What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (34 page)

Nope. You’re wrong. It was £78.42.

Now if it had been a nice round £80, I’d have summoned the manager and inserted the teapot in him. But because it was £78.42, it gave the impression that they hadn’t simply said, ‘Look at that rich bastard. Let’s charge him eighty quid.’ It looked like they’d done some workings out. And that the actual price in that part of London of two tea bags, a pint of tap water, eight slices of bread and a quarter of a cucumber really does add up to £78.42.

Apparently this is a well-known trick. When someone phones and asks you to quote for a job, you should never say, ‘Oh, £500 should do it,’ because that looks like you’ve simply plucked a number from the ether. Which is an open invitation for the customer to engage in that most barbaric of things: haggling. For the British, haggling is like talking in lifts. It’s disgusting.

What you must do when asked for a quote is mumble to yourself as though you are doing some long multiplication on the back of an envelope and then, after twenty or so seconds, say £512.63.

That looks like it is the real cost of doing the job, and as a result, haggling is not possible. So instead of settling on £450, you get paid £512.63.

This brings me on to the retail habit of pricing everything at something and 99p. We know why they do this. Because £4.99 sounds less than £5. Plus it makes the customer feel all warm and well disposed towards the notion of a return visit if he walks out of the door clutching a penny change.

Yes. But am I the only person who thinks that rather than knocking a penny off, the shopkeeper has simply added 99p? Or is that just my tight-fisted Yorkshire genes?

Probably not. Because if there’s one thing I despise, it’s a bargain. If someone offers me some goods, or a service, that costs less than I was expecting, I automatically assume there’s something wrong with it. Usually I’m right. Cheap cola tastes less good than expensive cola. A cheap vacuum cleaner will not do quite such a good job as an expensive vacuum cleaner. A cheap holiday will be rubbish. An expensive one will be great. Unless you’re on a cruise, obviously.

However, in the world of cars, this is not necessarily so. An Aston Martin Vanquish, for instance, costs £189,995. This tells us that Aston has done its costings (yeah, right) and that this is how much the car costs to make. Plus a bit of profit added on.

It’s the same story with the Ferrari 458 Italia. In basic form, this costs £178,491, because that’s how much the metal, glass, plastic and carbon fibre cost to assemble. No, really. They do. Ferrari metal is more expensive than Ford metal because, er, it just is.

I could go on. The McLaren MP4-12C. The Mercedes SLS AMG. The Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. All cars of this type cost between £165,000 and £200,000. It’s the price you pay for having something a bit different. Something a bit out of the ordinary.

So why, then, does an Audi R8 cost £91,575? Why is a Porsche 911 £71,449? Why is a Bentley Continental V8 GT £123,850? These are exotic cars, too, but they are half price.

Does that mean they are rubbish? Virgin Cola cars? Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think so. If you reduce a Porsche 911 and a Ferrari 458 to their component parts, you’d struggle to see why one costs more than twice as much as the other.

The truth is, the 911 is a bargain. So’s the Bentley and the R8. And that brings me on a wave of beige-tinted common sense to the door of the Ford Fiesta ST.

Cracking car, the Fiesta. It’s good-looking, spacious, safe, economical and, if you avoid the base models, nippy as well. But I’ve always felt that the chassis was so good, it could easily handle a bit more oomph. Which is where the ST comes in.

I do not know why Ford continues to name its faster cars after lady towels, and I’m not sure either why it says the engine under the bonnet is from the EcoBoost range. EcoBoost gives the impression that it runs on armpit hair and produces about as much power as Luxembourg.

That ain’t so. Because, actually, it’s a turbocharged 1.6-litre that produces 180 bhp. This means you go from 0 to 62 mph in a polar bear-strangling 6.9 seconds and onwards to a top speed of 139 mph. That’s quick.

It’s probable the standard suspension setup could handle the extra grunt, but to be on the safe side, and to make it look sportier, the Lady Towel is 15 mm nearer to the ground than standard Fiestas and sits on fat 17-inch wheels. There’s a roof spoiler, too, that does absolutely nothing at all. But it looks nice.

Does it all work? Yes, it does. And some. Like the Ford Focus ST, it all feels loose and light and, if you reduce the traction-control system, or turn it off altogether, a bit wayward. You have understeer and liftoff oversteer and patches of cling-on-for-dear-life grip, and the upshot is: it’s bloody good fun.

