Jeremy - The Times

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The Clarkson review: Fiat 500X Cross (2015)

Let Me Introduce the Latest Member of the 500 Family: Uncle Fester

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 5 July 2015


Fiat 500X 1.4 MultiAir Cross, £18,595

I THINK I wouldn’t enjoy working in marketing very much because when you go home after a hard day’s thinking, you have absolutely no idea whether your endeavours were successful or not.

You may have dreamt up the most brilliant sponsorship deal or an extremely clever bit of product placement, but did it have any effect at all on sales? There’s no way of knowing.

I bet you any money that the man in the polo-necked jumper and thin glasses was given an immediate pay rise and keys to the executive lavatory after he managed to do the deal for the Philips logo to crop up time and again in various James Bond films. It was on the stereo in Timothy Dalton’s Aston Martin in The Living Daylights, and on the keyring finder he used to kill a villain in Tangiers. But did that have an impact on sales? Not in my house, it didn’t.

Or what about Robinsons Barley Water? If it were removed from the umpire’s chair on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, would there be gallons of the stuff sitting around undrunk in warehouses? And if there were, could the slump have happened anyway because kids prefer Coca-Cola?

We see a lot of marketing in the world of cars and we have no idea whether it works or not. Take Audi’s “Vorsprung durch Technik” campaign. It was hailed as a triumph, but since it stopped being read out at the end of the TV ads, sales of the brand have skyrocketed. It’s much the same story at Ford. In the olden days Ford spent a fortune on Formula One and rallying and as a result it dominated the sales charts. And today it does much less motor sport, which means, er . . . it still dominates the sales charts.

Enzo Ferrari used to say that if you win a race on a Sunday afternoon you make a sale on a Monday morning. And everyone nodded sagely. But if that were true, Ferrari wouldn’t have sold a single car for two years, and, let’s see now, it has sold loads. Mostly to James May.

All of which brings me to Fiat. Several years ago it made a cheeky little homage to the original 500 and decided — after a great deal of market research, I should imagine — to call it the 500. It sold like hot cakes. In Britain alone 200,000 estate agents have bought one.



Ford obviously thought this runaway success had something to do with the actual car, so it launched its own version of it — the second-generation Ka. And nobody wanted one. This must have caused Fiat to think that the success of its 500 had something to do with the name it had given it. So when it decided to make a people carrier, it called that the 500 as well.

Then it decided to make a trendy, city-based European version of the rugged, all-American Jeep Renegade. So what would it call this, do you suppose? Well, after many meetings and a lot of espresso, Fiat has decided that it should be called the 500 as well.

There was a time when Fiat gave all the cars it made different names. You had the Panda, the Strada, the Stilo, the Croma, the X1/9 and so on. But it has decided that’s very old-school. So now, to keep things simple, everything is called the 500, whether it’s a hatchback, a lorry, a sports car or an off-roader. I wonder how long will it be before La Stampa, the Fiat-owned newspaper, is relaunched as La 500.

Anyway, back to the latest 500, which is badged with an X. This is an internationally recognised symbol to tell onlookers the car has four-wheel drive. But in the 500X that isn’t necessarily so. All-wheel drive is just an option. So it’s not a 500 and it’s not a 500X either.

Several trim levels are available. In the “Off-Road Look” versions of the car there’s Cross and Cross Plus. And in the “City Look” there’s Pop (coming later this month), Pop Star and Lounge. I am not making the last one up. I am aware, of course, that “lounge” these days is supposed to conjure up an image of some chillout music wafting through calico drapes on a perfect Ibiza morning. But to me it’s the horse-brass-festooned front room in a Cheshire semi.



It’s probably best we strip away all the marketing nonsense and concentrate on the car. It shares its basic architecture with the Jeep, but the two cars are very dissimilar. The Renegade may have grown up a bit, but it’s still the only car that actually shows up on a man’s gaydar. The Fiat, on the other hand, is aimed at estate agents who’ve met a client, got married and had children. So they need something with a bit of space in the back and a proper boot.

Hmm. And why would these thirtysomething bods and boddesses buy a Fiat that is made by Italians out of American components, rather than, say, a nice’n’sensible Nissan or Skoda?

Well, here’s something strange. In recent years Fiats seem to have stopped grinding to a halt in a cloud of steam when they are three minutes old. New figures suggest they are pretty reliable. That’s one thing. The next is: it doesn’t feel even remotely as though it’s made out of George Michael’s chaps.

In essence it’s a five-door hatchback that looks quite good, in an unthreatening way. It’s also good value when you look at the long list of equipment that’s provided as standard.

And yet I didn’t like it very much. Part of the problem was that I was driving around in a car that was called a 500 but so plainly wasn’t. That’s a bit like me deciding to call myself Brad Pitt. I could, but you wouldn’t be fooled for very long.

Then there’s my natural aversion to this sort of car. The Mini Countryman, the Nissan Kumquat and so on. I can’t see why you would need the ground clearance or the extra headroom. And why pay a premium for something you don’t need? Why not just buy a normal hatchback? A Volkswagen Golf, say.


There’s a switch on the centre console. Turn it to the right and the 500X becomes a stoned tortoise

The main reason I didn’t much care for the Fiat, though, was: it was deeply uninspiring to drive. The ride was poor, the steering was loose, the clutch was sudden and the brakes were so sharp that pulling up gently was nigh-on impossible.



Then there was a switch on the centre console that made everything worse. Turn it to the left and the steering got heavier, which seemed fairly pointless. Turn it to the right and the car pulled away from a junction as though it had suddenly become a tortoise with some kind of cannabis addiction.

As I said, I would never recommend any car of this type, unless you have a farm and need the ground clearance and the headroom for your horse. And if you have your heart set on such a thing, I still can’t really recommend the Fiat.

If you really want to say at parties you drive a 500, there’s a better plan. Buy a Skoda Yeti, then simply remove the badge and screw a Fiat logo to the boot instead.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for a used Fiat 500X

Fiat 500X 1.4 MultiAir Cross
Engine:1368cc, 4 cylinders
Power:138bhp @ 5000rpm
Torque:170 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission: 6-speed manual
Performance: 0-62mph: 9.8sec
Top speed:118mph
Fuel: 47.1mpg (combined)
CO2:139g/km
Road tax band: E (£130 a year)
Price:
£18,595
Release date:On sale now
Verdict:If this is a 500, then I’m a Dutch Brad Pitt

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆

PROS
✓ Looks quite good
✓ Plenty of standard equipment
✓ More space and ground clearance than the 500 city car

CONS
X Ridiculous that it hangs on to the 500 badge
X Deeply uninspiring to drive
X Why you would need the ground clearance in this type of car?



www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1575735.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-fiat-500x-cross-2015/

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THE CLARKSON REVIEW: JAGUAR XE (2015)

Put a forged Monet in the boot and you’d have a real bounder’s Jag

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 12 July 2015


Jaguar XE, from £26,990

NO ONE has yet said to me: “I’m thinking of buying a new Jaguar. What do you reckon?” People ask me about BMWs and Mercedes and Range Rovers all the time, but Jags? No. It’s as though they’ve dropped off the businessman’s radar completely.

We keep being told Jaguar is building another factory and taking on another billion or so employees, and that’s true. It is. But only so it can build more Range Rovers. Jag sales are — how can I put this kindly? — a bit Betamax.

The problem is simple, really. Why would you buy a big XJ when for the same sort of money you could have a BMW 7-series or an S-class Mercedes or one of those Audis that take Cara Delevingne to film premieres? Answer? Anyone? Anyone?

In the days of Terry-Thomas and of John Steed in The Avengers, Jags were rather caddish and wonderful. They were driven by charmers and chancers who always had a dodgy Monet in the boot and a “spot of bother” with the mortgage company, so “Would it be OK if I crashed at your place for a few nights, old boy?”



I know Jaguar worried about the Arthur Daley connection, but that was foolish, because people liked Arthur Daley. Even today people like a lovable rogue — someone who can charm his way into a woman’s knickers even though he always leaves his wallet at home “by mistake”. It’s why we’re always happy to have a drive tarmacked by someone who we know has nicked the ingredients from the council. It’s why we buy rugs if we think they’ve fallen off the back of a lorry.

Jaguar should have worked hard to develop this market. The cars themselves should have been sold from behind the railway arches and fitted as standard with a cubbyhole for shooters in the boot. But instead it went with vodka-bar lighting and rorty oversteer handling, and the moment was lost. It’s a pity.

As soon as you step into the new XE, you feel the disappointment. There. In the middle of the steering wheel is the Jaguar badge, which suggests you should be waist-deep in Wilton carpet, looking at your own raffish reflection in the highly polished walnut dashboard. But no. It’s just a car in there. So, as with all vehicles in this price bracket, it feels as if you’re sitting in a man’s washbag.

There’s more, I’m afraid. There’s less space in the back than in the BMW 3-series and C-class Mercedes, and you get a smaller boot. And while clever new petrol engines are on the way, they haven’t arrived yet. So the 2-litre turbo in my test car is an old Ford unit that first saw the light of day in the Mondeo. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s refined and economical, but you’d always know as you bimbled about that the heart of the machine was from the wrong side of the tracks.



