What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (15 page)

We’re told that between Christmas and the new year, 8 billion British people have defied the troublesome economy and, between them, spent £70 trillion on mildly discounted products in the sales. This sounds like good news. But if you examine the pictures of those rampaging around Oxford Street you will notice quite quickly that every single one of them was Chinese.

The Chinese love a bargain. But what they love even more than that is a brand name. I was in Beijing last month and was told, time and time again, that local produce had no appeal at all to the country’s new rich. They want Tommy Hilfiger and Prada and Ray-Ban. And if they can get these badges at the lowest possible prices – well, that’s got to be worth the cost of a return ticket to Heathrow.

That’s what you need these days to survive out there on the high street: a name that’s known. Because a name that’s known is a name that can be trusted. Fairy Journeyman HoneyWasp perfume may be excellent and good value but it cuts no ice with a bottle bearing the Chanel legend.

It’s not just the Chinese, either. I have a friend who dresses in quite the most hideous clothes you have ever seen. They look like they have been made either as a joke or by someone who was being deliberately stupid. But when I explain this to him, he always points to the label and says, with a hurt tremor in his voice, ‘But it’s Dolce & Gabbana.’

I guess I’m just as bad really. I only buy Ray-Ban sunglasses and Sony televisions. Not because I know they’re the best but because the names have a Ready Brek aura of comfort-blanket
warmth about them. And don’t claim you’re immune. Because I bet you’d rather do business with a man called Victor than a man called Vince.

In the world of cars, a brand name is everything. While in China I drove a car called the Trumpchi. Want one? Of course you don’t, because who’s behind it? What’s it made from? And where? I could tell you that it’s hewn from a gold bar, costs six pence and runs on water and you’d say, ‘How intriguing,’ as you wrote out a cheque for a Volkswagen.

You know where you are with a Volkswagen and you’re right. Every day, thousands of engineers work to the best of their abilities to make sure that every single car they make upholds the company’s reputation for durability and safety. Protecting the brand name: it’s everything.

Unless you are running General Motors. Protecting all the brands it controls is nowhere near as important as making any damn thing to keep the bankruptcy wolf from eating the company’s front door. Which explains the Chevrolet Orlando LTZ in which I endured a mercifully brief drive recently.

Louis Chevrolet was born in Switzerland and after a brief spell in Canada arrived in America where he drove racing cars for Fiat and made road cars for himself. Fairly soon, though, he sold his car company to GM and went off to have fun. In 1929 he lost every cent he had made in the stock market crash and ended up in Detroit working on the Chevrolet production line. That was sad, but worse was to come …

Because today, he is six feet under the ground in Indianapolis, spinning wildly at the Orlando people carrier that bears both his name and the stylized Swiss flag badge that he designed. The company he founded has always had one eye on budget performance. This was its guiding principle as far back as the 1930s, when it offered the cheapest six-cylinder car in the world.

In the 1950s it came up with the plastic Corvette and in the 1960s it was among the first companies in the world to fit a production car with a turbocharger. But all the while, it was plugging
away with its small block V8. The mainstay of blue-collar speed. The heart that pumped the Camaro and the Nova SS into the world’s consciousness.

This is what we think about when we think of Chevrolet. Men with tattoos and their hats on back to front, whooping wildly as their thunderous and wondrous machines skittle off the line in a shuddering roar of smoke, axle tramp and more smoke. Not sophisticated. But nice.

But, we are told, there is no place for this sort of thing in a country full of Al Gore, windmills, rising oil prices and Mexican pool cleaners whose houses are now worthless.

And to make matters worse, Chevrolet has always been run by the Flat Earth Society. The company may have been founded by a Swiss but nobody who followed in his footsteps ever had an atlas. To them, the world started at Los Angeles and ended at Boston. They didn’t sell cars outside America because, as far as they were concerned, it was the fifty states … and then some jungle.

Well, they’ve had a wake-up call now and what they’ve done is panic. Instead of sitting down and thinking, Right, we must protect the brand with a range of fun, fast, quintessentially American cars that we must sell in places such as Englandland and the People’s Republic of Japanland, they’ve run around like headless chickens, being chased from pillar to post by clueless government wallahs who want a return on the bailout cash now. ‘Now!!! D’you hear?’

The result is the Orlando. Built in South Korea from the same platform that props up the Vauxhall Astra, it is a 15½ foot, seven-seater people carrier of monumental awfulness.

