What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (12 page)

Back in 1995, Ford toured the world, showing off an exciting new concept car – a small two-seat roadster that was made from carbon fibre. Yum, yum, we all thought. We shall be very interested in buying that should the bigwigs in Detroit decide to put it into production.

Sadly, though, by the time it reached the showrooms, it had sprouted a roof, a hatchback and acres of pleblon upholstery. Furthermore, it was made from steel instead of carbon fibre and it looked like a teapot. It was called the Ka.

Ten years later Ford did it again, showing us a fantastic-looking concept called Iosis. It said at the time that the next version of the Mondeo would look very similar. And it did, except for every single detail.

This is the trouble with concept cars. They do not have to adhere to pesky EU rules about how high the headlamps must be from the ground and how much of the tyres’ width must be covered by bodywork. They don’t have to be crash-tested, and neither does every single piece have to pass through the company’s accounts department. They are freestyle cars. Flights of fancy.

They don’t even have to work. Many years ago Peugeot turned up at the British motor show with a concept car that looked like a cross between an America’s Cup catamaran, the glider Pierce Brosnan used in the remake of
The Thomas Crown Affair
and a sex toy. However, on the downside, it didn’t have an engine. It didn’t even have a space where an engine could go.

In recent times concept cars have started to look a bit more
like the cars you and I do buy. But even so, all of the little details – the fat tyres and the funky lighting and the weird door handles – are still rejected by the bean counters for being too expensive, or by the production line manager for being too complex to fit. This means the car that finally makes it to the showroom never looks quite as good as the car that appeared under a sea of girly flesh at a motor show. Concept cars, then, are the font of disappointment.

By far the worst offender in this is Jaguar. Almost without exception, every one of its new cars in recent times has been a shoulder-sagging visual let-down because, just before it was unveiled, the company had produced a concept to show how brilliant it could have looked if only there were no rules. In short, Jag’s designers have spent the past twenty years writing cheques that the rest of the company cannot cash.

However, a couple of weeks ago Jaguar unveiled a concept car called the C-X16, and if you examine it very carefully you will see that there are no details that are obviously impossible to mass-produce. Maybe the sideways-opening rear window will have to go because of some obscure bit of legislation from Brussels, but other than that, it looks real. It looks possible. And, more than that, it looks absolutely sensational.

It is quite similar in appearance to both the Jaguar XK and the Aston Martin V8, which is perhaps unsurprising since all three were styled by the same man. But it’s smaller than both of those, and cheaper, too. They’re talking about a price tag in the region of £55,000. For that, you would get a supercharged V6 engine, which would then be boosted further by a Formula One-style KERS, or kinetic energy recovery system. Engage this by pushing a little button on the steering wheel and the 375 horsepower coming at you from the petrol engine would be increased momentarily by 94 more from an electric motor. Will that be a showroom feature? Who knows? Price Waterhouse Coopers, probably.

I’ll be honest. I’m very excited about this car and especially
the convertible version that’s bound to follow. There’s just one request, and I’m directing this at Jag’s chassis people, who have been a bit hardcore of late. While it is very important to keep the oversteer-crazed helmsmen at
Autocar
happy, can I please remind you that most of the people who’ll want to buy this car will be middle-aged with bad backs? They will want, therefore, a decent ride. This has to be your priority.

Anyway, that’s then, this is now and we have a new Jaguar XF to think about. Recently, when reviewing the new Audi A6, I said the Jag was not as good for a number of reasons. And then, in a shoddy piece of journalism, didn’t go on to say what they were. Truth is, I couldn’t remember. It’s just that the XF is a bit like Cheryl Cole. I recognize that she blows up many frocks, but I don’t see what the fuss is about, frankly.

Now, however, there’s a revamped model. It has a restyled bonnet and tweaked front end and new gills in the front wings. It looks fine, but outside a red carpet event it doesn’t look quite as fine as the BMW 5-series or the Audi A6. Somehow they look more modern and more expensive.