It’s all a bit lacklustre, really, until you get to the eight-speed automatic gearbox, which isn’t lacklustre at all. It’s dreadful. You might imagine that, no matter what the situation, an eight-speed box would always have the right ratio to ensure you had the punch to get up and go. I’m afraid not.

Quite the reverse, in fact. It has been programmed to make sure that the engine is using as little fuel as possible at all times. This is to keep the EU emissions Nazis happy. So when you put your foot down to exploit a gap at a roundabout, the gearbox immediately forms a committee to decide how best to balance your request for power with its mission priority, which is: save the polar bear.

As a result, not much happens. So you ask for more power, which causes the committee to have a bit of a panicky wobble. Now it’s like the Terminator in that scene in the new film when it has been told to kill John Connor and save him. It hasn’t a clue what to do, so it just gives you random gears in no particular order until finally you mash the pedal to the metal, at which point it has a temper tantrum and throws a saucepan at your head.

Happily, there is a solution. You keep the gear selector in the Sport position, which tells the on-board computer that you literally couldn’t give a pig’s arse about the polar bear. You just want to be able to pull onto a roundabout without being T-boned by an oncoming lorry.


Try to ignore the man’s-washbag interior: the XE offers a wonderfully comfortable ride

Maybe these issues will be addressed when the latest petrol engines come on stream next year. But that doesn’t really help if you’re looking for a new car now.



This might, though. I was on the M40 — a road I know so well that I’ve given all the Catseyes names — when I suddenly realised that the XE is extremely comfortable. Oh, there are buttons that ruin that by making it bumpier, but in Normal mode it is fabulous.

And it’s not just the ride either. It has a refinement that is far beyond anything you could reasonably expect in this area of the market. In short, it feels noticeably more expensive than its German rivals. Even when you’re going round Hammersmith roundabout, in west London, which is basically a ploughed field these days, it feels as though you’re on a magic carpet.

Maybe this is down to the integral-link rear suspension, which is heavier than the setup everyone else uses but is better at its job. Or maybe the all-new platform, which one day will be used to make the Range Rover Evoque, is just inherently excellent. Or maybe it’s a combination of things. But the XE feels like a £100,000 car. It drives well too.

And then it gets better because it is also extremely good-looking. It doesn’t stand up and shout, “Look at me”, but when you do, you will be mesmerised by its beauty. It’s a minx with windscreen wipers.



I have no doubt at all that if you leave this car’s gearbox in Sport mode, switching back to “D” only when you’re on a motorway, it’s a better buy than anything BMW, Audi or Mercedes will sell you for the same money. It’s definitely the one I’d choose.

There is just one thing, though, before I close. In the fullness of time, Jaguar will launch a fast XE. It’ll have a V8, and everyone will rush around clutching their tinkles, saying that it’s as good as a BMW M3. But no one will actually buy it, because if you want an M3, you’ll buy one, not something that’s just pretending.

So how’s this for a plan? Jaguar should launch a Terry-Thomas special edition with lots of wood and tweed and possibly a decanter in the centre armrest. Sell it with a mildly forged Rembrandt in the boot and the number of a good lawyer programmed into the phone.

Because anyone who’s old enough to be able to afford a Jaguar will want that from his car, not an ability to leave 300 yards of black stripes down the road every time he sets off.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Jaguars

2015 JAGUAR XE PORTFOLIO 2.0I 240PS SPECIFICATIONS
Engine: 1999cc, 4 cylinders, petrol, turbocharged
Power: 237bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque: 251 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission:
8-speed automatic
Performance:
0-62mph: 6.9sec
Top speed: 155mph
Fuel: 37.7mpg (combined)
CO2: 179g/km
Road tax band: I (£350 for first year; £225 thereafter)
Price: £33,740
Release date: On sale now

Verdict
Jolly good show! But do keep it in Sport mode
CRITIC'S RATING  ★★★★☆

PROS
✓ Looks great
✓ More refined than anything from Germany
✓ Sublime ride

CONS
X Polar bear-loving gearbox is a drag
X Next generation engines aren't available yet
X Why is there no decanter in the armrest?


Jaguar XE Portfolio

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1578736.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-jaguar-xe-2015/

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FAREWELL, DUNSFOLD: CLARKSON'S FINAL LAP OF THE TOP GEAR TEST TRACK

The Condemned Man Has A Final Smoke On The Track

Rubber burns and fond memories flow as the deposed Top Gear ringmaster takes a few of his favourite cars for a final breakneck spin around the test track at the heart of the TV show he created

Jeremy Clarkson       Published: 19 & 20 July 2015



IT TOOK a while for the BBC’s senior management to understand what I was on about. They’d just canned Top Gear and couldn’t really understand my plans for bringing it back.

Eventually, though, I managed to get a bit of face time in Jack Barclay’s Bentley showroom in Mayfair with Jane Root, the controller of BBC2 at the time. Over a glass of wine I said that the show would have a studio, which would be in a hangar, and that outside there’d be a test track, where all the corners would be named after soft rock bands. “It’ll be a place,” I said, “where car things happen.” And the penny dropped.

With her backing, Andy Wilman, the producer, and I set out to find the “place” where these “car things” would “happen”, and ooh it was tricky. Britain is festooned with airfields and empty hangars, but everywhere we went it was the same story. “I’m afraid the RAF still needs it.” Or: “You’ll never get planning permission for that.”

In the end, while I was looking at a potholed and pockmarked option somewhere in the north, Andy rang from a place called Dunsfold in Surrey . . . and the rest is history.

It was an active airfield, but the perimeter road was in good nick and the owner said we could paint a few lines on the main runway to mark out a bit of a track. To help us out with that, we called a Lotus test driver called Gavan Kershaw, who came down from Turnipshire and worked out the corners that are now so familiar to millions of people around the world.

We were especially pleased with Hammerhead, which, for no reason at all, wasn’t named after a soft rock band. It was a quick left followed by an opening right and it would, said Gavan, cause a badly set-up car to understeer. Weirdly, the car that understeered most through there was the Lotus Elise. And anything on Pirelli tyres. Everything else kicked its tail out and went through, sideways, trailing a thick cloud of tyre smoke. I loved the Hammerhead. But then I loved all the corners. It’ll always hold a special place in my heart, that track.

Which is why, last week, I was feeling a bit choked as I went through the gates for the very last time.



The Top Gear portable office was locked to stop me taking even a small souvenir. The hangar was empty. But the track was full of enough memories to keep me going. The missing lamp where Black Stig went off in an Aston Martin Vanquish. The tyre wall rendered cockeyed by the first White Stig’s Koenigsegg moment. And the two furrows left by me after a quarter-of-a-mile spin in a BMW 1-series.

The longest accident, however, made that look like a parking bump. One of our drivers — I shan’t name him — had been asked by a director to get a shot of a Lamborghini’s speedometer reading 200mph. So off he went, in the pouring rain, to oblige. And he finished up more than half a mile away, pointing backwards, just yards from a primary school playground.


The final three cars to get the Clarkson treatment at Dunsfold are, from left, the Mercedes-AMG GT S, the LaFerrari and the 488 (Vicki Couchman)

Then there were the celebrity moments. Lionel Richie was our first big-name American guest and we’d rented him what was described as a luxury motor home. What made it luxurious was that it had a picture on one of the walls. A picture, much to our American friend’s distress, of the Twin Towers. And it got worse, because while he was out on the track, trying to set a time in the reasonably priced Suzuki Liana, the front wheel fell off.

Then we had Sir Michael Gambon bloody nearly rolling while doing the last corner. And Tom Cruise, who did exactly the same thing.

As I said. Many memories. So I wanted to enjoy my last moment out there, which is why I was so very grateful to Ferrari for shipping a brand-new 488 over from Italy.

I’d brought some guests. People who’d donated, between them, £100,000 to the Roundhouse charity in London to be there for my last hurrah.

Or so I thought. In fact it turned out that what they’d really bid for was the chance to be driven round in the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s LaFerrari.

While we waiting for a go in that, I took them round in the amuse-bouche, the 488, and ooh it was good. Many people have said that because it’s now hurled along by a polar-bear-friendly turbocharged engine, it’s lost the magic of the naturally aspirated 458. But it hasn’t. It really, really hasn’t.

Yes, you sense there’s been some marketing-led jiggery-pokery to make it sound “proper”, and the engine bay does look a bit empty, but from behind the wheel it feels pretty much identical to the 458, which means it feels better and more exciting than all its rivals. There’s a lightness in a Ferrari, a delicacy, that McLaren and Porsche and all the others just can’t match.



There’s a lot of speed too. Had I been so inclined, I could probably have done my fastest-ever lap in the 488. But I wasn’t so inclined. I was there to have fun, to kick the tail out and burn some rubber. Which is why Mercedes had sent along an AMG GT S.

The Ferrari is a wonderful thing — make absolutely no mistake about that. But the Mercedes is more . . . how can I put this? It’s more me. A big engine at the front, a gearbox at the back and a big smiley ape in the middle, shouting, “Power!” for no apparent reason every few seconds. The Ferrari is a quail’s egg dipped in the finest celery salt. The Merc is a great big steak, dripping in blood and horseradish.

