What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (20 page)

Almost every country has a unique detail that sets it apart from anywhere else. In France, for instance, you can’t walk for more than 100 yards without treading on a dog turd. Australia has too many dangerous animals. Germany has too much armpit hair. India needs a spring clean. And then we get to Sweden, where I spent a recent weekend. The little detail here is odd: there aren’t enough chairs.

I stayed at a boutique hotel and on the first day met colleagues in the dining room. After a while we were asked to move because the table had been reserved by someone else for dinner. This was fine, except the only other available seating in the whole building was two ornamental sofas on the second-floor landing.

They didn’t appeal, so we moved next door to the Grand. This is a big old-fashioned hotel and quickly we found a table with enough seating for all of us. However, each time one of us went to the bar or the lavatory, the waiter would take his or her chair away and give it to someone else.

Later that night we arrived at a lovely restaurant where we had booked a table for twelve. And it did indeed have a table around which twelve people could sit. But there were only ten chairs. The same thing happened the next night, and the next.

In our green room, backstage at the city’s ice hockey arena, we had a sofa and a chair. About half what we needed. A call went out for more seating, and two hours before we left to come home, a man arrived with a moth-eaten leatherette beanbag.

Someone suggested that Sweden used to have enough chairs for everyone but Ikea had exported all of them to Britain. I
think, however, the real reason is that, in a socially democratic utopia such as this, it would be considered bourgeois if everyone could sit down at the same time.

In Sweden everyone’s car was either light grey or dark grey. The sky was grey, too. And the sea. No one appeared to be rich and no one looked poor. The girls were pretty but not too pretty. And the buildings around the harbour were lovely in an unmemorable way.

They’ve built a museum to house a ship that sank 380 years ago and were expecting 200,000 visitors a year. In fact they’re getting that many every two months and you sense they are actually quite embarrassed about the success.

We see this sort of thing with the Swedish boat I used to take a tour of the archipelago. It was a 40-foot carbon-fibre twin-engined cruiser with a price tag of £400,000. That’s a huge amount of money for a boat of this size, so to make sure it appealed to the locals it had been styled to look like a Somalian’s fridge and fitted with an interior that put me in mind of a budget French hotel. Naturally, it was licensed to carry eight but there were only six seats.

This is what you have to remember about Sweden. You can have money but you’d better not let it show. They would find a Sunseeker ‘revolting’. They would think
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding
was science fiction. They’ve even named themselves after a nondescript vegetable.

Which brings me on to the ideal Swedish car. It’s the new five-seat BMW 328i, which in Stockholm is probably sold to school-run mums as an eight-seat MPV.

The BMW 3-series is now one of only two traditional four-door saloons to feature in Britain’s top 10 bestseller list, which means it must strike a chord here, too. And it’s not hard to see why: it’s the modern-day Ford Cortina. A no-nonsense design, done well.

Well, when I say no-nonsense … In the olden days a BMW 328i would have had a 2.8-litre engine and it would have had
six cylinders. But, to keep the European Union green counters happy, the latest 328i has a 2-litre four-cylinder turbo. Despite the smallness, you get 241 bhp, a bit more than in the equivalent Audi, but the BMW produces only 147 carbon dioxides. For a car with this much oomph, that is deeply impressive.

There are many reasons for this. One is the cleverness of the turbocharger design, which not only keeps the polar bears happy but also eliminates lag. It must be there – the chasm between putting your foot down and picking up speed – but you really can’t feel it.

Then there’s weight. Even though the new car is bigger than the old one, it weighs about 40 kg less. That’s good for the ecos, and as a bonus it makes the whole package feel livelier. And it really does feel very lively indeed.

It doesn’t tear your face off, and it doesn’t make much of a noise, but this car can make serious progress, blurring its way though the eight cogs in the optional automatic gearbox and humming a happy little tune to itself as you scythe past other traffic and arc through corners as if you were a world championship water-ski-ist. This car is more like a scientific instrument than a means of transport. It’s delightful.