We will start with the seats. Yes, there are seven but there is no one alive today that could fit in any of the five in the back. And there is no boot at all, unless you fold the two rearmost chairs into the floor. It’s hopeless.

But it’s not as bad as the engine. For the first mile, I was absolutely sure it was a diesel, but then I noticed that the rev counter
read to 6,000. Dear God in heaven, I thought. This ailing cement mixer is running on petrol. It’s a 1.8-litre four-cylinder unit that does nothing well. Even movement is a struggle. I was staggered to notice the car was fitted with traction control. Why? That’s like fitting traction control to a chest freezer.

On top of the lack of power, it’s also thirsty, unrefined and sounds like a wounded whale. And none of that should surprise you. Because asking a Chevy engineer to design a four-cylinder engine is like asking a man in a burger van to poach a halibut. It’s still cooking, but it’s not the sort of cooking he’s used to.

I should say at this point that the prices are quite low. The LTZ model is just £18,310, which doesn’t sound too bad. But if you want any colour other than white, you must pay an extra £410, and if you want satnav, then that’s another £765. What are they thinking of? Why fit traction control, which is unnecessary, and make us pay extra for a road map, which is?

Handling? That’s terrible. The ride? Terrible. Seat comfort? Terrible. And to top it all off, it was plainly styled by a man who gets tumescent at the thought of house bricks, and finished off on the inside with a range of plastics that feel like Cellophane.

Some people may buy this car so they can tell their friends they have a Chevrolet. They won’t buy another.

1 January 2012

We like to imagine these days that we live in a global village and that everything is the same wherever we go. But this isn’t actually the case. The Coca-Cola you drink in Russia tastes completely different from the Coca-Cola you drink in Ross-on-Wye. The Big Mac you eat in Cape Town tastes nothing like the Big Mac you eat in Cape Canaveral. The girl to whom you make love in Greece will be different from the girl to whom you make love in Grimsby.

You would imagine also that when it comes to cars the world is one harmonious, homogenized lake of similar goals, similar machinery and similar driving styles.

Not so. In the past eight weeks I’ve been to India, Italy, America, China and Australia. And although all these places are huddled together on one tiny blue pinprick in the vastness of space, they might as well have been in different galaxies.

In Australia, for instance, people drive much the same sorts of car as we do, on the correct side of the road and in a similar fashion.

However, every single Bruce is infected with a partisan attitude to motoring that you will find nowhere else. In Scotland there is Celtic and Rangers. In America there is north and south. In Australia there is Ford and Holden.

An Aussie friend of mine – a barrister – tried to argue recently that this was a working-class issue, but within moments he was busy proving himself wrong. ‘I mean, I drive an Audi, so I couldn’t care less about the Ford and Holden war,’ he said, before going on: ‘I mean, deep down, I’m a Ford man, like my
father before me. I’m from a Ford family and, given the choice, would have a Falcon. I actually hate Holdens. Hate them, d’you hear?’

By this stage he was banging the table. ‘I would bleed blue blood for Ford and I would strike down with furious anger those in Holdens who would attempt to poison my brothers. Holdens are the worst things on God’s green earth. The worst!’

There is no equivalent of this in China, although it seems there are two very different types of Chinese motorist. You have the rich ones, who buy expensive European cars that they drive as fast as they’ll go, and the not-so-rich ones, who buy Trumpchis and Roewes and dither about at junctions, terrified that they are about to be mown down by a twelve-year-old in a 140 mph Range Rover Sport.

In India the car is not a device for moving you and your family from A to B. It is a device designed exclusively to take you and your family into the next life. You buy a car. You set off. You have an accident and that’s that. Someone is killed on the roads there every three seconds.

Then you have America, where, generally speaking, the car is a horse. And you don’t wear the poor creature out by galloping everywhere. You plod at about 35 mph, pausing only to shoot at someone coming the other way. Against that background there is no call for finely balanced handling and good looks. It’s why there has never been an American sports car. Not one. Ever.

Whereas in Europe, with our twisting roads and active minds, every single car ever made – with the possible exception of the Austin Allegro – has the spirit of the Mille Miglia at its heart. Here, a car that won’t handle properly is as wrong as a horse with no legs would be to the Yanks.

Let me put it this way. I can think of only two mid-engined cars from America’s mainstream manufacturers and only two from Japan. Australia has never made one – or not a serious one, at least. Nor has India. Nor has China. Whereas here there have been mid-engined cars from Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, De
Tomaso, Pagani, MG, Porsche, Rover, Renault, Peugeot, Audi, BMW, Jaguar and, if you stretch it a bit, Volkswagen, Skoda and even Hillman.