So I did a few laps in that, looking out of the side window at all the places where people had come off, and then it was time to choose. Which would I use for my final lap?

The answer was obvious. It would have to be the Ferrari the Ferrari. Nick Mason’s million-quid hybrid.

And so off I went for one last go in what most people would say is the greatest, most exciting car yet made. It’s up there, certainly. But I did look a bit quizzical when I first put my foot down hard, because while the acceleration was prodigious, it didn’t feel quite as savage as it had done in the McLaren P1.


(Vicki Couchman)

What does surprise you is the way you think it absolutely must be time for a gearchange but the rev counter suggests that the petro-Faraday motor is only just starting to gird its loins. On and on the power comes, in a never-ending stream of relentless noise and thrust.

When the dashboard and the steering wheel finally start to light up like the control room in a stricken nuclear power station and you pull on the right paddle to change up, you get your second surprise, because ooh it’s quick. Not blink-of-an-eye quick. Way faster than that. And then you’re in the next gear, and on and on comes the power again.

Then it’s time for the tricky second-to-last corner, the one that caught out the celebrities because you’re going from a wide runway that dulls you to the sense of speed to a tiny slip road where everything feels much faster. You need to brake hard in a Ferrari the Ferrari, and that’s OK because it slows down the way it changes gear: immediately.



Through the bends? Well, it was Nick’s car and it was my last-ever lap and I didn’t want to bin it, so perhaps I wasn’t pushing quite as hard as I should have been. But I dunno. While it felt sublime and planted and wondrous, I do seem to recall that Porsche’s alternative, the 918, has just a tad more grip.

Let’s not forget McLaren never wanted to see its P1 race the 918 around Dunsfold. It had done the maths and worked out that in those tight corners the Porsche’s four-wheel-drive system would give it the edge.

We will find out one day which of these three cars really is the fastest. It’s on the to-do list. But for now it was time for the last lap. And I made it a good one. A smooth one. The sort of lap that would have made the Stig proud.

And then it was over. And back in the car park everyone was packing up to go home. And there was one of the guests left, saying she hadn’t had a go. And the only car that hadn’t been loaded onto the trailer was the Mercedes. So I took her out in that. And went nuts.

My last lap, then. It was smoky. And I’m happy with that.


CLARKSON'S LAST LAP AT DUNSFOLD: THE VICTIMS


Additional reporting by Dominic Tobin

So who accompanied Jeremy Clarkson on his final laps of the Top Gear test track? Step forward Zak Brown, co-owner of the United Autosports racing team, one of two winners who bid an eye-watering £50,000 charity donation each for the privilege. Last week Brown and his two sons were at Dunsfold to savour the moment.


Jeremy with Zak Brown and his two sons (Vicki Couchman)

The cloud is low, there’s drizzle in the air and on the track visibility is near zero — although that’s mainly due to the huge cloud of tyre smoke pouring from the rear of a Ferrari 488 GTB.

“These are once-in-a-lifetime memories,” says Brown. “They are particularly hard to come by these days. The kids have had a great time and it’s for a great cause. Absolutely, it’s been worth it.”



His sons agree. After one lap, Max, 11, climbs out of the car grinning from ear to ear. “After you slide, he looks at you, smiles and puts his thumbs up,” he says.

When he has finished with the Ferrari, Clarkson makes his way to a Mercedes-AMG GT S. “We’ll fire up the Merc now,” he announces, “and burn some rubber.”

Money raised from auctioning Jeremy’s last lap went to the Roundhouse Trust, a charity that supports disadvantaged young people

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Ferraris


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1581738.ece
www.driving.co.uk/news/farewell-dunsfold-clarksons-final-lap-of-the-top-gear-test-track/

A read bit more in Jezza on Twitter: jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/298322/thread  &  jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/298326/thread

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The Clarkson review: Volvo XC90 (2015)

Sven and Thor’s Safety Car Now Comes With Insomnia Control

Jeremy Clarkson               Published: 26/28 July 2015



Volvo XC90, from £45,750

AT THE turn of the century Volvo’s engineers hit on an amazing idea. Sitting in the sauna one day, as naked as the day he was born, Thor turned to Sven and said: “Sven. After you have whipped me with some twigs and I have leapt for no reason into a freezing-cold lake, why don’t we design a big family car that might actually suit a big family?”

Land Rover had tried this with the seven-seat Discovery. But of course Land Rover was run back then by people who were only interested in how a car performed on a very muddy slope in Wales. They didn’t understand children. Many, I suspect, weren’t even quite sure where they came from.

As a result the Discovery had seats in the boot that could be accessed only by someone with a degree in engineering. Certainly, they could not be folded down unless you were some kind of Indian god with six arms. And to make matters worse, there was no space in the boot for even the thinnest dog.

Sven and Thor had had a better idea. Their car would not be particularly good on a muddy slope in Wales. And it would not be able to spin its wheels when leaving the traffic lights. Nürburgring lap times? They weren’t interested at all.

However, it would have the cool, raised splendour of a big 4x4 and it would have buttons that could be operated by someone wearing gloves. The seats could be moved about and folded away easily, even by a harassed mum who had six bags of shopping and a child who’d run off to jump in puddles.



They called their new car the XC90 and in 2002 showed it off to the public at an American motor show. Nobody paid it much attention. Why would they when the rest of the hall was full of cars that could growl and generate so much G in the bends that your face would come off? At a motor show nobody is interested in harassed mums or seats that can be folded down with one hand.

Despite the wall of silence that greeted the new car, Sven and Thor went ahead and put it on sale. They obviously weren’t expecting much. Because they’d geared up to make only about 42 in the first year.

But the world went mad for the XC90. It soon became Volvo’s bestselling model, and because demand way outstripped supply, second-hand values were off the charts. It won award after award as people began to realise that the Swedes had pretty much reinvented the wheel. A 4x4 for people who don’t answer to the name of Ranulph or Sir Stirling.

I first saw an XC90 at the Donington Park racetrack. I can’t remember why it, or I, was there, but as the father of three young children I knew straight away that I had to have one. And a few years later I bought a second. And then a third. And then a couple of months ago a fourth.

This may strike you as odd, because why would you buy one of the last of the old models when you knew a new one was due to be launched in a matter of weeks? Simple. Back when the original XC90 was launched, Volvo was owned by Ford. It was a big player with deep pockets. But today Volvo is owned by a Chinese operation called Geely, and, from what I can gather, its pockets are now a bit more like those flaps you get in a pair of Levi’s. To put it simply, I figured the new car would have been designed on a bit of a shoestring.



When the second-generation XC90 was brought round to my gaff recently, I thought I’d made the right decision. It’s not really much of a looker any more. The deeply sculpted sides are now more slabby, and, my God, it’s big. Really big.

But the bigness pays dividends on the inside, where you now get a boot and seating for seven adults. Not five adults and a lot of moaning from the teenagers who have been put in the very back.

And there’s more, because, ooh, it’s a nice place to sit. The dials, the textures, the air-cooled subwoofer and the sheer design of everything is absolutely wonderful.

It’s so simple too. There are only eight buttons on the dash — not counting the diamond-cut starter button— because everything is controlled by what isn’t an iPad but sure as hell looks like one.

There is a bit of a drawback, though. Have you seen a child’s iPad after he’s had some sticky buns for tea? Well, that’s what the screen in the Volvo looked like after I’d played with it for five minutes. Oh, and the sat nav idea where you pinch the screen to zoom? That doesn’t work at all. But these are niggles compared with the feature that had driven me mad before I’d even reversed out of my drive . . .



The problem is that back in 2012 Sven and Thor had another idea. They said that by 2020 no one should be killed or injured in a new Volvo. That’s obviously preposterous, because what if you drove one off Beachy Head? No safety feature is going to save you then.

But, having made the claim, they are now working flat-out to realise it, and as a result the XC90 is festooned with systems that become hysterical if they think you are about to bump into even a rose bush.

Manoeuvring this car in a tight spot is like being at a rave. You have flashing lights, sirens and whistles, and there’s no point diving into the iPad thingy to turn everything off because that’s smeared with fingerprints and is invisible.


The brilliantly simple control system in the new XC90 has just eight buttons and a touchscreen

Later, on the motorway, the car did its best to stop me changing lanes — by which I mean it took control of the steering — and it applied the brakes if it thought I was too close to the car in front.

Every fibre of my being was stretched to a teeth-bared grimace by all this, but then I started to think: “Hang on — just go with the flow. Let it do its thing and you are less likely to have a crash.” And when you start to think that way, the new XC90 starts to make sense.



It becomes quite relaxing. Very relaxing, in fact. Because the 2-litre engine is now far quieter than it was in the old model, and the ride — mostly — is pretty good too. It’s so soothing you could nod off. And you’d be fine because it’d wake you up if anything was going wrong.

In the course of a week I drove this car around my farm, around London when the Tubes were on strike and on various motorways, and after seven days I was pretty much in a coma.

