What Could Possibly Go Wrong. . . (41 page)

Let us be in no doubt about this. The Toyota Prius is a stupid car for sanctimonious people. It has two power sources and is made from rare materials that have to be shipped all over the globe before the finished product is finally delivered with the morning muesli and a copy of the
Guardian
to some malfunctioning eco-house in some trendy part of town where the coffee shops sell stuff that no one understands.

Remember how people used to sew CND badges to their parkas in the 1960s? This simple act didn’t actually stop the SS-9 missiles rolling off the Soviet production lines, but it did tell everyone that you were interested in nuclear disarmament. Well, that’s what the Prius is: a badge. A full metal jacket that tells other people you are interested in sandals as well. It’s a knowing wink, a friendly nod. And I hate it.

However, it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important cars to have seen the light of day. A genuine game-changer. Because versions of its hybrid drive system will eventually be fitted to every single car on the market. McLaren is already there. Its new 903-bhp P1 uses a 727-bhp 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 that works in tandem with a 176-bhp electric motor. This has not been done to save the polar bear, but to produce more speed. A lot more. Yes, you can turn the V8 off and use the electric motor to drive you silently around town, but mostly it’s used to fill in the performance hole while the turbos spool up, and to fire rev-generating backwards torque at the petrol engine during gear changes.

I asked a McLaren engineer if the P1 would have been even
faster if it weren’t fitted with 324 very heavy laptop-style batteries and the extra complexity of the electric motor, and he was most emphatic. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Really, no.’

So, in other words, McLaren has taken Toyota’s concept and turned it into something else entirely. You can think of this car as Viagra. Designed originally as a drug to mend a patient’s broken heart, it is now sold to keep you going harder and faster for longer and longer.

And McLaren is not alone. Ferrari is working on a car called, weirdly, the Ferrari the Ferrari, which uses much the same technology. Porsche is nearly there with a hybrid called the 918 Spyder. Already it has lapped Germany’s Nürburgring in six minutes and fifty-seven seconds. That’s faster than any road car has gone before. Mercedes is working on a hybrid S-class.

They’re not statements. They’re not cars for eco-lunatics. They are cars for people who want the speed they have now – and in some cases even more – but not the petrol bills. What we’ve done, then, is taken a technology intended for the greens … and hijacked it. We’ve weaponized the muesli.

There’s more, too, because we are about to see a shift in the way cars are made. For years they’ve all been built along pretty much the same lines. The body is a sort of frame onto which the engine, the suspension, the outer panels and the interior fixtures and fittings are bolted.

This is fine, but as the demand for more luxury and more safety grows stronger, the penalty is weight. Twenty years ago a Vauxhall Nova weighed about 800 kg. Its modern-day equivalent is more than 1,000 kg. Many larger cars tip the scales at more than 2 tons. And weight blunts performance, ruins handling and costs you at the pumps. Try playing tennis with a dead dog on your back and you’ll soon see the problem.

Happily, there is a solution. It’s called the carbon-fibre tub and it’s been the basis of all Formula One cars for years. It really is just a tub, which is used instead of the frame. And because it’s made from carbon fibre it weighs less than Richard Hammond.
Seriously. But it is much stronger. Ferrari uses a similar thing in its road cars. So does McLaren. And now it’s starting to filter down the food chain. The Alfa Romeo 4C has a tub. Maybe one day the Ford Fiesta will too.

Preposterous? Not really. I remember when the video recorder first went on sale. The Panasonic model was £800 and was viewed by the bitter and mealy-mouthed as being another example of life being all right for some. And here we are today with DVD players being available on benefits.

For about forty years cars have inched along, getting a little more refined and a little easier to use with each generation. They have been evolving at about the same rate as the trees in your garden. But, in part because of the law makers in Brussels and the need to meet tough rules on what comes out of the tailpipe, we are about to witness a seismic shift. The meteorite has landed, and if the species is to survive, it needs to change.

I look at all the cars out there now and all the cars in this supplement and I get the impression they are all dinosaurs, roaming about in the fields, chewing grass and bumping into one another, blissfully unaware that the dust cloud is coming.