With my Chinese or Indian hat on, I can tell you that mid-engined cars are a damn nuisance. Because there will come a day when two people will want a lift. Or when you realize that your shopping won’t fit in the boot. They also scrape their noses on even the tiniest of speed bumps and are very uncomfortable.

But we Europeans like them, nevertheless, because the weight is at the centre, which means they’re bound to be better balanced than cars with their powerplants at the front. We also like the styling that results.

And the sheer frivolity of a machine that has no practical purpose. Mid-engined cars make us priapic. Which is a good thing because they also tell the world that we haven’t had kids yet.

Occasionally, though, a car maker will forget all this and try to make a mid-engined supercar that is more than just a toy. And that brings me neatly on to Audi and the R8. It’s very good. With a V10 it’s spectacular to drive, but because it’s all so sensible it doesn’t ignite the small boy that lives in us all. It feels like a big TT.

Well, now Audi has obviously realized the futility of venturing further down this road – an everyday supercar is as silly as an everyday ball gown – which is why it has produced the limited-edition R8 GT.

GT stands for grand tourer but it isn’t that at all. It’s a harder, lighter, louder, more powerful version of the original and it comes in two specs. You can have a road-going version, which I recommend, or the more focused track-day version that came to my house.

This has a switch in the ashtray that does nothing at all, a fire extinguisher, some scaffolding in the back and idiotic four-point racing harnesses that take six hours to adjust and three hours to fasten up and mean that when you’re driving along you can’t reach half the controls or the glove box.

There was much to hate about this car, then. But if you peel away the track-day frippery and nonsense, there was actually a lot to love. They may have only skimmed this and chiselled away at that to save a miserable 100 kg – most of which was then offset by the silly roll cage in my car – but the GT feels light. Much lighter than the standard car. And as a result of that, it feels more awake, more eager.

This is something Europeans like. American testers found that on a track, if you pushed it, there was a lot of understeer, but I fail to see how this is possible. Yes, the R8 GT is four-wheel drive, and that is usually a recipe for the nose to run wide. But so little power is sent up front, and the chassis is so good, I found that, if anything, it was the other way around. It was the back that stepped out of line. We Europeans like that, too.

Then there’s the engine. This is a 5.2-litre Lamborghini-based V10 that has been fettled so that it now produces 552 horsepower. And it’s power that all comes in a rush near the top of the rev band. That encourages you to hang on to each gear as long as possible, and that in turn unleashes a soundtrack that’s totally at odds with the featherweight feel of the car. You expect it to howl, or shriek. But it bellows – a deep, low, frightening sound. It’s fantastic.

So’s the ride. So’s the driving position. So’s the way Audi has sensibly left most of the luxury equipment on board rather than follow Porsche’s lead by taking it all out. And then charging you to put it back.

My only real gripe with this car is that the single-clutch flappy-paddle gearbox is a bit dim-witted. And maybe £152,000 is a bit much when for a little bit more you could have a Ferrari 458. Which is a tiny bit better.

8 January 2012

Back in the mid-1960s a South Korean construction company called Hyundai decided it would like to start making cars. With the financial muscle of Manchester City, it could have employed anyone to lead this new venture, but, for reasons that are not clear, the man it eventually selected was an Englander called George Turnbull.

George had made a name for himself as managing director of Austin Morris, where he had steered the Morris Marina from what must have been a drunken doodle on the back of a beer mat into what passed in the Midlands back then for ‘production’.

Rather than work with Koreans, who obviously wouldn’t know a shock absorber from a stick of rhubarb, George brought with him a team of other Englanders, including the man who’d designed the chassis of Princess Anne’s car of choice, the Reliant Scimitar.

The car they created was called the Pony – rhyming slang, probably – and apparently it was exported to Britain, although I don’t remember hearing about it, seeing one or having met anyone who had decided that their life was incomplete without an oriental Marina on the drive. Certainly I never had a picture of it on my bedroom wall.

No matter. Thanks to healthy sales in motoring meccas such as Egypt and Ecuador, it was a success, and even though Mr Turnbull had gone off by this stage to make Hillman Hunters in Iran, among other things, Hyundai launched a replacement model. Through a lack of imagination, this too was called the
Pony and was described in the brochure as having ‘rectangular halogen headlamps’ and ‘easy-to-read gauges’.