So, yes, I made a mistake by buying the old one. This new car is very good; so good in fact that it’d be ideal for those who find the current offerings from Land Rover a bit — how can I put this? — pratty.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Volvo XC90s

Volvo XC90 D5 AWD Momentum
Engine 1969cc, 4 cylinders, diesel
Power 222bhp @ 4250rpm
Torque 347 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission
8-speed automatic
Performance 0-62mph: 7.8sec
Top speed 137mph
Fuel 48.7mpg (combined)
CO2 152g/km
Road tax band G (£180 a year)
Price £45,750
Release date On sale now
Verdict A king-size bed on wheels
CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★★☆

PROS
✓ The ultimate car for parents
✓ 2-litre diesel is whisper quiet
✓ Wonderful cabin design

CONS
X Nannying driver aids
X Touchscreen picks up finger marks
X Can't do what a Range Rover can off-road




Volvo XC90

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1584347.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-volvo-xc90-2015/

[RedMoon11]

You did have one excuse not to buy a 3-series. Not any more

Jeremy Clarkson     Published: 4 October 2015


BMW 320d xDrive SE, £31,285

I HAVE been much amused in recent weeks by various earnest BBC news reporters telling us that people these days decide which car to buy on the basis of how much damage it will cause to the environment.

Of course, this is entirely true inside the BBC, which is why many of the staff go to work on foldaway bicycles. But in the actual world, where women shave their armpits and see Jeremy Corbyn as a humorous throwback, people couldn’t give a stuff about emissions or any of that PC nonsense. You could use slave labour to build a car that ran on a mixture of cyanide and potassium, and if it had free mud flaps and a five-year warranty, you’d sell it by the shipload.

Value for money matters. Fuel economy matters too, along with comfort, zest and reliability. What comes out of the poo chute is irrelevant. And so too, weirdly, is styling.

It’s odd. Nobody would choose to have ugly children and nobody would deliberately fill their house with furniture that they found displeasing to the eye. And yet, every year, thousands and thousands of people buy a car that has the aesthetic appeal of a gaping wound.



I don’t think there’s been a time in automotive history when the market has been so awash with ugly cars. Skinny-wheeled, ungainly monstrosities crammed with unnecessary styling features and roof lines that seem to have been designed so people in the back can wear stovepipe hats.

I look at the Citroën Cactus and wonder: “What’s that all about? Why’s it got bubble wrap down the side?” But plainly lots of people think differently because the damn things are everywhere. It’s the same with that new Lexus NX. Why did they allow a four-year-old with a space laser fixation to do the styling?

Then you have the Mini Countryman and, oh, I nearly forgot, the new Jeep Cherokee. That’s astonishing. Because what they’ve done is taken the old Pontiac Aztec and blended it with a wide-mouthed frog.

However, there are a few manufacturers that are swimming against the ugly tide. Kia is one. And BMW is another. Of course, the German giant can sell you an X3 that is terrible, but its saloons and coupés are magnificent, their lines spoilt only by the curse of familiarity. The 5-series in particular is a masterpiece.

And the 3-series that I was using last week is not far behind. You look at it and you think: “Why on earth would someone choose to buy an Audi or a Mercedes or a Lexus instead?”

One of the reasons, of course, is that in winter BMWs are famously hopeless. In fact the main reason the country grinds to a halt every time there’s a light dusting of snow or a mild frost is that every road in the land is blocked by a BMW, its big fat rear wheels spinning uselessly and its panicking driver filling in insurance forms, knowing that although the accident hasn’t happened yet, it will.

Well, with the BMW I’ve been driving, those days are gone, because it has four-wheel drive. Such a car has been available on the Continent for almost a decade, but until recently BMW’s designers never really saw the point of engineering all-wheel drive into right-hand-drive models. They probably thought that in Britain, where the weather is rarely very bad, we could cope. Yeah, right.


BMW has reworked its iDrive control system, turning it from a mad jumble into a model of sense

We are told this winter will be very bad, and doubtless, if it is, the BBC will blame Volkswagen. But in your sparkly new 320d with xDrive you’ll be fine.

There are, however, some downsides on the days when it’s not snowing. First of all, there’s a premium to pay. That’s reasonable. There are a lot of extra cogs and stuff. But the premium is £1,500, and that’s what economists call “a lot”.

There’s more. The space between the centre console and the wheelarch is quite tight, which means that every time you want to go faster, you hit the brake and come to a halt. More importantly, the fuel consumption is hit hard. The four-wheel-drive car does 5.3 fewer miles to the gallon than its rear-drive sister. And it’s slower. I suppose, in case someone from the BBC is reading this — highly unlikely, I know — I should also mention that it produces 10 more carbon dioxides.

So, there’s a heavy price to pay for the ability to get out of your drive on that chilly February morning when you wake to find Jack Frost has been round in the night. And in all probability you won’t be going anywhere anyway, because your neighbour will have slithered into a lamppost in his two-wheel-drive 3-series and blocked the road.

Really, then, it’s up to you whether you choose xDrive or not. Only you know whether you need it enough to make the penalties worthwhile.

Either way, you do get a lovely car. Wheelarch intrusion aside, the driving position is sublime and the thickness and texture of the steering wheel are perfect.

In the early days, BMW’s iDrive command and control system was a jumble of unintelligible submenus and nonsense, but today it’s the standard-bearer of common sense and logic, twin features that you find throughout the car. Rear seat space, the size of the boot, the way everything operates and the ride: it’s all how it would be if you’d designed it yourself.

Naturally, I do have a couple of niggles. The steering — electric these days, rather than hydraulic — is a bit 50p-piecey, if you know what I mean. It doesn’t have the fluidity that used to be a hallmark of BMW when it billed itself as the maker of the ultimate driving machine. And the parking sensors are stupidly pessimistic. “You’re going to crash! You’re going to crash!!!!” they wail hysterically when you are still yards from the car behind.

Oh, and then there’s the diesel engine. Two years ago eco-loonies were telling everyone diesel was the fuel to use. But then they woke up one day and decided that, no, diesel was not the fuel to use. Because it will cause global warming that will cool the planet. Or something.

It’s hard to be sure with these nutters who say they can predict what the weather will be in a thousand years even though the Met Office’s giant computers can’t even work out what it will be doing tomorrow afternoon. So I shall ignore them and tell you that BMW’s diesel engine is fine. It sounds rather good, it has immense torque and it settles down to a muted hum on the motorway.

Plus, you’ll be doing many more miles to the gallon than you would be with a petrol-powered alternative. Which, as we established at the beginning, matters a great deal more than how many nitrogens are being left in your wake.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for a used BMW 3-series

BMW 320d xDrive SE
Engine 1995cc, 4 cylinders
Power 181bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 280 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission 6-speed manual
Performance
0-62mph: 7.5sec
Top speed 146mph
Fuel
58.9mpg
CO2 116g/km
Road tax band
C (free for first year; £30 thereafter)
Price £31,285
Release date On sale now
Verdict Four wheels good
CLARKSON'S RATING  ★★★★☆
PROS
✓ Drive will help save face if it snows
✓ Spot on layout; like it was designed by you
✓ Diesel engine isn't rattly, has lots of torques
CONS
X Economy drops, nitrogens increase with xDrive
X Four-wheel-drive also adds cost
X Where can I put my feet?


BMW 320d xDrive SE

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1613968.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-bmw-320d-xdrive-se/

---

This Will Relax You, Said The Prison Yoga Teacher As She Pulled My Leg Off

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1614472.ece
jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/298653/thread

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 MCLAREN P1

And On This Bombshell, I Can Officially Declare: We’re Back

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 11 October 2015


McLaren P1, £866,000

ON Wednesday morning I climbed behind the wheel of a McLaren P1, fired up its massive engine, eased it into Drive and set off in a blizzard of noise and wheelspin to start filming Amazon Prime’s new motoring show.

On one side of me was James May in a Ferrari the Ferrari. On the other was Richard Hammond in a Porsche 918 Spyder. And in front, hanging from the back of a Land Rover Discovery, was the big, bushy beard of Ben the cameraman. The band was back together and I was very excited. But, ooh, getting it to this point had not been easy.

When the BBC bigwig Alan Yentob called back in April to say my contract would not be renewed as a result of the “fracas”, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. A large part of me considered the appealing option of “nothing at all”. A smaller part thought I should change tack and do a programme on farming.

I had no idea what James and Richard were planning. When we spoke, they made supportive noises, but unlike the US marines the three of us have always operated under the rule that we do leave a man behind. Put simply, they had themselves to look after and the BBC was making all sorts of coo-coo noises while dribbling warm honey into their heads.



Of course, you all now know that they decided to leave Auntie and come with me to look for a new home. To find one, we decided to get an American agent, which meant doing conference calls with people who dressed up like the Borg and communicated by barking. “Woof, woof,” they all went into their face-mounted microphones. James May in particular looked very distressed.

Eventually, though, we found a chap who said that the three of us and our executive producer, Andy Wilman, suddenly becoming available was a huge opportunity for any broadcaster. Or at least that’s what we thought he said — it came across as a series of dog sounds.

He was true to his word, however, and soon the offers started pouring in. All of a sudden we were up to our scrotums in the dizzying world of modern narrowcasting, in which you can upload a programme when it’s ready, not necessarily at 7pm on a Tuesday.

