What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (29 page)

In essence there are three peninsulas that stick out into the Mediterranean: Greece, Spain and Italy. And choosing which is best for a summer holiday is a no-brainer. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for – heat, landscape, wine, culture, food, history or architecture – Italy wins. By miles.

When I see people on holiday in Greece, I always think, Why have you come to a country where they grow vines, eat the leaves and throw the grapes away, choosing instead to make their wine out of creosote? Of course, Spain is more civilized than that, but it doesn’t have a proper word for ‘beer’ and the food seems mostly to have come from the nearest bin.

It’s the same story with supermarkets. If you have a choice of outlets within easy reach of where you live or work – and most people do – why would you not go to Waitrose?

There’s more. When you are in need of a refreshing soft drink, why would you not have a glass of Robinsons lemon barley water? Why do people buy BlackBerrys when they could have iPhones? And, conversely, why have a Mac, which has no right-click, when you could have a PC that does?

In almost every sphere of life – baked beans, cola, television channels – there is a bewildering choice on offer but actually no choice at all. Because one product is almost always head and shoulders above the rest. I’m trying my hardest at this point not to mention
Fifth Gear
.

It certainly applies in the world of cars. If you want a big off-roader, you can waste your time test-driving the Toyota Land
Cruiser if you like, but it simply isn’t as good as the Range Rover. And that’s the end of it.

Supercars? Yup. By all means buy a McLaren MP4-12C or a Lamborghini Gallardo, but you must know that because you didn’t buy a Ferrari 458 Italia your life will not be quite as good as it could have been.

You may imagine that the theory gets a little blurred in the risk-averse world of the humble hatchback. These are the bread-and-butter cars and any attempt to do something risky or interesting might put buyers off. Car makers know this, so they stick to four wheels and a fold-down back seat. And yet …

What is it you want? Economy? Value? Speed? Comfort? Reliability? Handling? Space? A blend of all those? It doesn’t really matter because the Volkswagen Golf does more things more betterer than all of its rivals. It is the Italy of hatchbacks. The Heinz baked bean. The iPhone. The Waitrose. The best.

I recently drove a Vauxhall Astra VXR and it was deeply impressive, fast like you would not believe yet blessed with a level of comfort that you could not reasonably expect. But too flashy, really. So you’re better off with a Golf. Which isn’t flashy at all.

The Ford Focus ST? Great fun. But not as good as a Golf. Mercedes A-class? Well, the model I tested was the 250 AMG Sport and it was flawed in many ways. But it does at least have that Germanic quality. Much like the Golf, which isn’t flawed in many ways.

The BMW M135i? This is a fabulous car. I loved it. It’s better to drive than any Golf I’ve ever experienced, but the payback is a slightly cramped interior. A Golf doesn’t have that problem.

However, in recent months I’ve been seeing a new boy on the block. It’s so pretty that I’ve found myself hoping its undersides can cash the cheques its body is writing. Because if this is as good to drive as it is to look at, Johnny Golf may have finally met his match. I’m talking about the Volvo V40.

The interior is just as good as the exterior. Great seats, a good driving position and a ‘floating’ centre console that’s festooned with cool Scandinavian buttonry. With prices starting at a whisker under £20,000, I thought I might be on to something …

The washer nozzles are particularly impressive. You get six. This means that when you pull the stalk, it’s like driving through a car wash. Sure, you’re temporarily blinded, but when the spray has gone, it’s as if the glass has been burnished clean. I think, however, that I could make do with fewer. So I’d angle five to clean the windscreen and aim the sixth so I could wash the faces of passing cyclists. I think they’d like that.

So far, then, all is good. But I’m afraid there are a few problems. First of all, Volvo diesel engines are not the most refined you can buy, and the five-cylinder in my test car was no exception. On start-up, it sounded as though the cylinders were full of pebbles.

Plus, when you compare it with the similarly sized engine BMW offers in a 120d, it’s not as powerful and, despite being hardly any more economical, takes nearly 1½ seconds longer to propel the car to 62 mph. I don’t understand this. Why build an engine that you know straight away is not quite good enough?

I fear there’s more, because while the floating dash may look nice, it is almost impossible to use. I couldn’t turn the radio up or down, couldn’t operate the satnav, couldn’t turn the seat heater off, couldn’t find the button that switched the car from Performance to Eco setting and couldn’t work out how to engage the system that parks the car for you. It’s bewildering and hopeless.