The gear lever is a bit annoying. It always bongs at you when you try to move it about, but the Sport/Normal selector is a joy. You simply press a button and then choose which bit of the car you’d like to be what. The best solution? Lots of speed and a nice comfy ride. Then it’s even better than delightful.

However, there are one or two issues that need to be addressed. First of all, it looks pinched. In the past, all BMWs looked as if their body had been stretched to fit over the wheels. It’s what made them look purposeful. There was a sense the shell could barely contain the power that lay within.

But the new car looks pinched – like an elephant on a unicycle. And it takes a very keen eye to tell the fast 328i from the cement salesman’s diesel. I’m all in favour of quiet restraint and
hiding your light under a bushel when you are out and about. But BMW has gone too far with this new car. It’s a bit too Swedish.

The interior is beautifully organized and well made, but the 328i I tested was fitted with a steering wheel that felt as if it was covered in sandpaper. Cheap doesn’t really begin to describe the pound-shop nature of this item. And it gets worse because my car was equipped with optional wood trim of such monumental terribleness, I longed for every journey to end so I could get out and not look at it any more.

It looks exactly like the ‘wood’ used to make a Disneyland log canoe. In other words, it doesn’t look like wood at all. It looks like Fred Flintstone’s club. Like a giant Cadbury Flake. The sort of thing that no one, not even Wayne Rooney, would find appealing, attractive, interesting, tasteful, desirable, nice or real.

Then there’s the problem with buying a 3-series. Go on, try it. Engage your internet, go to BMW’s website and try to make sense of what’s there. You can’t. Not till you’ve found your reading glasses, and then gone to Boots to buy a pair that is even more powerful. And even when you are able to read the microdot typeface, your computer won’t have the plug-in necessary to enjoy any of the site’s features. Not that you will understand what’s on offer anyway, because it’s either flowery rubbish or techno gobbledygook.

Soon you will give up with the complexity and buy something else. Well, I would, and that’s a shame because whatever you buy will be worse.

15 April 2012

Until quite recently it was pretty easy to run the public relations department of a car company. You organized foreign jollies for journalists, you got one of them to translate the vehicle’s publicity pack into something close to English and then you ran a fleet of press demonstrators.

And your boss was happy if the journalist you flew out to St Tropez, and furnished with a fully fuelled car for the week, gave it a friendly notice in his paper. Even if the paper in question was the
Welsh Pig Breeders’ Gazette
.

But then Audi employed a man called Jon Zammett as its head of PR, and he decided he wasn’t really that bothered about small puff pieces in provincial farming magazines. What Zammett wanted was to see Audi in
Hello!
.

So on the quiet he began to furnish various celebrities with Audis. He has been so successful that now pretty well every star we put in
Top Gear
’s Reasonably Priced Car tells us that he has an Audi and that he’s very pleased with it. And it’s not just celebrities, either.

Why do you think Zammett was invited to last year’s royal wedding? Why does he now appear on red-carpet party guest lists more than Jordan and Victoria Beckham combined? Simple. You have a face? You want wheels? He is a one-stop shop in a suit.

It was a brilliant wheeze, a fairly low-cost plan that took Audi out of the oily rags and into the diamond-encrusted, pap-spattered glitter ball of celebrity. Frankly, the man’s a genius.

Providing stars with cars was only part of his headline-grabbing
antics. Because in the past celebrities were expected to make their own way from their sumptuous homes to the glittering gala do. This meant they would turn up in front of the flashguns in whatever their local chauffeur company happened to be running at the time – an S-class Mercedes, usually.

Zammett realized this was a lost opportunity, and so at a secret location – in Warwickshire – he keeps a vast flotilla of Audi A8s and the contact details of a hundred or so former coppers who can be called upon at a moment’s notice to fire up the fleet and descend on the Empire in Leicester Square.

Just go and check all those old copies of
Hello!
that you keep by the lavatory. Notice how the car from which a knees-together star with a Daz-white smile is climbing is always an Audi. Zammett did that.