It’s the same story on the inside. I like the minimalism Jaguar’s designers tried to achieve, but it would have been better if they’d succeeded. I’m loath to say this, but it all looks a bit cheap. The headlamp switch, for instance, is on the indicator stalk. There’s only one reason to put it there: to save money. That’s why Mercedes and BMW don’t. Because they know we know.

Still, the most important new feature in this car is the engine. It’s a 2.2-litre four-cylinder diesel, and this is the first time Jag has ever used a four-pot paraffin stove in any of its cars. I was expecting great things because other diesel engines in the Jag and Land Rover range are excellent.

Unfortunately, this is not a Jag engine. In essence, it’s the same unit Ford, Citroën and Peugeot use and I’m afraid it’s not very good. It’s not refined and it’s not as economical as the engine BMW fits. What’s more, these days the government – idiotically – taxes you according to the composition of gases
coming out of your tailpipe. And the fact is that the Jag’s engine produces way more CO2 than BMW’s equivalent.

There’s more. Every few thousandths of a second, the computer that runs the engine in a modern car takes stock of the prevailing conditions. It checks the temperature, the position of the driver’s foot, the gear he’s selected and the barometric pressure, and it compares its findings with a programmed map so that it knows precisely how much fuel to squirt into the cylinder to provide the perfect balance between power and economy.

To try to get the emissions down, Jaguar has very obviously fitted a map that demands the absolute barest minimum of fuel to keep the engine alive. As a result, around town it feels constantly on the verge of stalling. You can get round the problem by switching the eight-speed gearbox (why?) to ‘sport’ mode, but that rather negates the reason you bought a diesel in the first place.

All in all, then, this car is not Jag’s finest hour. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the BMW 5-series is better in almost every way.

However, it has at least given me an idea. What if car companies started making concept cars that were uglier and less exciting than the actual cars they spawned? That way we’d always view a new car in the showroom with delight, rather than a tinge of disappointment.

18 September 2011

With a deserved reputation for being a bit hopeless with my hands, I approached the job of building a dam very seriously. So I climbed onto my new six-wheel-drive ex-army Alvis Supacat and spent the morning driving around the farm looking for suitable stones.

When my hands and lungs were bleeding from the effort of loading them into the ‘boot’, I headed off to my newly dredged pond to start work. Using skills I’d learnt from watching documentaries on the building of the Hoover Dam in America, I started by erecting a temporary blockage using bits of old skirting board I’d found in a skip. This didn’t work.

So I gave up with the idea of a temporary dam and plunged straight in with the real one. And after about an hour, I realized I wasn’t making much progress at all. Even though I had many stones and some of them were quite large, they didn’t fit together very well, or they sank into the ooze. Either way, the water carried on flowing, oblivious to my efforts.

This caused me to break out a spade. And what a stupid, terrible, ungainly thing this is. You plunge it into the ooze, and everything you pick up simply falls back into the water again. Pretty soon I was sweating like an Egyptian boilerman and my back muscles felt like they might actually be on fire. And still the water kept on coming.

However, all the while, I’d had my eye on a mini-digger that the pond dredgers had left behind. ‘You can use it, if you want,’ one of them had said as he left for the weekend. And I’d nodded and said, ‘Sure,’ not being prepared to admit to another man,
especially not a son of the soil, that I had absolutely no idea how it worked.

Men are supposed to understand diggers like we understand testicles. But I don’t. The last time I’d used one, I accidentally pulled a seal’s head off, and damn nearly killed my son. And that was a tiny little thing. The one sitting by my pond, winking at me, was much larger and had many more levers, all of which were incomprehensible. But I decided to give it a try anyway.

It took a while to realize that the big scoopy thing on the front wouldn’t move unless both the big red levers were pushed forwards, and that if I wanted the digger itself to move forwards, I had to pull the levers in front of me backwards. But pretty soon I had it by the water’s edge, scooping up silt like my actual name was Seamus O’Gallagher. And ten minutes after that, the dam was built. I was very proud.