The company was reduced to mentioning these rather trifling things because there really wasn’t much else of note. I drove this car way back, and still, even to this day, I can recall the horror. Everything from the vinyl upholstery to the ungainly exterior styling was hideous, and, worse, none of the components seemed to be joined up.

There was a lever that sprouted out of the floor, but using it to engage a gear was so hard that by the time you found something that felt promising, the car had coasted to a halt and you faced the prospect of trying to find first again.

I believe that the gearlever was connected to the box with string. And that the steering column ended up in a big box of yogurt. If you twirled it fast enough, the yogurt would spin and centrifugal force would eventually cause the front wheels to change direction. Often one would go left and one right, but you usually didn’t notice, partly because you were too exhausted by twirling the wheel and partly because, by this stage, you’d have run over a small piece of grit and your back would have broken.

Then there was the engine. Oh dear. I distinctly remember thinking after just a few miles, by which time I’d reached 6 or 7 mph, that oil was a much better lubricant than the garden furniture Hyundai had plainly decided to use instead. The only good news was that you could never reach a high-enough speed to be worried by the fact that the brakes were made from old milk bottle tops and didn’t work.

What more could we have expected, though? Asking Korea to make a car at this time was like asking the residents of a sink estate in Algeria to make a space shuttle today. It’s not going to end well, especially if you employ the father of the Morris Marina to help out. And yet somehow it has ended well, because here we are, several decades down the line, and while many European and American car companies have foundered, Hyundai has become the fifth-biggest car maker in the world.

Its latest offering is called the i40 and it’s not bad at all. It’s similar in size to a Vauxhall Insignia and Ford Mondeo, although it is better-looking and, if you go for the eco-models, just as economical. It’s also a tiny bit cheaper, but gone are the days when a ‘made in Korea’ tag meant huge savings. You pay European prices these days because the cars are just as good.

The diesel engine in my test car was not enormously refined but it managed to pump out plenty of horsepower while not suffering from a prodigious thirst. The steering’s a bit odd, but at least when you turn the steering wheel, both front wheels turn in the same direction. And when you press the brake pedal, you slow down. There are no surprises, nasty or otherwise. The interior feels as if it were made by Honda. The suspension is conventional. The gearbox is unremarkable.

Hyundai said that when it was designing the i40, it took as its benchmark the Volkswagen Passat and Toyota Avensis. And that’s what it has ended up with: an inoffensive, odourless blend of the two. It is just ‘some car’. And as a tool it’s absolutely fine. Which is why, of course, it’s not fine at all.

In the olden days, when Korea was a war, not a country, everyone had a four-door saloon. We viewed anything with a hatchback as being rather suspicious, and perhaps even a bit French. Nowadays, though, the market for conventional saloons has all but gone. We like our cars to be tall or big or roofless or made to look like something from the 1950s. We like them to be interesting, so conventional front-drive turbodiesel saloons just don’t cut it. They’re like going out in M&S trousers.

It takes a special kind of dullard to look at the wealth of possibilities in the land of internal combustion and say, ‘Yes. I want a four-door saloon.’ And it takes an even more unusual soul to say, ‘And the four-door saloon I want is a Hyundai i40.’

The biggest problem is that all the great car companies were founded by a single man with a vision. Colin Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, Sir William Lyons and so on. Hyundai, on the other hand … Well, it was started by a man called Chung Ju-yung,
who was born in what’s now North Korea, into extreme poverty. It was the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and then some. On one occasion he managed to raise enough for a train ticket out of his village only by nicking a cow from his dad and selling it.

Later, in the big city, he drifted from job to job – one minute a docker, the next a handyman. Eventually he started a car-repair workshop, but during the war the Japanese colonial government merged his fledgling business with a steel company. And that was that. Mr Chung ended up back where he’d started. In a rural village in the north, with a dad who had no cow.

When the war ended, he started a construction firm he felt would be able to help out with the rebuilding needed. He was right, and today Hyundai is a multinational conglomerate. And its car business makes Mercedes-Benz look like Plymouth Argyle. One factory alone is capable of making 1.6 million vehicles a year.

It is a remarkable rags-to-riches story and I should like to have met the man who started it all. But do I want to buy one of his cars? No. For the same reason that I’d rather buy cheese in a delicatessen than in Walmart. The ingredients may be the same. The taste may be pretty similar too. But you would rather buy from someone who wants to make cheese than from someone who makes cheese mainly to make money.

22 January 2012