You can feel the electronic limited-slip diff doing its best to keep things orderly and neat, but you get the impression it’s like a not very good teacher, trying to organize a class full of unruly seven-year-olds.

I like that. And I like the noise as well. Ford has pinched an idea first seen on the £336,000 Lexus LFA and has fitted a ‘sound symposer’, a tube that feeds the induction roar directly into the cabin. It makes you feel like you’re actually sitting in the engine bay. The interior is good, too. You get enormous body-hugging Recaro seats, and even in the base model lots of toys as well.

I liked this car. A lot. It has all the qualities I look for in a hot
hatchback. There’s everyday practicality. There’s comfort. There’s the sense that each of its body panels will cost no more to repair than it would on a cooking model. And yet despite all this Terry and June down-to-earthness, there is also lots and lots of juicy speed and joie de vivre.

And here’s the best bit. It costs just £16,995, which is £2,000 less than Peugeot or Renault charge for their latest hot hatches. In fact, £16,995 is as near as dammit what Alfa Romeo charges for some versions of its woeful two-cylinder TwinAir MiTo. And you don’t even get ripped off with extras. I visited Ford’s online configurator and once you’ve selected the model, pretty much the only choice you have is the colour.

The Ford Fiesta Lady Towel, then. It manages to be something that’s quite rare these days: cheap and cheerful.

7 April 2013

In 1990 there was the NSX, a mid-engined two-seater that waded into battle with Lamborghini and Ferrari, sporting a small V6 engine. While it couldn’t sting like a bee, it could dance the dance of even the most zippy butterfly. And the induction roar was a noise that stirred the soul.

It’s been said many times that Japanese cars have the character of a washing machine. And it’s true. Japanese car makers always designed their cars to keep everyone happy: retired postmasters in Swansea, east African taxi drivers, soccer moms in Houston … everyone.

But, as modern politicians know, if you try to keep everyone happy, you end up looking a bit boring. If you make a stand, stamp some character into the mix, you get a big funeral that shuts half of London. That’s what the NSX did. It was the Boris Johnson of supercars. Only a bit lighter.

There was also the CRX, a small 1.5-litre coupé that served no purpose at all. The rear seat was a birdbath. It had the grunt of a mouse. And the comfort of an acacia tree. But because it was so unusual I bought one the moment it went on sale.

I’ve always harboured a soft spot for the Prelude, too. Most coupés at this time were based on normal saloons. The Capri was a Cortina with a comedy nose. The Scirocco was a Golf. The Calibra was a Cavalier, and so on. But the Prelude was a Prelude. Honda didn’t try to save money by sharing parts. It made it to be as good as it could be, and then clothed it in a very pretty body and gave it pop-up headlamps. That was the Honda way. Different. Better.

But, despite the unusualness, the company never lost sight of its origins. It started out making piston rings for Toyota and knew that quality was the beginning, the middle and the end of everything.

Honda knew that its own cars had to be just as reliable. And they were. The variable valve timing system is a complex blend of mechanical and electronic engineering. So you’d have to expect some failures. It would be only natural. But after the company had made 15 million units, guess how many warranty claims there’d been. Nope. You’re wrong. The correct answer is zero.

Hondas, then, were iPhones that didn’t jam. They were style icons that worked. They were the embodiment of what Charles Babbage was on about – the unerring certainty of machinery. Or, to put it another way, Alfa Romeos that started.

Remember the Honda Civic Type R? What a machine that was. Or the Integra. Or the original Insight. Oh, and I’ve just remembered the S2000, which was a beefed-up Mazda MX-5. Slightly bigger, and slightly more butch to behold, this two-seater soft-top had an engine that screamed up to 9000 rpm and would sit there all day. Every day.

It wasn’t just cars either. There were motorcycles and generators and marine engines and lawnmowers and water pumps and mopeds that were so important to the world that they were immortalized in a Beach Boys song. There were leaf blowers and quad bikes and hydrogen fuel cells and Formula One powerplants that won the world constructors’ championship six times on the trot.

All of these achievements were immortalized in one of the greatest television commercials of all time. Set to Andy Williams singing ‘The Impossible Dream’, it showed a balding man charging across New Zealand in a range of everything Honda had made over the years. You watched it and you wanted to have a go on every single thing.

But what Honda would you want to drive today? A Jazz?
A Civic? An Accord? A hybrid? I suspect that, in the best traditions of multiple-choice questions, the correct answer is E – none of the above.

