Clarkson on Cars (33 page)

They know that if they ban seatbelts, rip down all crash barriers and douse all roads with a mixture of diesel oil and washing-up liquid every morning, people would never dare drive at more than 10 mph.

And this would remove one of the most iniquitous taxes ever dreamed up – the speeding ticket.

It’s all so obvious. By forcing car makers to give us safer vehicles, and by making the roads less dangerous, they are encouraging us to drive faster and faster. Couple this with ridiculous vigilant police patrols, and they have a small fortune.

People are dying out there, to pay for the National Health Service.

When Stephenson launched his Rocket locomotive, sceptics were convinced that passengers would not be able to breathe when it was moving along at top speed.

The strange thing is that even though the great man proved them wrong, the world is still full of people who reckon that speed kills.

Barely a week goes by without a sad-faced policeman coming on the television to tell us how a whole family has been wiped out because someone was going too fast.

On
Top Gear
, we are forever being harangued by tweedy liberals on nonsensical quangos who reckon that speed is the root of all our evils. Kill your speed, not a child, they wail.

Well, if speed really is this dangerous then how come Concorde isn’t the most dangerous form of transport ever devised? I mean, here we have a plane which rockets across the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound but which, in all its years, has never killed a soul.

How come Japanese commuters don’t dive for cover whenever the 200-mph bullet train hisses to a halt at their station? Worse, they climb on board and drink coffee, while what’s left of Japan slides by in a blur.

No astronaut has ever died while circling the earth, something he is doing at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour.

Speed, all on its own, is safer than lying in bed all day. It can only kill when it is mixed up with something else, like inattentiveness. So instead of worrying about speed, we should concern ourselves with what causes people to lose concentration.

It certainly isn’t speed. The faster you go, the more you have to think about what you’re doing, so I laughed at all those yellow-toothed members of the British Vegetarian Society who leaped about when Vauxhall introduced the 170-mph Lotus Carlton.

They called it a cancerous menace with gangrene and leprosy and said it was the seven-headed beast from Revelations. Women with short hair began to leave Greenham Common and head for Luton.

Never mind that in any other walk of life, speed is considered essential – faxes and modems for instance – the Carlton was a greater threat to man’s survival than Trident.

Well, only a handful were ever sold and some straw-poll research has shown that so far, not one of them has been involved in any sort of fatal crash. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Mrs Weird Beard.

The Vauxhall, and all the other fast saloons of its ilk, tend to be safer than the average car because they are usually bought by enthusiasts. These guys are not worried by how the car looks or what badge is nailed to the back: they simply want a car that’s good to drive.

And when they’re out driving it, they’re not listening to the radio or talking on the phone or turning round to try to reason with an incontinent four-year-old in the back. When they are driving, they are driving.

Anyone who is not enthusiastic about cars, but needs one to get from A to B, will not buy a Lotus Carlton or a Jaguar XJR or a BMW M5 because they’re too fast. He won’t feel safe in them. He doesn’t like the racy suspension and the sports seats and the gaudy wheels.

He simply consults the Consumers’ Association which, like him, is unconcerned with speed or style; only with reliability and value for money. They like Nissans and Volvos and Toyotas.

So he buys one of those which he drives around in. V-e-r-y S-l-o-w-l-y.

Yes, he goes the wrong way round roundabouts and has heated arguments with colleagues while lurching about on the M40. Yes, he indicates right when he wants to go left. And yes, he occasionally drinks and drives.

He never drives quickly though so as he ambles past those signs saying Speed Kills, he feels fine. He isn’t speeding.

It’s the same story on the motorway. He’s in the middle lane with a truck two inches from his high-intensity rear lights, which come on the instant it’s dark, but he’s only doing 50 and that’s 20 mph below the speed limit, so he’s all right, Jack.

And besides, he hasn’t noticed the truck because he’s listening to a particularly good play on Radio Four.

Even though he is in control of a ton of metal which is storming along at 50 mph, he is absolutely miles away. It doesn’t matter what the weather does or how much traffic there is, he’s below the speed limit and he’s feeling smug. He may even have a little snooze.