It’s not a spacious car, either. Realistically, you’re only ever going to get two adults in the back, headroom is at a premium and while the boot does all sorts of funky things, it’s not very commodious. It looks, then, like a car that’s been designed and engineered by a company that didn’t quite have enough money to design and engineer a new car. Which is probably the
case. And as a result, despite the looks, it’s not as good as a Golf. The end.

Except it’s not the end because this car scored a whopping 98 per cent in independent safety tests for adult occupancy. The highest score of any car in history. And I’m not surprised because it comes with a vast range of devices to warn you of impending doom as well as many features to ensure you’re OK even if the worst happens.

And it’s not just good at protecting those inside, it also comes as standard with an airbag that inflates to protect any pedestrians that get in its way. This is all part of the company’s mission to ensure that by 2020 no one should ever be killed or injured in a Volvo.

It’s an ambitious target, and in all probability it’s completely unrealistic. But the aim is noble, nonetheless, and for that reason I would completely understand why you might buy a V40 rather than a Golf.

All things considered, the VW is a vastly superior car. But in an accident you will probably be better off in the Volvo. Think of it, then, as Cuba. In terms of Caribbean islands, Mustique is much better. The food, the beaches, the crime, everything. But if you become ill, you can’t get round the fact that Havana has better hospitals.

2 December 2012

I’m a fiddler. Whenever I get the furniture in a room arranged just as I like it, I sit down and decide immediately that I don’t like it at all. It all started in my study at school. I had to share it with five younger boys, so that meant five tables and five chairs. And pretty much every day I’d try something a bit different.

Usually this meant four boys sharing one table and me having the others for my various hi-fi components that had to be laid out horizontally for aesthetic reasons one day and then vertically the next.

I think, therefore, I’d make a good fist of running Aston Martin. It is a small company with limited resources and no big-boy owner to help out with the economies of scale when buying components. Bentley can get its masters at Volkswagen to make noises when negotiating a deal on a new supply of brakes. Rolls-Royce can turn to BMW. Ferrari can look to Fiat. But Aston has to go and see ZF, the German gearbox manufacturer, and say, ‘Please, sir, can we have some more?’ And usually the answer is, ‘
Nein
, Englander.’ So it has to produce a range of cars using nothing but what it’s got. And what it’s got is two engines. And one basic design.

It started with the DB9. An excellent, graceful and fast car. It heralded a departure for the company and many were sold. So a new car was launched, the V8 Vantage. To the untrained eye, it looked pretty similar to the DB9 but to start with, it had a different engine and was a bit more sporty. Then it was fitted with the same engine as the DB9. And then the DB9 was given some new sills to become the DBS, which was very brilliant but quite
expensive. So some new sills were invented to create the Virage. And you could also buy most of these cars as convertibles or coupés. In essence, then, Aston’s engineers were in my study, endlessly rearranging the same bits of furniture.

And now they’ve rearranged them again. The DBS and the Virage are gone and in their place we have this car. A car that doesn’t even get its own name. Instead they’ve rummaged around in the company tuck box and found an old moniker – Vanquish.

You may remember the first effort. I do. Mainly because it was so very poor. Yes, it had a big price tag and a big V12 engine – made from mating two Ford V6s together. And yes, it was very fast, but only in theory. In practice it went from 0 to 6000 rpm in one clutch.

So the new car uses an old name and the same basic engine that’s been in the DB9, the DBS, the Virage and the V12 Vantage. The same basic styling, the same construction techniques and a six-speed automatic gearbox from ZF’s end-of-season everything-must-go discount bin. And the price tag for this rearrangement? Well, before you start with options, it’s a whopping £189,995.

There are other issues too. This is a car made from a clever, glued-together aluminium and carbon-fibre tub. It has aluminium side-impact beams. It should be so light that it needs mooring ropes rather than a handbrake to stop it floating away. And yet somehow it weighs more than 1.7 tons. Perhaps that’s why it’s so expensive – because the seats are filled with gold ingots.

On paper, then, this looks like a bubble-and-squeak car. At first appealing, but when you stop and think, you realize you’re eating leftovers. And yet …

While the profile may be familiar, there is no doubting the fact that the styling tweaks are extremely successful. This is a car that moons you with its beauty. The new Ferrari F12 is good-looking enough to cause a grown man to faint but the
Vanquish is better still. It’s delightful on the inside too. The old Volvo satnav has been replaced with a system that tells you where you’re going rather than where you’ve been and the fiddly little buttons that plagued the short-sighted in previous models have been replaced with bigger ‘haptic feedback’ knobs that buzz slightly when you touch them. Why? Not a clue, but it’s nice.