And you can say what you want, because out there, in the free world, there’s no Ofsted. There’s no finger-wagging. Kevin Spacey spat on Jesus and no one batted an eyelid. Because the internet, let’s face it, is also showing a gentleman and a lady making sweet love in extreme detail.

The problem was that standing between us and all this freedom was an impenetrable layer of legal gobbledygook. James May gave up and disappeared. And I wanted to do the same, because while I could tell that the words being used in meetings were English, they made no sense at all.

And then, riding over the horizon on a white charger, in a brown cardboard envelope, came Amazon. It took us to its London headquarters and showed us the tech it had lined up for the very near future, made us an offer in English — well, it was in American, actually, but that’s close enough — and that was that. We had a new home.

All we needed to do, then, was come up with the new show. All of the previous ingredients — the Stig, the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car and the Cool Wall — belonged to the BBC, so we’d have to start from scratch.



It forced us to get creative. To do what we’d never dared to do in the past: to change what we knew worked. We have, though. It’s going to be all new. New name. New segments. New ideas. Everything is different. Apart from James May, obviously, who is still in 1953. And Richard Hammond, who still doesn’t quite understand anything. And me, who thinks everything can be solved with a hammer.

Oh, and we will still be testing cars. And once we’d decided to keep on doing that rather than switching to icebreakers or handbags, it was pretty obvious where we’d begin.

Which is why, last week, I arrived in a part of Portugal that smells faintly of sewage and is full of people I meet at drinks parties in Oxfordshire and friends of Prince Andrew enjoying the last of the summer sunshine.

Why Portugal? Well, because it’s home to the extremely brilliant International Racetrack of the Algarve. A racetrack Ferrari, Porsche and McLaren all agreed would be ideal to sort out the question that has vexed the world’s motoring enthusiasts for nearly a year: which is best, the Ferrari the Ferrari, the Porsche 918 or the McLaren P1?


May, Clarkson and Hammond assemble the LaFerrari, P1 and 918, as they couldn’t do on... you know

We knew before we set off that other people from the internet have now tested these cars to see which is the fastest and so on. And we wondered whether we should start our new show by gorging on sloppy seconds, but then we thought: “People will hopefully want to know what we think.” And so we got on the plane and came.

I’m here now, and I’ve spent the day in the McLaren and I still can’t quite believe that the thing’s for real. I’ll admit the Ferrari is extremely pretty and that the Porsche grips like an especially clingy and nervous barnacle, but for sheer “Oh my God”, sweaty-pawed, heart-racing, wide-eyed, hair-on-end, ball-shrinking terror, you simply can’t beat the P1.

It doesn’t accelerate in the conventional sense. The throttle pedal is more a sort of portal to a wormhole. You press it and instantly 903 brake horsepower of electricity and petrol working together puts you somewhere else.

I am still slightly amazed — and thrilled — that we live in a world where a car as fast as this can be made. And that if someone has the money, they can drive it on any road they like. Even if they are only 17 years old.



It’s not the best-looking car in the world, but it has a sinister presence. Like the foldaway stock on an AK-47, it’s functional, and its function is to terrify.

But the looks and the speed are nothing compared with the noises it makes. Because it’s a hybrid, there’s a little bit of everything in there. You have the whirrings of a milk float, the chirps of the wastegates, the bellow of the V8 and the roar of the exhaust, all of which come together to make the sort of sound you would normally associate only with a dramatic and sudden movement of tectonic plates.

Inside, there are many dials and readouts and there are buttons that make it go even faster. But you have no time for any of this because you are going so bloody fast and your eyes are full of sweat and you’re getting to a corner and you’re doing a million and you have to trust that the invisible elephant sitting on the rear spoiler is still there, pressing the back tyres into the road, and that it hasn’t wandered off to eat some bark.

I have no idea at this stage whether it will be faster than the Ferrari the Ferrari or the Porsche round the spaghetti-shaped racetrack here in southern Portugal. That test doesn’t happen until after this newspaper has gone to bed.

But whatever the outcome, we are now in the future. It certainly feels that way from where I’ve been sitting all day.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used McLarens

McLaren P1

Engine 3799cc, V8, twin turbo
Power 727bhp @ 7500rpm (petrol engine); 176bhp (electric motor)
Torque 530 lb ft @ 4000rpm (engine); 192 lb ft (motor)
Transmission 7-speed dual-clutch automatic
Performance 0-62mph: 2.8sec
Top speed 217mph
Fuel 34mpg
CO2 194g/km
Road tax band J (£490 for first year; £265 thereafter)
Price £866,000
Release date Sold out

Verdict
Just like that, you’re in the Orion nebula

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★★☆
PROS
✓ Terrifying, in a fantastic way
✓ Sounds like sudden tectonic shift
✓ Doesn't accelerate... it travels through wormholes
CONS
X Not the prettiest of the Holy Trinity
X Driving it fast requires balls
X Even if you had the money, they're all sold




McLaren P1 (McLaren)


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1616781.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-mclaren-p1/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 LAMBORGHINI AVENTADOR

Yabba dabba doo! T rex is snarling in evolution’s face

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 25 October 2015



Lamborghini Aventador, from £266,040

ONE DAY, many years ago, a penguin must have landed in the frozen wastelands of Antarctica and thought: “Hmmm. It’s a bit cold but there are no polar bears trying to eat me and the sea is full of fish, so I reckon I’ll stick around.”

Now if we are to believe the teachings of the baby Jesus, he’d have lasted about five minutes before freezing to death. Or he’d have jumped into the sea, where he’d have immediately become a tasty frozen snack for a hungry leopard seal.

Luckily, however, there’s such a thing as evolution, which arrived in the snowy wilderness and with a heavy but loving, parental sigh took charge of the situation, giving Mr Penguin bigger lungs and a fat tummy and turning his wings into flippers.

We see this kindly benevolence everywhere. When people started to live below sea level in what we now know as Holland, evolution arrived and quietly made sure they grew to be very tall so they’d be OK when the place flooded.

Then there’s Australia. It was designed to be a faraway dustbin for all the animals that were really too dangerous to live anywhere else, so evolution had to make sure that when people decided to live there too, they’d become hardy souls with a belief that anyone who has tear ducts must be a Pom.



I like to think that evolution lives on something a bit like Tracy Island, waiting to drop everything and help out when a tortoise decides it wants to live in the sea, or when people decide they want to keep dogs as pets. Secretly, it thinks: “Why would you want to do that, you imbeciles? Dogs are dangerous carnivores.” But it rocks up anyway and turns what’s basically a wolf into a spaniel with floppy ears and a cute, waggly tail.

We see evolution at work in the world of cars too. When we were all called Terry and June, we were happy to drive around in four-door saloons, but one day we woke up, started naming ourselves after various white wines and decided we would only be happy if our car was 15ft off the ground and called an SUV.

One day everyone wanted a hot hatchback. We liked them. We thought they made a great deal of sense. And then we decided for no reason at all that we didn’t want to go quickly any more. We wanted to save fuel. We are worse than otters, which, of course, started out as fish, then decided they liked the land and then decided, just after evolution had turned their scales into fur, that actually they wanted to be fish again.

But despite our otterishness, the car industry has kept up, giving us what we want with remarkable speed.

However, occasionally evolution is caught out. Thanks to the teachings of the great American scientist Michael Bay, we now know the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant meteorite, which means that one day they were walking through the woods thinking: “These plants are awfully dusty today.” And the next they were sitting there thinking: “Why am I so dead?”

Evolution didn’t even have a chance to put down the crossword and slip into its Thunderbird suit before the whole planet was carpeted with decaying carcasses. And we are seeing a similar sort of thing today in the world of supercars.

Back in the mid-1960s, Lamborghini decided to put an enormous engine in the middle of a car that was about the same height as a piece of paper. It called its creation the Miura and the supercar was born.



There have been many imitations over the years but they’ve all adhered to the same basic recipe: dramatic looks, enormous power and, er, that’s it.

Now, however, Porsche, Ferrari and McLaren have taken the unusual step of using hybrid technology to get even more power from their road rockets. The combination of electricity and petrol is as potent as it sounds. These new cars are phenomenally fast and have therefore arrived in the supercar arena like three extinction-event meteorites.

Honda is next with a hybrid, all- wheel-drive NSX, which I hope will be more successful than its efforts in Formula One. And BMW is said to have an improved i8 in the wings. And that takes us back to where the whole genre began: Lamborghini.

Lamborghini is a division of Volkswagen, which because of this ludicrous emissions saga will not be spraying much cash around in the foreseeable future. Which means Lambo will have no funds to develop a hybrid supercar of its own. Which means it will be stuck with what it’s got now for quite a while.

Which in many ways is no bad thing, because what it has got now is the best car it has yet made: the Aventador.


The Aventador’s controls are lifted from the Audi TT. But would you prefer Italian electrics?

Oh sure, even by dinosaur standards it’s not the best supercar to drive. It feels big and heavy. And if you go for a hot lap of a racetrack, you’d better not even think about doing another, because the brakes will fade and then fail. It’s all very well saying that this cannot happen because they are carbon ceramic, but I know it does.