It’s had a marked effect on sales. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when every car firm had its back to the wall, Audi actually shifted more metal than ever before. One company chief said, ‘We note that there is a recession in full swing at the moment. But we have decided not to take part.’

Last year in Britain alone Audi sold 113,797 cars. That’s almost 32,000 more than Mercedes and a staggering 73,000 more than it sold back in 1999.

That’s the result of today’s strange obsession with celebrity. Or is it? Could it be that the new Audi A8 is simply better than its mighty rival the S-class?

In terms of looks, no. If you take away the Audi’s grille, which looks like George Michael’s beard, it could be a Toyota or a Honda. That’s fine if you want to maintain a low profile, but if you want to cut a dash, you’d be better off with the Merc. That thing’s got serious presence.

Value? It’s hard to say, really, because there are countless models and each is available with a vast array of options. The car I tested was a four-wheel-drive petrol-powered 3.0 TFSI, and that’s just shy of £60,000 – a tiny bit less than an entry-level S-class.

So what about space? Well, I was recently chauffeured in an A8 to the ballet and I fell asleep in the back. So it’s fine. It’s also fine in the front. But then it would be. It’s a really, really big car.

So now we must consider what it’s like to drive, and this is where Audis in recent years have come a cropper. The company’s engineers have never understood that road-worker Johnnys in Britain are not quite as thorough as their opposite numbers in Germany. Which means that big Audis in the past have always been way too firmly sprung. Or, to put it another way, uncomfortable.

The new model is different because the driver is allowed to choose just how soft and gooey he wants the ride home to be. And we’re not talking here simply about the suspension. Oh no.

You’ve various settings for that, including Comfort, Automatic and I-Want-to-Go-Around-the-Nürburgring. You have a similar variety of choices for the engine and gearbox, the steering, the differential, the lights and even the seatbelts. Why? This is a large car, designed for large people who just want to get home after a large lunch. If they’d wanted a bone-hard ride with electric performance, they’d have bought a BMW M3.

In a bit of a huff, I put everything in Comfort mode and set off up the M40. It was utterly delightful. As relaxing as a happy ending. Smooth, quiet, soft – exactly how a big car should feel.

But then I turned off the motorway, and oh dear. All of a sudden the suspension and the steering seemed to lose control of the bulk. It was like trying to drive home on a slightly decomposed hippo. So I dived back into the menu and chose the Dynamic setting, and suddenly everything was worse.

Eventually I realized that it’s best to let the computer choose a setting to suit the conditions. But even here there’s an issue. Because the steering system constantly flicks from Dynamic to Comfort, you are never sure how much effort you should use to turn the wheel. Sometimes you think just a bit will be required, and then just as you spot a bus coming the other way, you realize it should have been a lot.

There are other small irritations, too. The gear selector is too fiddly, the steering-wheel-mounted buttons feel cheap, the dash is made from wood (very 1986) and when you select reverse, the radio turns itself down. Is this so you can hear when your dog’s head bursts? Surely it’s too late then.

Another point I should make at this stage. Don’t bother with the 3-litre petrol I drove. It’s quiet and refined, but in all honesty the diesel provides all the get-up-and-go, with less thirst. And a better resale value.

It sounds here as though I have a downer on the new A8, but that’s not strictly accurate. Because when it’s bad, it’s not really very bad at all. And when it’s good, it’s fantastic. It is so quiet and so comfortable on the motorway, you can set the cruise control, sit back and use the on-board wi-fi to get on with some emails. Just remember that if you’ve selected the auto steering, it doesn’t actually mean it will steer automatically.

I also loved the quality of the stereo and the DAB radio system that let me listen to Christian FM. This is much better than normal radio because you are not warned about traffic jams ahead. Only the fact that you will soon be engulfed by God’s fiery love.

Truth be told, though, you get Christian radio in a Mercedes S-class as well. And with that car you will always have upmarket mini-cabbers queuing around the clock when the time comes to sell. It’s a more sensible buy.

The trouble is that in a Merc you look like a fat man on his way to a meeting. In the Audi, thanks to the efforts of Mr Zammett, you look like Jude Law.

29 April 2012