Thanks to a smaller transmission tunnel, there’s more space than in previous models too. So much, in fact, that if you specify the optional rear seats, you can actually put people in them. People with heads, if you want, and legs.

And then there’s the upholstery. It looks like leather bubble wrap and it’s wonderful. So when it comes to practicality – it even has a big boot – and styling, this car is world class. It’s an iPhone in a sea of Bakelite.

And there’s more. The engine is a masterpiece. You get almost 11 per cent more power than you did from the DBS, and that means 565 bhp. To remind you that they are there, all of them bark every time you go anywhere near the throttle.

It’s more than just the aural effect, though; it’s the sense that this engine is not a thousand parts whizzing about under the watchful eye of an electronic overlord. It feels like one big muscle – a mountain of loud but lazy torque.

Normally I worry about V12s. I always fear that a V8 does pretty much the same job with much less complexity and much less opportunity to go wrong. But the V12 in the Vanquish is a thing of such unparalleled brilliance, I’d be prepared to forgo my worries.

It suits the gearbox too. Yes, almost all of the Vanquish’s rivals are now fitted with eight-speed manual gearboxes that are operated by flappy paddles. This is very good for the environment, as they use less fuel, and it’s also good when you are on a racetrack. But it’s not so good when you are in town and you have a millionth of a second to exploit a gap in the traffic. Because at low speeds they are dim-witted, jerky and hesitant.

That’s where the Aston scores. Yes, it has flappy paddles, but they are connected to an automatic gearbox. That may be old-fashioned, but in town it works much, much better.

But, you may be wondering, what about out of town? Can the bubble-and-squeak car really hold its own against its more modern rivals? The short answer is no. You feel the weight and that makes the car feel bigger and more intimidating than it really is. It doesn’t flow and it doesn’t really matter whether you engage Sport mode or put the suspension in Nutter Bastard mode, the Vanquish doesn’t boggle the mind quite as effectively as, say, a McLaren MP4-12C or a Ferrari California. It doesn’t feel special.

However, since it was a pre-production car, it’s probably unfair to say its boot lid broke and its passenger-side electric window was wonky.

If we assume these issues are addressed before the car goes on sale – that was never a certainty with Aston Martin in the past – then what do we have here? Well, it’s a thing of immense beauty and it does have a fabulous engine. In many ways you could call it a modern-day British take on the muscle-car idea. And that would be great.

But I fear Aston is at the point where we can all see this car for what it really is. A new car that’s not really new at all.

9 December 2012

Helsinki airport is vast. You walk for miles and miles past hundreds of shops and thousands of commuters, through a line of passport inspection booths that stretches across six time zones. And then you are told that your luggage will be arriving at baggage carousel No. 36.

That’s what gave it away – thirty-six baggage carousels. Do me a favour. Why would you need that many in Finland? Well, I did some investigating and it turns out there are, in fact, only six. It’s just that the numbering starts at thirty-one. And once you notice this, the whole charade falls apart. All the people? Actors, plainly, employed by the government to make the country look busy and industrious.

The shops? Well, I didn’t check but I bet that behind the Dior and the Jack Daniel’s advertising, all you can actually buy are half-hunter watches, No6 cigarettes and confectionery items such as Spangles and Opal Fruits.

Lots of smaller countries do this. They know that their airport is the nation’s porch, so they make it enormous to give the six annual visitors a sense that they have arrived in a country that’s going places. ‘Look at us. We make mobile phones and cars you haven’t heard of, and Santa lives here and that’s why we need an airport that is eighteen times bigger than LAX in Los Angeles. Because we are important.’

It’s all very lovely, I’m sure, but the problem is that by the time the visitor makes it to the taxi rank – and has hopefully not noted they’re all Singer Gazelles full of shop window mannequins – he feels like he’s done an Ironman triathlon and is knackered.

This is an especially big problem for those who visit Helsinki in the winter because unless you arrive between 12.03 p.m. and 12.07 p.m. it will be black dark. And if you do manage to arrive between these times, it will be dark grey. It’s a lovely country, Finland, but the dimmer switch appears to be broken.