I was so brimming with confidence that after I’d celebrated with a crusty sandwich, some pickle and a cold beer, I started up the dredger man’s dumper truck and spent a little while using it to knock down various dead trees. Then I cleared a spring that was jammed with flotsam from the woods. Then I made a waterfall. I was in heaven. A man and his machines at one with nature. I was an artist and internal combustion was my brush. Later today I’m going to buy a chainsaw.

It really is hard to think of any machine that provides more enjoyment than the tools of landscape architecture. Diggers. Bulldozers. Dumper trucks. My beloved Supacat. There’s an effortlessness to the hydraulics, which means that at tickover there’s enough power to shift in a moment what took God himself 450 million years to create. When you are in a JCB, you really are a master of the universe.

You have much the same feeling in the new Mercedes SLS roadster, which comes with a bonnet that seems to cover a slightly larger area than Wyoming. That’s one of the many, many things I love about this car. Because you sit right at the back, in the boot almost, you have a sense that you could have a huge
accident and simply not know about it for a week or two. Imperious: that’s how you feel.

As I have said on many occasions, the coupé version of this car is one of my all-time favourites. But it does have a drawback: its gull-wing doors. Yes, they look very interesting at a motor show, and yes, they hark back to the original Mercedes 300, but when you are in Wolverhampton, and people are looking, you feel like a complete knob every time you get into and out of your car. The only reason doors like this are fitted is for showing off. And in this country, show-offs are held in dim regard.

There’s another problem, too. If you roll an SLS and end up on the roof, with petrol sloshing about, life is very tricky because, of course, you can’t open the doors to get out. To get round this issue, the hinges are fitted with explosive bolts that fire when the car is upside down. That means a) you are driving around with a bomb right next to your head and b) the car is heavier than necessary.

Happily, the roadster – for obvious reasons – has conventional doors. This means no embarrassment on the high street, no bombs and no excess weight. Yes, the car is heavier than the coupé, thanks to specially strengthened sills. But because the doors are lighter, the overall increase is negligible. Which means the performance is not affected in any way you’d notice.

It’d be a good test of Wayne Rooney’s new barnet, the roadster, because my God it’s fast. And with the roof down it feels almost ridiculous. You put your foot down, the double-clutch gearbox responds in an instant and you are catapulted towards the horizon in what feels like a category 70 hurricane.

Then there’s the AMG soundtrack. This is a car that assaults all of your senses. It batters you. Think of it this way. The coupé is a Gulfstream biz jet. Sleek. Fast. Comfortable (ish). The roadster is a Gulfstream biz jet, too. Only with no roof. Imagine that and you have an idea of what it’s like to drive this car down the A361.

But it’s not all about straight-line speed. By mounting the gearbox
at the back, and using a carbon-fibre prop shaft that weighs about the same as a mouse, the engineers have made sure the weight is distributed perfectly. You feel that when you hustle it and it surprises you: because you can’t really understand how something with a bonnet that vast can feel so small and agile. And you especially can’t understand when your ears are bleeding and your hair is in the slipstream three counties back.

It’s not a Ferrari. It won’t grip like that. It isn’t supposed to. It doesn’t grip at all, if I’m honest. Turn the traction control off and it will spend most of its time sideways. But it all feels easy. It’s not a sports car, and it’s not a GT car. The ride’s too hard for that. It’s a muscle car, really.

Bad things? Well, there is a hint of scuttle shake – you can feel it through the wheel – the lumbar support controls look as if they were bought from a motorist discount store in the 1970s and while the gearbox may work well at speed, it’s dim-witted and a bit jerky around town. Minor things, really.

Good things? Everything else. The roof is fast, you get all the usual Mercedes trimmings and the price is about £30,000 less than I was expecting.

I would quite understand why you’d buy a Ferrari 458 instead. It’s a better driver’s car. And I’d be stumped if someone asked why the SLS costs twice as much as the ostensibly similar Jaguar XKR. Really, it’s a question of each to his own. Some people like to play golf. Some like to build dams. Some prefer the delicacy of an Italian supercar. Some, the charm of a Jag. But if you ‘get’ the SLS, nothing else will do.

25 September 2011