There’s more. Inside, an Aventador is very dramatic, with a starter button that hides under the sort of red flap that you normally find over the Fire Missile button in the cockpit of a fighter jet. But if you actually look at all the stuff carefully, you’ll notice it’s been lifted straight from an Audi TT.



And who cares? Because — let’s be honest, shall we? — nobody has ever bought a supercar because they want to get round the Nürburgring in four seconds. Supercars are capable of going at 200mph, but they’re bought mainly for doing 1% of that speed in Knightsbridge. And when it comes to prowling, nothing looks quite as good as the big Lambo. It’s a masterpiece.

And why are you bothered about the “I started wi’ nowt” Audi underpinnings? What would you prefer? Italian electrics?

Yes, it’s soundly beaten both in a straight line and round a corner by the new breed of hybrid hypercars, but, while they make a range of unusual noises, they can’t compete with the raw, visceral bellow of the T rex that lives under the Aventador’s engine cover. Ungodly. That’s how it sounds.

And another thing. The new McLaren P1 is very difficult to drive fast. If you make even a tiny mistake, it will kill you. The Lamborghini isn’t like that. Thanks to its four-wheel-drive system and the fact that it’s more for show than go, it’s on your side when the outside world gets blurry.

I love this car. I love its clunky, old-skool manners and its honest-to-God, shepherd’s-pie approach to the business of getting down low and going quickly.

Will it die in the face of the modern competition? Well, look at it this way. When steam power came along, horses were no longer necessary. But instead of melting them down — which is what I’d have done — we turned them into pets.

And that’s what I hope happens with the big old Lambo: that after the meteorite of hybrid power has struck, people will continue to want it precisely because it suddenly appears to be lumbering and old-fashioned.

Certainly, if I were given the choice of any supercar, this is the one I’d buy. I respect and admire the P1. But which would you rather have as a pet: a clever and sophisticated electronic robot? Or a bloody great brontosaurus?

My case rests.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Lamborghini Aventadors

Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4

Engine 6498cc, V12
Power 691bhp @ 8250rpm
Torque 509 lb ft @ 5500rpm
Transmission 7-speed sequential automatic
Performance 0-62mph: 2.9sec
Top speed 217mph
Fuel 17.7mpg (combined)
CO2 370g/km
Road tax band M (£1,100 for first year; £505 thereafter)
Price £260,040
Release date On sale now
Verdict
I’ve been to Jurassic World — and I like it
CRITIC'S RATING ★★★★☆

PROS
✓ Bellow of the V12 is glorious
✓ 4WD system is on your side at speed
✓ A masterpiece to look at

CONS
X Not as fast as new breed of hypercars
X You'll need new brakes after first lap
X Switchgear comes from an Audi TT


Lamborghini Aventador

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1622347.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-lamborghini-aventador/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: FORD FOCUS ST ESTATE

Fetch Fiona Bruce: I’ve found the world’s fastest antique

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 1 November 2015


Ford Focus ST estate, from £23,595

BACK in 2010 the Conservatives announced that there would be no more idiotic bus lanes on the M4 and that speed cameras would be switched off. New Labour’s 13-year war on the motorist, they declared, was over.

Sadly, they were lying. Because today, if you have to get from, let’s say, west London to Luton airport, you are monitored by hidden speed cameras on the motorways and average-speed cameras everywhere else. You cannot stray over the limit even once. Compared with Tony Blair’s puny war on the motorist, this is nuclear.

Smug speed-camera enthusiasts will argue through their muesli-stained teeth that the new blanket coverage means that no one can ever break the law. But I have a couple of points on that.

No 1. In a modern car with good brakes and airbags on a good, well-designed road where pedestrians and traffic are kept apart by railings, it is absurd to impose a 40mph limit. Forty is just a number plucked from the sky by a fool who knows nothing. There’s no science or sense to it at all.



If you want total safety, make the speed limit 1mph. But if you accept that casualties are inevitable, then balance the need for safety with the need for speed. And on a dual carriageway that means a limit of 70mph. As it always used to be when the country was run by sensible people, not ill-informed morons.

No 2. And this is more important. Just because we now have the ability to prevent speeding of any kind everywhere, that does not mean we should use it. Hey, why not implant everyone in the country with a tracking device so the police can keep an eye on their movements until the day they die? Why not take a DNA sample from every newborn baby? We could do that easily, and if fighting crime were our priority we would. But it isn’t.

No 3. Speed cameras do not cut accident numbers. In fact when they were switched off in Oxfordshire recently — they’re back on again now, by the way — the number of casualties showed no noticeable increase. We all know they are a tool for raising money. So why can’t the government admit it? Why can’t it say: “They are a tax on people who want to go quickly.” I wouldn’t mind that because if I were late for a flight I could make the choice: do I pay the speed tax and catch it, or do 40mph and get the next one?

The only thing ministers would have to do to make this work is drop the penalty point system. Because that’s the real problem. The fact is that on one journey from London to Luton it is now possible to amass enough points to mean that you arrive without a driving licence.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. So I guarantee that we will reach a stage very soon where it will be impossible to get away with speeding on any road anywhere. And there will be no point hiding from the law in a bothy in Scotland because there will be a tracking device in your head and Plod will send attack choppers to hunt you down.

This is something you should bear in mind when choosing your next car. Because what’s the point of having a 500 brake horsepower engine when all you need to reach 40mph is just one actual horse? Certainly that would make more sense than the car you see in the photographs this morning.



It’s called the Ford Focus ST and it’s wilfully set in about 1984. There are extra dials above the dashboard to keep you informed about temperatures and pressures, which is important in a 1940s fighter plane but less so in a modern car; there are illuminated Essex disco motifs in the kick plates, body-hugging seats and — what’s this? — yes, it’s a manual gearbox that you operate with a stick on the floor.

Oh, and let’s not forget the name. ST. Doubtless Ford will tell you this stands for Sports Technologies, but we all know what it really means, don’t we, ladies? And now it’s available as a diesel. So that’s an STD. Excellent. I haven’t been able to make jokes along those lines since Citroën’s Project VD.


The Focus ST estate comes with lots of kit — which doesn’t all work brilliantly

I’m trying at the moment to work out who would want to buy a practical estate car that’s named after a feminine hygiene product and comes with Wayne and Kev styling, a Dickensian gearbox and enough power to put you on a speed awareness course every time you go into third. Nobody is springing to mind at the moment. Is there someone perhaps from Dexys Midnight Runners who has a dog that’s only really happy when it’s doing 150mph?

I’ll be honest: I’m partial to a fast Ford. I go all gooey about a 3-litre Capri, I spent most of the 1990s in an Escort RS Cosworth, my first car was a Cortina 1600E, I adore the GT40 and there’s no doubt in my mind that for sheer fun there is no better car on the market today than the Fiesta ST. But I dunno — this Focus ST estate seems a bit weird.

Partly this is because I know it’s a fluffer designed to warm us up for the all-wheel-drive 345bhp Focus RS. And partly it’s because I was in London most of last week and the manual gearbox made my teeth itch with rage. Using your leg to change gear in 2015 feels as old-fashioned as using the phone on the hall table.

However, I must say that when I got out of London it did what all fast Fords do: it put a big smile on my face. Yes, there is a huge amount of torque steer when you accelerate hard in second or third gear — you don’t drive this car so much as hang on for dear life. But the engine is a gem, the ride is nicely judged, the seats are epic and my dogs appreciated all that space in the back. It covers a lot of bases, this car. And it appears to be good value as well.

But while it comes with a lot of toys, many don’t work as well as you might hope. There is the option of headlights, for instance, that dip automatically when a car is coming the other way, which is handy. But they also dip when you are approaching a reflective warning sign, which means you are suddenly no longer able to see either the sign or whatever it was warning you about.



Then there’s the sat nav screen. Mostly it all works very well, except that in an effort to look snazzy Ford has completely overdone the amount of information that’s being conveyed. At any given point you have 33 features on the screen, and that’s not including the map.

This has always been a Ford thing. Its kit is a bit like supermarket own-brand baked beans. It looks the same as the real thing. But it isn’t.

And that’s never really bothered me because, all things considered, fast Fords were bloody good fun. They still are. But, because of the jackbooted Tory Stasi with their surveillance cameras, you struggle to enjoy that fun on the road any more.

Which means that today this car only really works as a wistful cameo on the Antiques Roadshow. Not as something you’d realistically want to buy.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Ford Focuses

2015 FORD FOCUS ST-2 ESTATE SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £23,595
ENGINE: 1997cc, 4 cylinders, turbo
POWER: 247bhp @ 5500rpm
TORQUE: 266 lb ft @ 2000rpm
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 6.5sec
TOP SPEED: 154mph
FUEL: 41.5mpg (combined)
CO2: 159g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: G (G (£180 a year)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now
Verdict: The STD diesel is a good joke. But that’s about it

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆

PROS
✓ Gem of an engine
✓ Excellent sports seats
✓ Big boot ideal for the dogs

CONS
X Annoying infotainment system
X Torque steer
X Telling anyone you have an STD


Ford Focus ST estate

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1625603.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-ford-focus-st-estate/

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[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: LINCOLN TOWN CAR

So smooth, Hank could perform eye surgery in the back

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 8 November 2015



Lincoln Town Car, $52,895 (£34,370)

BECAUSE I now have my own production company, I have had to learn how to behave like a businessman when travelling. It’s the little things that set them apart; the wheeled suitcase that fits precisely into the overhead locker, the laptop that never runs out of battery. And the maroon polo shirt that’s tucked into a pair of bad jeans.