The range of cars sold by Honda in Britain is about as dreary as a Victorian tea set. The reliability is still there, but the flair, the innovation, the genius? All gone. Honda’s demise is like the Rolling Stones deciding to start recording hymns. Or the hotel chain Raffles deciding that Formule 1-style bathroom cubicles are quite good enough.

I’ve just spent a week in the Honda CR-V diesel EX, which is a big and quite expensive bucket of nothing at all. Honda tells us the latest model is rammed with significant improvements but then struggles a bit when they are listed. It has, for instance, daytime running lights. Just like every other car on the market.

It has a powered tailgate, which means you have to stand in the rain while electric motors take five seconds to do a job you could have done in one. It has a 12 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, which is irrelevant unless you are a bear. And the four-wheel-drive system is now electronic rather than hydraulic. Which is another way of saying ‘worse’.

Under the bonnet of my test car was a diesel engine. Honda was one of the last big car manufacturers to make such a thing, and it is nowhere near as good as the ones made by everyone else. It’s noisy, rough and, compared with, say, BMW’s effort, way down on power.

Inside the CR-V are no features you cannot find in cars that cost less and a few that are annoying. The satnav screen is surrounded by buttons so small, you can’t see what they all do. And there’s another screen that tells you a raft of stuff you don’t care about. Such as how many hours you’ve driven since you accidentally set the trip meter. It’d be more interesting to know when high water was due on the Solomon Islands.

The rear seats, apparently, are 38 mm lower than in the previous model. I mention this simply because I’m running out of things to say. As the miles droned by, I began to wonder who on
earth would spend more than £31,000 on the model I was driving. It has no more seats than a Vauxhall Astra, and if you really need part-time four-wheel drive and a tall boot, Ford, Hyundai, Kia and many others can sell you something similar and better for less.

I suspect the answer is caravanists. People who enjoy this type of holiday tend to be the sort who vote UKIP and therefore like the fact that the CR-V is made in Swindon by British people, not by a sausage jockey or a garlic-munching surrender dog.

They also like the promise of great reliability and the sense that four-wheel drive is on hand to help out should the site be on a bit of a slope. Plus, of course, the boot is capable of taking all the paraphernalia they need for a summer holiday in Britain: umbrellas, windbreaks, cagoules, wellies and so on.

I still don’t get it, though. Buying a car because it suits your requirements for two weeks in the summer surely is like wearing ski boots all year round because you go to Verbier every February.

There is no reason for buying this type of car. And even if you can think of one, there is no reason for choosing the Honda. The Land Rover Freelander is much better. So’s the Nissan X-Trail.

Honda needs to buck up its ideas. I realize that there will be a new version of the NSX, and I have high hopes for that. But it needs a bigger range of other stuff, too. It needs to get different again. It needs to get better. Because until it does, there’s no reason for you or me to get out our chequebook.

28 April 2013

Legend has it that when Frank Sinatra first clapped eyes on the then new E-type Jaguar at the New York motor show, he said, ‘I want that car. And I want it now.’ The E-type had that kind of effect. Pedants were saying that the actual cars would not achieve the claimed top speed of 150 mph, and back then everyone knew that the ‘Made in England’ tag was another way of saying you’d arrive everywhere in a cloud of oily steam.

But the E-type was so bite-the-back-of-your-hand pretty that grown men lost their capacity for reason. They simply didn’t care how much it cost or how uncomfortable it might be, or even if it did only six miles to the gallon … of myrrh. They had to have one.

And now history has repeated itself with the F-type. I’d seen early spy shots of this car, and I’d even spotted camouflaged mules being tested around the Cotswolds. And I’d got it into my head that it would be nothing more than an XK that had been boiled for a bit too long in the washing machine. I was very, very wrong.

It is a spectacularly good-looking car. The bulge of the wheelarches, the length of the bonnet, the flatness of the boot lid, the angle of the rear window – every single little thing is completely flawless. There must have been a temptation to fit a retro nod to the E-type. But apart from the slender rear-light clusters, there’s not one. So it’s perfect and it’s modern, and as I stood there gawping, I had a Frank Sinatra moment. I have to have this car. And I have to have it now. A few days later, however, when the test drive was over, I was starting to have some doubts …

When I was growing up, Jags were driven by people who had sheepskin car coats and they were very soft to sit in. They were also very quiet. This is because they’d usually broken down. All over the world they were known for these two qualities: quietness and comfort.