Some of them have V12 engines. And they’re not going to survive the storm. Nor will V8s. And that’ll be sad. We’ll all miss the rumble. In the same way, I’m sure, as when the last apatosaurus keeled over, the species that were left may have shed a bit of a tear.

But look at it this way. It’s argued by some that dinosaurs actually evolved into birds. The velociraptor became the white tern. The Tyrannosaurus rex became the peregrine falcon. And cars will have to do the same thing. It’s already happening, in fact. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ford has squeezed 124 bhp out of the 1-litre three-cylinder engine it fits into the Fiesta. And I challenge anyone to get out after a drive in that thing without wearing a grin the size of Jupiter’s third moon. It’s a riot and yet it can do more than 60 mpg.

That Alfa Romeo 4C is a pointer as well. It’s light, so it needs
only a little petrol-sipping 1742-cc engine to reach 160 mph. But imagine if it were a hybrid, if it had a small electric motor firing gobs of instant torque at the rear wheels while the petrol engine was waking up, and adding horsepower to the mix when the road ahead opened up. It’d be like driving a mosquito that had somehow mated with a water boatman.

I have enjoyed my time with the dinosaurs. I shall look back at the Mercedes SLS AMG and the Ferrari 458 Italia and the Aston Martin Vanquish with a teary eye. And I shall always keep a picture of the wondrous Lexus LFA in my wallet. But that chapter is closing now. We’re about to start a new one, and from the snippets I’ve seen so far, it looks rather good.

20 October 2013

Because I spend pretty much all of my life at airports, I’ve learnt a great deal about the human spirit. And what I’ve learnt most of all is that a man is genetically programmed to go into a branch of Dixons.

You watch him with his little-wheeled hand luggage and his laptop bag, wandering past all the shops selling perfume, and all the other ones selling Chinese bears in Beefeater suits. He drifts past Smythson like a trout in a slow-moving river and looks neither left nor right as he meanders past the art gallery selling massive horses. He doesn’t even register it – never even stops for a minute to think, How would you get an actual life-sized ceramic horse in the overhead bins?

But then, carried by the current of his tiny mind, and by impulses over which he has no control, he will slither into Dixons to have a look at all the new machines that beep when you push their buttons. It doesn’t matter if the passenger is late and doing that half-run businessman thing. He will still go to Dixons. Nor does it matter if he’s naked and plainly in need of some new trousers. He will still consider a quick browse in gadget central to be more important. Hungry? Thirsty? Minutes to live? None of these things will get between a man and his need to examine the latest GoPro camera.

Which brings me on to the new Mercedes S-class. Over the years this flagship has been the pad from which most of the important motoring innovations have been launched. Crumple zones. Collapsible steering columns. Airbags. That sort of stuff. If it matters, we saw it first on an S-class.

So what manner of new stuff is to be found on the new model, I hear you ask. Well, stand by and roll the drums, because … it comes with the option of having a choice of fragrances in the air-conditioning system. Don’t mock. In thirty years’ time, when the S-class is a minicab, you will welcome anything that masks the overpowering aroma of the driver’s armpits.

I haven’t finished with the air-conditioning system either, because you are also able to go into the on-board computer and alter the level of ionization in the air being delivered. And what is ionization? Good question. Glad you asked. Because it’s the process by which an atom or a molecule acquires a positive or a negative charge. So, in my book, that means Mercedes has developed a car that can fire lightning out of the air vents. It says that this makes the interior more relaxing. If I were ever to use an exclamation mark after a sentence, I’d have used one then.

Anyway, sticking with the air-conditioning system, I can tell you that its innards are filled with dried coconut shells that absorb not just some of the world’s more unpleasant gases but, with the help of the ionization, many of the world’s viruses. This, then, is a car in which you cannot catch smallpox, cholera or even ebola. Which, as a safety feature, beats the crap out of a collapsible steering column, if you ask me.

Before we move away from the air-conditioning system, I should explain that different levels can be set for each part of the car. So if you have a passenger whose company you do not enjoy, you can make him hot, fire lightning into his face and give him the bubonic plague.