When travelling, a businessman deliberately wears jeans that don’t fit properly because it tells everyone that he spends most of his life in meetings or on a golf course where the denim trouser is frowned upon. It is important, therefore, when wearing jeans to look as uncomfortable and as stupid as possible. Like a fish in a hat.

A businessman never uses any of the business facilities in an airport lounge because hooking up to the airline’s services implies that he does not have the right equipment to do this for himself, and worse, that his business is so unimportant he doesn’t mind if his conversations are broadcast over an unsecure server.

You see someone in one of those airline lounge business booths and you can be assured he is a business foetus. A new boy. And you are thus at liberty to pull his hair.

On the aeroplane, a businessman never has a drink because this suggests to other people in this cabin that he is an alcoholic. No true businessman drinks. Ever. He also does not watch any of the films that are on offer because he gets all the stimulation he needs from a spreadsheet. He is in his in-flight pyjamas, horizontal, and fast asleep six seconds after the seatbelt light is turned off. Eating? That’s for wimps. Relaxing? That’s what you do when you’re dead — something he hopes to become when he is 57.

When the seatbelt light comes back on, he is immediately bolt upright and dressed in the suit that was somehow concealed in his locker-sized suitcase. He then either whips out his laptop that’s been on for six years and still has 42% of its battery life remaining. Or he watches a businessmen-friendly half-hour episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, just to show everyone else in the cabin that he is so well organised he doesn’t need to check the spreadsheets one more time.

Four minutes after the wheels chirp into the runway, he’s outside the airport, in the back of the Mercedes S-class and on his way to grease the wheels of the world.

I have to admit I’m pretty hopeless at all of this. I watch films on planes, my suitcase is too big and I don’t have a suit. But I do have a grasp of the wheels you need at journey’s end. And I know that the S-class is wrong. It would be the correct choice in Europe or Asia, but any businessmen on a trip to one of those places is saying that he’s second tier.

Really, the only place to do proper business is America, and if you’re going there, you don’t want to be picked up in a Kraut-Tank. Which is why last weekend, on a quick trip to Seattle, I was picked up in a Lincoln Town Car.

Sadly this will soon be a problem because Ford stopped making it four years ago, which means that eventually the current crop being used to transfer businessmen to their downtown hotels will sigh for one last time, then die. And then what? Because there is simply no other car quite like it on sale today.

First of all, it is enormous. Until 2003, in fact, it was the largest car in the western hemisphere. If you could make a Town Car float — and you can’t because it’s made from the heaviest metals known to man — you could use it as an aircraft carrier.

Happily, this size means the interior is slightly larger than most branches of Walmart. Fitted with bench seating, it can handle a driver and five businessmen (or three Americans), and the boot is so vast that not even the Beckhams would be able to fill it with luggage. Apparently it will take four sets of golf clubs, which I understand is impressive. And a golf buggy as well, probably.

But the best thing about a Town Car is not the size, or the loungeability of the rear quarters; it’s the comfort.

European and Japanese cars are always made with one eye on the Nürburgring. We can’t help ourselves. Deep down, we think that handling is more important than safety, price, fuel consumption, world peace, the global economy or God himself. But the problem is that if you build a car that’s designed to cling and scrabble on a high Alpine pass, comfort will inevitably play second fiddle.


The Town Car sacrifices performance to be everything that a limo should: spacious, well equipped and comfortable



In America it’s different. Many think the steering wheel is nothing more than a handy place to rest a laptop. Going round a corner at more than 2mph would cause your bucket of coffee to fall over. So why bother?

Lincoln definitely understood this when it was designing the Town Car back in 1876. Of course it’s changed since then — it now has a cigarette lighter and the leather is ruched — but the recipe is basically the same. You get a body bolted onto a chassis, a live rear axle and a V8 engine that produces seven horsepower but lasts for a thousand million years.

Then there’s the suspension, which can iron out, completely, even the most savage pothole in New York. You could drive a Town Car through a recently bombed city while doing eye surgery and the patient would be fine. I once parked a 1980s Town Car outside a shop in Detroit and when I returned an hour later it was still rocking. It’s probably still rocking now.

Of course this does have an effect on the way it goes round corners. And we know how it does this because the Lincoln’s sister car — the Ford Crown Victoria — is used by many of America’s police forces. And we’ve all seen what happens when they get involved in a chase. Even though they have beefed-up suspension they usually end up in a ditch, with hilarious consequences.

But here’s the thing. When you emerge into the world after nine hours in an air-free, overheated tube, which would you rather have transport you through the inevitable jams and into the city centre: a car that can get round Silverstone in 90 seconds? Or something comfy?

There are other things too. Because the interior of a Town Car is made from DVD-box plastic and DFS furniture, and because it has 19th-century railroad underpinnings, it cost, when it went out of production, 16p. And because the engine turns over at no more than 2rpm, it only has to be serviced once every million years.

The Town Car was everything a limo should be. Spacious, well equipped, comfortable and cheap for its operator to buy and run. Apart from the lemon-fresh smell from the inevitable air-freshener, it was a lovely place to be. A little taste of America before you actually got there, if you see what I mean.

But now it’s been replaced by something called the MKT, which looks like a Citroën. No businessman would be seen dead in it. Which is why you won’t be reading a review of it from me any time soon.


The first Town Car was the Lincoln Continental Mk IV, introduced in 1959. The recipe has barely changed since then

Lincoln Town Car Signature L

ENGINE: 4601cc, V8
POWER: 236bhp @ 4900rpm
TORQUE: 287 lb ft @ 4100rpm
TRANSMISSION: 4-speed automatic
Performance: Not available
FUEL: 14mpg
CO2: 159g/km
Road tax band: Not applicable
Price: $52,895 (£34,370; 2011 price)
Verdict:
Two tons of pure American indulgence

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆

PROS
✓ Spacious
✓ Comfortable
✓ Cheap to run

CONS
X Interior is made from DVD-box plastic
X Dated underpinnings
X No longer in production



Lincoln Town Car


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1628640.ece

www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-lincoln-town-car/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: VOLKSWAGEN GOLF R ESTATE (2015)

Ahoy, Captain Ahab — they’ve put quad exhausts on Moby-Dick

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 15 November 2015


Volkswagen Golf R estate, £33,585

CHOOSING what car you are going to buy is always 10 times more enjoyable than actually buying it. So when I decided I needed a Volkswagen Golf GTI in my life, I spent many hours on the company’s configurator, examining colours and options and working out whether the aesthetic appeal of the bigger wheels would compensate for the inevitable loss of comfort.

Eventually, of course, I had to give up the delicious procrastination and place my order. It wasn’t easy. One dealer laughed in my face and said I’d have to wait six months. Another said I’d never get the car I wanted at all but he had a very nice Scirocco R that I could have instead. “I’m sure you also have a potted plant,” I said, “but I don’t want that either.”

In the end, I gave up with the telephone and drove to my nearest dealership, which, it turned out, is shut on a Saturday. How did it make that one work in a business plan? And then it turned out not to be a dealership at all.

I could have given up and bought something else, but my heart was set on a GTI. I’d had enough of driving flash cars because they cause other motorists to take pictures on their cameraphones. Constantly. I wanted something that would attract no attention. Something grey. And I’d always wanted a GTI, ever since 1980. It was a dull, unfulfilled ache, but when the Mk 7 version came along a few years ago it became an all-consuming need. It’s really, really good, that car, and I wanted one a lot.

My persistence was eventually rewarded — though when I say “persistence”, what I actually mean is “contacts at VW’s head office” — and in September a brand new car arrived at my house on the back of a lorry. I was very excited and was tempted to jump up and down clutching my tinkle, until I noticed that the car had five doors. Two more than I’d wanted. With a five-door car you can’t drive along with your arm out of the window because the B-pillar is in the way. I’d thought about that a lot while choosing the car. But then I’d forgotten to tick the right box on the form, and that was that.

There was another problem too. On holiday in France this year I used a Golf R, which is a bit like the GTI only it has 78 more brake horsepower and four-wheel drive and the wheels look less lost in the arches. I liked it enormously. And you would too. I don’t care what you drive now: I can pretty much guarantee that if you took an R out for a test drive, you’d want it in your life immediately.



However, to convince myself that the GTI is still better, I’ve told myself over and over that the R is a bit knowing, a bit anoraky, a bit Subaruish. And then last week an R estate came to my house . . .

Commentators have observed that this is a silly car because in basic rental spec it costs upwards of £33,000 and that is too much for a Golf. I sympathise with this argument because I’m well aware you should never buy the most expensive house in the street.

However, let’s just look for a moment at what you’re getting. First, it is an estate car and so, with the back seats folded down, there’s space in the back for a small horse and all the paraphernalia that goes with it.