The F-type offers neither of those things. I tested the mid-range, V6-engined S version and it is a bite-sized parcel of barely controlled fury; the angriest, most brutal and loudest car I’ve encountered in some time. Then I discovered a button on the dash that makes the exhausts louder still.

Even on the overrun, as you cruise up to a junction, a clever system of flaps causes the back boxes to spit and crackle and bang. It sounds like distant artillery fire. Then you pull out from the junction and press the accelerator and, whoa, now it feels as if you have actually become an artillery shell.

God knows what the 5-litre V8 is like because the firepower from the 3-litre V6 is plenty savage enough. One minute you’re balancing the throttle against the interruption of the traction control system, and the next you’re in Arbroath, doing a million, there’s blood streaming from your shattered eardrums and your hair’s on fire. Exciting doesn’t even begin to cover the thrill of taking this car by the scruff of its neck and giving it a damn good spanking.

The steering, the brakes, the grip. No idea what they’re like. Concentrating on details in a car such as this is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube while being machinegunned.

And yet, behind the veneer of bloodcurdling violence, the cockpit is all very civilized. There are cupholders, for a kickoff, and there’s a satnav system and blue teeth. And while there are flappy paddles behind the steering wheel, they are connected to a proper automatic gearbox – not a scrappily converted manual unit that is sold to misguided enthusiasts as a must-have Formula One-style racing accessory, but is, in fact, a fuel-saving sop to petty, polar-bear-minded Eurocrats.

And, what’s more, the interior styling is every bit as successful
as the exterior. Maybe the graphics on the dials are a bit 1977, but I did like the bronze-coloured controls and I loved the Range Rover-style facility for changing the colour of the interior lighting. Very Reykjavik vodka bar, that.

There were one or two little niggles, though. The warning lights in the door mirrors are designed to illuminate whenever a vehicle is in your blind spot. But, in reality, they come on to alert you to pretty much everything: trees, crash barriers, signposts you’ve just passed, churches, apples, the lot.

And accessing some of the day-to-day functions does mean you have to go through quite a few layers of computer submenus. You can press one button that makes the car more sporty – as if such a thing were possible – but if you want to keep the steering and gearbox in comfy mode, you need to be Bill Gates, really.

I could, and would, live with this, and the epilepsy-inducing door mirrors. I could even live with the price, which is extremely high. But there are two things that cause me problems.

First of all, my test car had no boot. Well, it had a boot, but it was filled, completely, with a space-saver spare wheel. There was not even enough room left over for my briefcase. Many of the road tests of the F-type so far have not mentioned this, as though it doesn’t matter. But I think that in the real world you would occasionally wish to transport something other than just a passenger. And you can’t.

And then there’s the biggest problem of them all. Jaguars have been getting firmer and firmer in recent years. The engineers seem obsessed with setting the cars up to be good at the Nürburgring and nowhere else. But with the F-type they have gone completely bonkers.

It’s just about bearable at 70 mph on a motorway, but around town, on urban potholes, it is a joke. I thought my Mercedes CLK Black was firm and stiff, but the F-type is in another league. I know of no other car that deals with bumps so badly.

When you see a manhole cover approaching, you try to
prepare yourself for the jolt in the way that a boxer prepares when a punch is coming. But you can’t. And as you feel your skeleton creaking and snapping, you can’t help wincing. And there’s no need for it.

When the F-type went back to Jaguar, I took the trouble of borrowing a Porsche Boxster for a couple of days. This is also a two-seat soft-top and no one has said that it drives badly in any way. Quite the reverse. Its grip and handling have been much praised. And yet despite this it can go over speed bumps, manhole covers and bits of grit without causing the driver to suffer pain.

This, however, is irrelevant. Because comparing the F-type and the Boxster is like comparing the latest supermodel with Angela Merkel. I could sit here all day and tell you that the supermodel has a screeching, hideous accent, a virulent STD and a propensity for extreme violence, and that Mrs Merkel is very clever and comfy, but I know which you’d prefer to take to your bed.

So it goes with the Jag and the Porsche. And I get that. I respect the Porsche immensely. But I simply couldn’t walk away from the Jag’s looks, or the noises it makes, or the absolute rightness of its cockpit. I’d buy the Jag. And I suspect you would too.

It’s just a terrible shame that the only real winners will be the nation’s osteopaths.

12 May 2013