He is a menace but how do you legislate for guys like this? You can’t force him to buy a decent car because even if he did have a big Bee Em, he’d still be doing 50 and he’d still be sozzled. And he’d still jam his brakes on every time Tony Blair came on the radio to say something even more stupid than usual.

You can’t ban phones and radios in cars and even if you could, people would still daydream. You could, I guess, force cars to be a lot noisier by banning exhaust silencers, but this wouldn’t go down too well in residential areas, early in the morning.

You can, however, make people drive faster. A lot faster.

I therefore propose a new minimum speed limit of 130 mph on motorways which will scare away the truly hopeless drivers and force those who could be good if they tried to concentrate.

If you had a motorway network where every single driver was concentrating absolutely on the job in hand, you wouldn’t have any crashes at all.

Men in suits, be they government ministers, insurance company bosses or police people are convinced that it is young men in fast cars who constitute the biggest hazard on the road.

This hazard is perceived to be so great that the punishment metered out is horrendous. Drive too fast, even for a moment, and they will remove your licence. As a result, your job disappears down the lavatory and you will come home one night to find that your wife has moved in with someone else. Someone who still has wheels.

Steal a car and they’ll send you to the Red Sea for some scuba diving. But drive a car too quickly, and they’ll wreck your life.

However, I have never been inconvenienced by a young man in a fast car. Blink, and you’ve lost sight of him in the smoke from his own tyres. Who cares?

By far the most terrifying sight on the roads today is the Nissan Sunny. This is Freddy Kruger on wheels. If I may liken all cars to the City of New York, the Sunny is Harlem, at 2 am on a Saturday night.

Anyone who is not interested in cars tends not to make a very good driver. And there is no better way of demonstrating a complete lack of interest in all things automotive than driving, owning, or having anything whatsoever to do with a Nissan Sunny.

The Sunny is a stupid-looking car that handles like a wheelbarrow and is neither fast, economical nor cheap, but the infernal Consumers’ Association says it’s unlikely to break down.

So old people buy one and drift around as though it’s 1947. They haven’t got to grips with roundabouts or motorways or filter lanes or pelican crossings or anything really. So long as they’re going roughly in the right direction, that’s fine.

Should you come up behind a Sunny, you might imagine that its driver is being deliberately obstructive, veering all over the road, braking for no reason and so on, but usually, this is not the case.

First, the driver’s body is so racked with osteoporosis that it has shrunk to a point where he can’t actually see where he’s going, let alone what’s behind.

And second, he assumes there is nothing, simply because there wasn’t anything in 1947.

And anyway, if by some miracle he does notice that there is a 30-mile queue of red-faced young men stuck in his 20-mph wake, you must remember that he is a
Which?
magazine reader and will therefore be mean spirited. The passive resistance to your increasingly desperate attempts to overtake will become active.

Last week I followed a Sunny for fifteen miles and never, not once, anywhere in the world, have I seen such a display of truly appalling driving.

And eventually, I could take no more and in perhaps the most idiotic move I’ve ever made, I slammed my car into first gear and on a blind bend, shot past, flicking Vs and snarling.

Had I crashed, the full force of the law would have been brought to bear as the shrivelled-up has-been explained to anyone who would listen that he was trundling along at 20 mph and that this huge, wailing Jaguar had flashed by and that I deserved everything that was coming.

Since then, I’ve started to notice Nissan Sunnys more and more, and in 100 per cent of cases, they are being driven not just badly, but in a fashion that leads me to deduce that the driver is blind, mad or dead.

If they indicate at all, it’s done on a random basis. I have seen one attempting to turn right at the bottom of London’s Park Lane, into Hyde Park Corner. They stall at the lights and if it’s an old model, it’s likely to stop in the middle of the road, without warning, to let the drunken fare out.

Worst of all though, when attempting to pull out from a side turning into a main road, the driver will wait until the road is clear for eight miles in both directions before initiating the lunge.