I’m aware I have now spent a long time covering the air-conditioning, so let’s take a deep breath and move on to the seats. As you would expect, they can all deliver a ‘hot stone’ massage, the armrests are heated and in the long-wheelbase model those in the back can recline until they are pretty much flat. Pillows are provided, naturally, and they are not just heated but also air-conditioned. This … (That’s enough air-conditioning stuff. Ed.)

There’s more, of course, but we must move on at this point to the optional thermal-imaging camera. When engaged at night, it projects a greyscale image of the road ahead to a screen on the dash, and – get this – when it detects a pedestrian, the person in question is highlighted in red.

This is fantastic. Because when you drive down Baker Street you feel as if you are commanding an Apache gunship and that all the people are targets.

They are as well. Because if one of them does something that appears to be threatening, such as, say, stepping into the road, the Mercedes fires a laser into his eyes to warn him you’re coming. I know you think I’m making this all up. But I promise I’m not.

Mercedes says the equipment is so sophisticated, it can tell the difference between a person and an animal. But this isn’t so. Because when I reached my London flat late last Sunday night, the camera detected what it thought was a human hiding in the bushes, and a little red square highlighted his exact position. I could see nothing with the naked eye, so I drove over to find it was a paparazzo. Not a human at all.

Sadly I was not able to run him over because the Mercedes has a system that applies the brakes even if you don’t. The same system allows you to engage the cruise control in stop-start traffic and sit back while the car quite literally drives itself, maintaining a safe distance between itself and the car in front.

But that is nothing compared with the cameras that guide what’s called the Magic Body Control. I kid you not. When they see a speed hump or a pothole approaching, they don’t just soften the suspension to minimize the jolt, they actually lift the wheel clear. So there’s absolutely no jolt at all.

Oh, heavens. I’ve forgotten the interior lighting. You can choose from a vast array of colours and then choose how bright you’d like it all to be. And then, with a swivel of the knob, you can turn on the wi-fi. You then input the seventeen-digit code into your phone – don’t worry about drifting onto the other side
of the road while you do this because the Mercedes knows when you’re about to cross the white line – and, if you haven’t indicated, it will steer you back again.

Did I mention the fridge? Or the larder? Or the availability of TV screens that fold out of the centre armrest? Nope? Well, what about the button that allows you to choose just how high you’d like the electric boot lid to rise?

Some are saying that all of this stuff is ridiculous and the S-class is no longer sitting at the prow of motoring innovation. Others say – and I have some sympathy with this argument – that true luxury is achieved with a clever use of space, light and silence, and that a billion gadgets is no match for the sheer opulence you find in a Rolls-Royce.

And yet. My inner man loved foraging about in the Merc, finding solutions to problems that no one knew existed. It also comes with an engine.

27 October 2013

When I first moved to London, during the war – with Argentina, that is – Knightsbridge was a quite genteel place full of old ladies and sausage dogs. It was an oasis of calm in the centre of that magnificent 1980s whirlwind. It isn’t any more. Now it’s one of the noisiest places on earth.

This is because it has been bought, pretty much completely, by gentlemen from the Middle East, all of whom drive extremely loud supercars. You can hear them start up from three streets away, and you can hear them leaving the lights from back in Qatar. A Ferrari drove past me last night fitted with exhausts like 120-mm guns being played through the Grateful Dead’s sound system. And then there was a Lamborghini with a bark so loud it could frighten an old lady’s sausage dog to death.

There are rules on how much noise a car can make, but because they are rules they can be broken. Many supercar makers have worked out how. They have noted that the EU noise inspectors, who test a car before it is allowed to go on sale, take their reading when the engine is turning at 3000 rpm. So the manufacturer fits a valve in the exhaust system that opens at 3001 rpm. This means all is lovely and quiet for the men with clipboards. But then, just after they’ve smiled and put ticks in the right boxes, all hell breaks loose.

Today most fast cars make a racket. Jaguar even fits a discreet little button that enables you to turn the silencer into a trumpet. So when an F-type goes down your street, it feels as if the Royal Artillery has just opened up with everything it’s got. I shall be honest. I like a car to make a noise. I loved the muscle-car
rumble you got from AMG Mercedeses before the turbochargers came along. I love the melancholy howl of a Ferrari F12. And the shriek from the Lexus LFA was up there with Roger Daltrey’s scream towards the end of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.