That’s why, when I emerged from Helsinki airport last week, exhausted, with my stomach demanding brunch and my eyes telling me it was time for a mug of cocoa, I thought I was getting into a normal Range Rover.

Only when I arrived at the hotel and went to retrieve my luggage from the boot did I notice something was afoot. I own a Range Rover. We use a fleet of them to make
Top Gear
. There is no car I know better. I certainly know where the boot-release catch is. But on the car in Finland it was in a different place.

Now I know some car manufacturers make small changes to tailor their models for various markets. Cars sold in China, for example, have a longer wheelbase than cars sold elsewhere because Chinese motorists like a lot of room in the back. I’m also aware that the Americans and the French insist on having their steering wheels mounted on the left.

But changing a car in this way is expensive. And I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Land Rover would agree to move the boot-release catch just for the Finns. So I did some journalism and realized after no more than fifteen minutes that I’d just been driven from the airport to the centre of Helsinki in the new Range Rover. One of the most eagerly awaited cars of recent times. And so at dawn the next day, I broke off from breakfast to give it a closer look.

The Range Rover has to walk a fine line. Yes, the vast majority are sold within the M25, but only because the city folk are buying into the country dream. They have to know that Lord Fotherington-Sorbet has one as well. So first and foremost, the Range Rover has to appeal to him.

The most recent examples of the old model were definitely getting too chintzy. Land Rover was listening to the people who
were buying their cars – footballers and drug dealers – and was losing sight of the reason why. Lord Fotherington-Sorbet, for instance, does not like a chrome grille. Or piped upholstery.

I was fearful that with the new model the company would go berserk and give up on the countryside altogether. But it has not done this. The chintz is kept in check. Yes, my car was black (a town colour) and had a silver roof (a Cheshire option) but in the dim Finnish light, it looked very good.

My only complaint: on the last model, the heat-extracting gills used to be on the front wings and therefore seemed to have a purpose. But on the new one, they’ve been moved onto the doors where they just look stupid because they’re obviously fake.

Inside, though, I had no complaints at all. The car I drove was a pure four-seater, with a box of electronic goodies separating the back seats. This was nice but you wouldn’t actually buy this option unless you were mad. Up front, I was amazed how similar it all felt to the last model. You have the same split-opening glovebox, the same controls. All the company has really done is redesign the buttons and fit the gear lever from a Jaguar. And thank God for that.

There are some new things, though. The stereo is quite simply the best I’ve ever encountered. The seats are sublime. And now you can choose what colour you would like the interior lighting. And I’m not talking about blue or red. I’m talking about a full Dulux colour chart. I liked the purply blue best. It made up for Helsinki’s broken dimmer switch.

Apart from this, though, it looked and felt like a Range Rover. And then the door handle fell off, which means it’s probably built like a Range Rover too.

To find out for sure, I opened and closed the door twenty times. In the last model, this would have flattened the battery because each time the car was unlocked, the computer thought, ‘Oh, we are going somewhere. I’ll power myself up.’ Then when the door closed, it would power itself down. But Land Rover has obviously fixed the problem now because the battery was fine.

On the road? Well, now this is the really clever bit. The new car may be bigger than the old one, but some versions of it are almost a staggering half a ton lighter. I was fearful this would make it feel less substantial, more Japanesey. But it doesn’t. You now get better acceleration and much better fuel consumption, and it still feels as solid and as regal and as comfortable and as imperious as ever.

Off road? I didn’t have a chance to find out but all of the features you found on the last model are still fitted to the new one. So it should be about the same. Fine on winter tyres. A bit slithery if not.

Three engines are on offer. There’s the 5-litre supercharged V8, which is fine if you are a bit unhinged, and then there’s a 3-litre V6 diesel, which offers extraordinary fuel consumption for a car of this size. And in the middle is a 4.4-litre V8 diesel. That would be my choice. Will be my choice, in fact …

My main emotion after driving this car was much the same as my main emotion during the Olympics opening ceremony. Relief that they hadn’t cocked it up. Then as time went by I started to realize that, like Danny Boyle’s effort, it’s more than not a cock-up. It’s actually brilliant. Expensive, yes. But worth it.

The company spent a billion quid on designing the new lightweight chassis. And then clothed it in a modern-day interpretation of what made the last car such a massive hit, not just with people who wear nylon shorts at work but also people who wear tweed shorts at play. It is a fantastic car. Not just the best off-roader in the world, but one of the best cars full stop.

16 December 2012