The trouble is that ‘waiting too long at a junction’ is not against the law. You could get them with ‘driving without due care and attention’, but acquaintances of mine in the traffic police say this is notoriously difficult to prove.

I find myself wondering then whether it is time for some new laws. ‘Driving while under the influence of Clement Attlee’ might work, but we should stop short of actually making it illegal to drive a Nissan Sunny on the public highway.

Right now, if you see one you can be absolutely guaranteed that it will be doing something strange. You can prepare for that.

If, however, the Sunny was outlawed, all the bad drivers would disperse into other cars like the Proton or the Toyota Corolla or the Rover 200. This would make them hard to spot until, perhaps, it was too late.

So, I think we should keep going with the present system where all the hopeless drivers have Sunnys but that to make them that little bit more obvious at a greater distance, all of them should be painted vivid lime green.

When Tony Blair comes on the television, I usually lose my temper.

So I have no problem with Eric Cantona’s kung fu episode. In a highly charged environment, some ghastly man in quite the foulest clothes I’ve ever seen invited him to go back to France, and was kicked. Eric lost his temper. Big deal.

Same goes with Ian Wright. So he planted a docker’s oyster in someone’s face. Worse things happen.

There are few people out there who can put their hands on their hearts and say that they have never reached breaking point, that they have never snarled and gritted their teeth and shouted. It’s perfectly natural and provided you can keep away from knives and guns, there’s nothing really wrong with it.

However, some damnfool feature writer, probably in America, has coined a new phrase for losing your temper in a car – they’ve called it Road Rage.

So now, when some ninny in a Datsun starts to meander around the road like a twig in a brook, it’s not his fault that you blow up. You are suffering from Road Rage.

Yes, now you can drive down the outside lane of a motorway at 40 mph and when the guy behind rips his steering wheel from its mountings and turns puce, you can shrug and put his stupidity down to Road Rage.

I recall reading one story in a newspaper recently about how this poor, unfortunate woman had borrowed a TVR – which was almost certainly the real motivation behind the piece – and how she’d been shouted at by men while driving it.

Well, TVRs are notoriously hard work. The steering is heavy. The clutch is heavy. The brakes are heavy. She was very probably unused to the power and it is therefore not beyond the realms of possibility that she was making a complete Horlicks of everything.

She tried to claim that these men – spit the word out like you’ve inadvertently eaten a piece of marzipan – these ‘men’ were cross with her because she was a woman in a flash car. I doubt it somehow. It was very probably because she was a crap driver.

I must confess that I too get irritated by women in cars, mainly because none of them ever, ever let me out of side turnings.

Every morning, I try to turn right onto the slow-moving Fulham Palace Road and every morning it is a man who lets me out. Women have perfected the art of staring straight ahead and pretending they don’t know I’m there.

Yesterday, one even went to the trouble of pulling her headscarf forward a bit so that as she sat, blocking my path, I didn’t even trouble her peripheral vision.

Now this made me mad, and if she was a reporter on the
Daily Mail
, I don’t doubt that when she arrived at work, she wrote a piece saying that men are beasts, and that women can never reach high office. Except prime minister.

And then she would go into all the complex reasons for Road Rage, trying to intellectualise something that just doesn’t need intellectualising.

Doubtless, she would explain that when pushing her trolley round the supermarket, people apologise and smile if they bump into her, or indeed, if she bumps into them.

But in the car park, it’s a different story. Out there, if you make a mistake, other drivers engage their fingers in such a way to suggest you are an onanist. They lean on their horns, and shout a lot. Why does this happen?

Well, it’s perfectly simple. If you bump into someone’s supermarket trolley, you won’t need to swap addresses. You won’t be faced with a £200 bill. You won’t need to argue the toss with insurance companies. You won’t lose your no-claims discount.

And then there’s the open road where you’re going much faster than you are in a car park. If someone makes a mistake on the M1, the result can be a whole lot worse than a cracked indicator lens. You could die, and when you’ve had a near-death experience, it’s only natural that at the very least you shake your fist at the person who caused it.