Motorworld (19 page)

Detroit today, no longer car capital of the world… more like the crime capital. Look at the sign in this car park — tailor-made to make you feel insecure and unwanted.

It’s the most beautiful terrain on earth, but to get there you need specialised machinery, satellite navigation and a guide. And a snowmobile. And a hat. And some soup.

During our two-week stay in Tokyo, we didn’t go out after work once. Had we attempted to do so, we’d still be there now. The traffic jams just have to be seen to be believed.

What is wrong with this picture? In Switzerland, there are said to be eight million guns in the hands of the six million population. Kalashnikovs are fine and can be bought for about £300. Grenade launchers are acceptable too — and they’re even less. But the TVR Griffith is too loud, so it had been banned.

Cheesy. Not my grin. The man. Cheesy was one of those people who could put a smile on anyone’s face. In the villages, he chugs along on his vintage motorcycle and sidecar combo but, on the open road, he prefers the thrill of two-wheeled motoring so we rode along like this for, oh, about twenty miles. If he’s caught, he faces life imprisonment.

Now then. The Western world can do you all sorts of spectacular cars but none is quite so refined or quiet as the Vietnamese cyclo — a sort of bicycle-armchair combo that’s yours for a day for about 10p (including driver). Give him 20p and you get there twice as quickly.

The sheer enormity and emptiness of outback Australia boggles the European mind. If this picture had been taken 100 miles further down the road, it would still have looked exactly the same.

Clyde Puckett. Crazy name. Crazy guy. Really crazy truck. It’s just been voted the ugliest pickup in all of Texas but, even if Clyde wins the state lottery, he won’t sell it. ‘I’d fit power steering and some new tyres,’ he said. But not air conditioning? ‘Texas heat’s good for you. It makes you sweat. Cleans the pores.’

You may think that making Motorworld was one long orgy of fast cars, loose women, supersonic boats and high living. But you’d be forgetting the expense account, candle-lit dinners, the sun-kissed beaches and the five-star hotels.

The buses are a hangover from the British days but so too, sadly, is the bureaucracy which snarls everything up. There has never been an Indian Grand Prix driver. And, in all probability,there never will be.

The F-15 Eagle: f ’in’ fast.

Night after night, stern-faced men and politicians come on the television to tell us that Britain’s roads are the modern-day killing fields. Alongside the M4, the Somme looks like a stroll in the park. Severe, blood-red captions flash up, warning us that excessive speed causes 100,000 deaths and serious injuries every year.

The Department of Transport spends millions on gory, X-certificate commercials that tug at our heart strings and lift our right feet. We are shamed and beaten into submission.

But despite what the doom-mongers say, British drivers are the best in the world, by a country mile. We invented queuing and it shows on the roads. We don’t lean on the horn every time the lights go red. We don’t simply ignore cycles and nor do we dawdle, American-style. We’re fast, organised and, despite what the suits say, safe. I’m not playing with statistics when I say that nobody does it better.

And I think it’s all thanks to Nissan.

Anyone who is not the slightest bit bothered about cars is likely to be a poor driver. People who don’t care about handling or performance; people who buy a car simply as a means of getting about are not going to worry if they indicate left while turning right once in a while.

So what if they trundle along a country road at twenty, causing ten-mile tailbacks? They can’t park, don’t understand roundabouts and are not averse, once in a while, to driving the wrong way down a motorway.

All these people want from a car is reliability. And that leads them, inexorably, to the door of their nearest Nissan showroom.

The good news is that when you or I see a Nissan, we know it may do something unusual and can take appropriate action. By herding all the bad, uninterested, mealy-mouthed and selfish drivers in one type of car, the roads are immeasurably safer.

They’re also stationary, which might have something to do with it. Years of under-investment by successive governments mean we have fewer miles of motorway per car than any other noteworthy industrialised power.