stopped at a set of lights.

So not only is there no space up front, but the back, though big enough for a couple of volleyball courts, is nigh on useless too.

America has a history of being able to convert a working man’s tool of the trade into a fashion icon – the Zippo, Rayban Aviators and Levis spring to mind – but they’ll have a job with the pickup truck.

An American marketing person may try to explain the Dodge Ram is a distinctive, eight-litre, four-wheel-drive two-seater. But it isn’t. It’s a lorry. And lorries are not, and never will be, trendy.

In a little over a hundred years, the motor car has killed more people than every single war that has ever been waged.

Stacked up against the car’s adroitness at wholesale slaughter, the Somme begins to look like a Sunday School outing.

In India alone, where cars haven’t even caught on properly, nearly 50,000 people a year are killed on the roads. In just one state, 16 people are killed every single day, and 97 are injured. Out there, one in every 42 cars on the roads, at some stage, will be involved in a serious accident. It’s so bad that in the 5 to 44 age group, car accidents rate as one of the biggest killers.

In the West, the car is still a murdering blaggard but at least the picture is a little more rosy. Indeed, while the number of cars on the roads goes up every year, the number of people they kill is falling.

But I fear that this statistic is about to be filed under ‘history’. I fear that within the next five years, the number of people being killed will rise sharply all over Europe and North America.

And I blame the air bag.

Earlier this year, Mercedes Benz unveiled a new concept car which is basically a bouncy castle on wheels. Hidden away, in little recesses all over the interior, are no fewer than seventeen air bags.

Quite apart from the usual places like the steering wheel, they’re located under the dashboard to save your parts, in all four doors, between the front seats, in the roof and in the headrests. There is even an air bag in the back of each front seat so that should the driver crash while you’re in the back, working on a laptop computer, you won’t emerge from the wreckage with qwertyuiop[] stencilled on your forehead.

At the moment, this is at the concept stage but we can rest assured that something along similar lines will soon find its way into ordinary cars for the road.

Volvo is already advertising its seat-mounted air bags which pump themselves up should anyone be foolish enough to drive into the side of one of these Swedish tanks.

Now you must remember that Volvo already has its Side Impact Protection System (SIPS) which transfers all the energy of a crash into the roof and the floor, and away from the poor souls in the car.

Then there’s Audi with Procon Ten. Run into something bigger than you are – a Volvo for instance – and at the same moment, the seatbelts are tightened as the steering wheel is pulled forward, away from your head.

This is the cutting edge of safety in cars, and it comes on top of anti-lock brakes, rigid safety cells, traction control and any number of other devices to keep you alive, should everything turn pear-shaped.

And therein lies the problem. Very soon, people are going to realise that they can have huge crashes, at any speed they choose, and walk away.

They’ll be careering into buildings, pedestrians, lamp-posts and people in older, less-well-protected cars, knowing that they are immune from injury. This won’t do.

So if car manufacturers are really interested in promoting safety on the roads, rather than introducing new measures about which their marketing departments can crow, they should ditch all the new ideas.

Rip out the air bags, and in their place, fit titanium spikes which, in the event of a crash, will leap out of the centre of the steering wheel, and impale the driver on his seat.

And hey, Mr Audi, instead of pulling the steering wheel forward in a crash, why not give us something which shoves it back into the guy’s face – hard.

And Volvo, forget SIPS. Better to fit a small nuclear bomb in the back of the child seat which is triggered to go off should the car receive a significant jolt. Crash and your baby is blown into such tiny particles, you won’t even need a coffin.

With these sorts of features in all cars on the road, I think it’s safe to assume that the number of deaths on the road would fall, in an instant, to zero.

Right now, people are quite happy to hurtle down the outside lane of a motorway, in thick fog, at 100 mph because their anti-lock brakes will keep them out of trouble – they’d better go too – and that even if they don’t, everything else will.

Well, they’d think twice if the car was nothing more than a series of booby traps.

To make sure this was fair, and that all cars are equipped with the same menacing array of death traps, the government needs to introduce legislation. But this is where it all gets sinister. The government won’t do this, because it wants us to drive fast and dangerously.