So I was surprised and, yes, a little bit disappointed when I put my foot down for the first time in BMW’s new 435i coupé. This is the sporty two-door version of the 3-series. In the past it would have been called the 3-series coupé but BMW has decided to give it a name of its own, which has allowed the stylists to have a freer hand. A much freer hand, as it turns out, because the only panel this car shares with its four-door stablemate is the bonnet.

The rest is all different and all new and nowhere near as dramatic as I’d been expecting. Yes, it’s lower and wider than the saloon – the rear wheels are about 3 inches further apart – but it lacks visual presence. And on the face of it, that doesn’t sound such a good idea.

When someone buys the two-door version of a four-door car, they are spending more money and getting less practicality. And the only reason they would want to do this is: they want more style. And with the 4-series I’m not sure they’re getting it.

Which brings me back to the noise. Floor the throttle and all you get is a gentle hum, the sound of an engine that is doing a spot of gardening or maybe popping down the road for a pint of milk. It doesn’t really sound as though it’s making much of an effort at all.

Maybe it isn’t. Because even though it’s a 3-litre turbocharged straight six, it’s producing only 302 brake horsepower. That’s 14 bhp less than you get from the 3-litre turbocharged straight six in the smaller BMW M135i. What we have, then, is a car that is more expensive than the more practical 3-series and slower than the 1-series. A bad start.

But here’s the thing. While it is extremely enjoyable to put your foot down in an F-type Jag and listen to all those pops and bangs as you lift it off again, I have a sneaking suspicion that
after a while it might become wearisome. Certainly if I’m arriving at an adult’s house in my AMG Mercedes I do everything in my power to stop the engine from sounding as if a yobbo is pulling up outside.

So, in the long run, a car that hums rather than shouts might be a more rewarding companion. And a car that is quietly stylish without being tartan might be burgled and vandalized less often. We see this a lot with BMW these days. There was a time when they were brash and driven an inch from your tailgate by men with inadequate sexual organs. But not any more. BMWs have become … gentle.

With the 435i you still have the near-perfect weight distribution and an extremely low centre of gravity. The engineers have worked their traditional magic to make everything balanced and just so. It may not be the fastest car in the world but it is extremely rewarding to feel it turn one way as you go round a roundabout and then the other as you leave. Some cars wobble about; some lurch. A BMW just does as it’s told.

A BMW also has extremely impressive antilock braking. Many good cars these days are fitted with a system that cuts in too early. It thinks you’re panicking and about to crash when you are not. A BMW waits for you to be an inch from the tree before it says, ‘Excuse me, sir. Can I be of any assistance in these troubling times?’

A BMW accepts that you are not a nincompoop. It accepts that you may be a very good driver, and that you may want to have some fun before the electronic nanny tells you to come inside and wash your hands before dinner.

Let me put it this way. If you have an Audi or a Mercedes or a Jaguar, you are telling the world that life is treating you well. If you have a BMW these days you’re not really saying much of anything at all. You’re like the quiet, grey man on the bus. Nobody notices you. And certainly nobody would guess that under your dignified, grown-up clothes, you’re wearing a lime-green mankini.

In the 435i you really are, thanks to a little button that changes the characteristics of everything. Most of the time it’ll be set to Comfort, but you can go to Sport+, which sharpens up all the important stuff. It’s nice. I loved driving this car. I loved being in it as well.

As with all BMWs, there’s no unnecessary detailing, no silly fuss and no superfluous gadgetry. You have a little readout at the bottom of the rev counter that is unintelligible and has something to do with polar bears, but everything else is A* common sense. I even found myself thinking that the optional head-up display was a good idea.

Let’s be in no doubt. The 435i is not for everyone. It is not good value and it is no use for showing off. But if you miss the way Knightsbridge was. Or if you want a getaway car that no one will notice. Or if you are a grown-up. I can’t really think of any car that is better.

17 November 2013