And then at the front you have the GTI engine, which has better pistons and valves and a whizzier turbocharger, so it churns out as near as makes no difference 300bhp. This is allied to a double-clutch gearbox that features a launch control system, though I strongly advise you not to use this facility if you do in fact have a small horse in the back because it will fall over. Ooh, it’s brisk.

In between the horse and the horsepower, you have the bit where you live, and this is perhaps the best part because not only is it all screwed together to a standard way beyond what you could reasonably expect, but also, if you choose your options carefully, you want for nothing at all.


The Golf R estate has a whizzy GTI engine, but also enough space in the back for a small horse



This is a car that can read out text messages, help you stay in lane on the motorway, apply the brakes if it thinks you’re going to crash and a million other things.

What we have here, then, is a commodious, fast, comfortable, quiet and very well equipped four-wheel-drive car. Which brings me on to the Range Rover.

Round where I live in Chipping Norton, my friends all used to have Range Rovers. But now you get the impression that absolutely everybody has one. I was at the local farm shop last weekend and in the car park I counted 37 of the damn things. And I’m not talking about Evoques. I’m talking about the big, hundred-grand jobs.

The Range Rover has become a uniform, and I’m sorry but when I’m presented with a dress code, I’m consumed by an overwhelming need to wear something else. I love the Range Rover. It’s magnificent, but here’s the thing: is it better than a Golf R estate? Look at the figures. No, actually, don’t bother, because of course they come from Volkswagen, which means they’re probably plucked from the sky. Ja, it does one million miles an hour und 40,000 miles to ze gallon.

It doesn’t, but it is very, very fast and very beautiful to drive. The compromise between ride and handling is judged perfectly, and so’s the noise. It’s quiet most of the time, but when you accelerate hard it produces a snarly bark that makes you go all tingly. And, best of all, if you crash into a tree it’s cheap to repair because most of the panels are the same as they are on a Golf diesel.

All things considered, then, this is a five-star car — except for one rather enormous problem. The styling. VW decided R-spec cars should not be showy in any way. They wouldn’t even get the little red flashes that you find on a GTI. They’d look to the untrained eye like a run-of-the-mill model. I approve of that. I like a Q-car.

It’s a philosophy that works well for the hatch because that’s a good-looking vehicle in the first place. The estate, however, isn’t. It’s dumpy and bulbous. And in the R spec it looks stupid because it’s dumpy and bulbous but there are four exhaust pipes sticking out of the back. Which make it look like some kind of weird turbocharged whale.

So there we are. A very impressive car. Ruined.


Volkswagen Golf R estate
Engine 1984cc, 4 cylinders
Power 296bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque 280 lb ft @ 1800rpm
Transmission 6-speed dual-clutch automatic
Performance 0-62mph: 5.1sec | Top speed: 155mph
Fuel 40.4mpg (combined)
CO2 162g/km
Road tax band G (£180 a year)
Release date On sale now
Verdict Perfect — from the inside

CRITIC'S RATING ★★★★☆

PROS
✓ Space in the back for a small horse
✓ Nearly 300bhps can't be wrong
✓ It's not a Range Rover

CONS
X Looks like a turbocharged whale
X Do we believe VW's economy claims?
X Makes my GTI look slow


Volkswagen Golf R estate

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1631914.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-volkswagen-golf-r-estate-2015/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 FIAT 500

When the traffic stops, the love‑life turbocharger starts to whir

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 22 November 2015


Fiat 500, from £10,890

IF YOU are thinking of coming to London for some festive shopping, I have a suggestion: have you thought about going to Peterborough instead? Or Swindon?

I’ve wondered for many years how a city that wasn’t designed at all hundreds of years ago manages to cope with the demands placed on it today. Because asking it to deal with the daily transport needs of more than 8m inhabitants is a bit like asking your landline telephone to take a photograph.

Somehow, though, it has always just about managed to cling on, like a grand old battleship: shot to pieces, with a broken rudder, but still in the fight.

Today, though, the bridge seems to have been taken over by a bunch of slightly panicky monkeys. Of course London’s transport system has always been managed by idealists and lunatics, because how else would you arrive at the concept of a bus lane? “Right, comrades. London’s streets are higgledy-piggledy and were designed as gaps in which people could leave a dead horse. They are not wide enough for the motorcar, so let’s take half the available space and turn it into a special lane so that old ladies can get to the post office more easily.”

Then along came the bicycle. “Right, comrades. Let’s make special lanes for these wheezing old communists. And better still, let’s make a little space for them to sit in front of the cars when the traffic lights are red.”

Someone in the meeting must have put his hand up at this point and said: “But cyclists don’t stop for red lights.” And? Well, your guess is as good as mine. He’s probably in a correctional facility now, in a wing for the mentally impaired.

And there’s more. When Ken Livingstone was in the hot seat, he put down his newts for a moment and decided to model the phasing of the traffic lights on the passage of the sun. Red and orange for 14 hours, with a brief green flash in the evening.

And then there’s the issue with parking. They decided that cars causing an obstruction should be clamped. So they continued to cause an obstruction for many more hours. Or that they should be towed away by a fleet of lorries that would cause even more of an obstruction in the process.

Next, they decided that every single one of the 4m people who’d arrived on the underside of a Eurostar train after a long and difficult journey from north Africa or the Middle East should be given a Toyota Prius, a smartphone with Uber on it and a licence. To kill. And yet, despite all this pedestrianised, camera-monitored idiocy, the capital continued to grow and flourish.

Now the maniacs have come up with a new wheeze. It’s a biggie. They’ve decided that every single road in London should be dug up simultaneously. It’s so far beyond a joke that it’s actually funny.

Every residential street is clogged by someone digging out a basement. Every side road is having calming features installed. And every main road is subject to traffic control so that Crossrail can be built. They’ve even shut half the Embankment so they can install a new cycle way. Honestly, they have. If this lot were doctors, their solution to a dangerously clogged pulmonary artery would be to open it up for six months so that it could be filled up with Chris Hoy.

This time they really have scored a blinder, because even I have reached the bottom of the pit of despair. I view the onset of every meeting with a crushing sense of dread. And I lie in bed at night seething about how much time I’ve wasted by sitting in a completely unnecessary jam.

And I feel so powerless. I can’t use a bus because I don’t like being murdered. I can’t cycle because it’s too cold and wet at this time of year. I can’t go on the Underground because . . . just because. And that brings me neatly on to the Fiat 500 that you see in the photographs. This, you may think, is the solution. Something small. Something that can make its own lane. Something that will fit into even the tiniest parking space. Surely this is the antidote to the panicky monkeys on the bridge.

Hmm. This may well be true in a city such as Rome, where any piece of ground that isn’t occupied by a structure can be viewed as a parking space. But here in London it doesn’t work that way. Parking spaces are all marked clearly and are big enough for a Range Rover. So using something titchy makes no difference.


Some may find it a bit baffling, but tech-savvy youngsters will find lots to play with in the 500

Then there’s the business of lanes. Yes, in a small car you can make new and exciting lanes in European cities, but not here. On a road such as, say, Holland Park Avenue, in west London, there are two. And if you try to make a third you’re going to get looked at. And being looked at in Britain is worse than being eaten.

So there’s no point driving a very small car in London, because you’re going to be just as stuck as if you were driving something much larger. The only real difference is that in a small car such as the Fiat you are more likely to be injured in a crash. Unless you are in the back, in which case you can be injured without a crash being involved. Ooh, it’s a squash.



So the only reason for buying the little Fiat is that you like it. And I get that. The version I drove had a matt-black flower pattern stuck onto the shiny black paint, and green ears. This was a good look — even as a £460 option.

Under the bonnet it had the clever twin-cylinder 0.9-litre engine, which, thanks to all sorts of jiggery-pokery and witchcraft, produces 103bhp. That’s not far short of what you got in the original Golf GTI.

There is a fair bit of turbo lag, which is annoying, because just as the blower has fully girded its loins and the fun’s about to begin, you run into a set of roadworks and have to stop again. Only once in a week did I get the full shove, but it was worth the wait. There was a tremendous wallop and a whizzy racket from the clackety-clack engine, and for a moment it felt as though I were inside a mad, flowery, homemade go-kart.

It’s a hoot, this car. It’s nicely equipped and electronically savvy. Many of the details will be a bit beyond the elderly, but anyone under 12 will be quite content with all of the submenus in the submenus. It will give them something to do in the jams.

Me? I just sat there thinking two things: that I’d quite like to peel the people responsible. And that if I’m going to be stuck for two hours, I’d rather be in a Fiat 500 than something bland and anodyne from the Pacific rim. Because sitting in a car such as the Fiat is like walking through the park on a sunny day with a cute dog. Sooner or later someone is going to lean out of their window and say: “I love your little car’s green ears.” And who knows where that might end up?

That’s what this car is, really. Tinder. With windscreen wipers.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for Fiat 500s

2015 FIAT 500 0.9 TWINAIR LOUNGE SPECIFICATIONS

PRICE: £14,420
ENGINE: 875cc, 2 cylinders
POWER: 103bhp @ 5500rpm
TORQUE: 107 lb ft @ 2000rpm
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 10.0sec
TOP SPEED: 117mph
FUEL: 67.3mpg (combined)
CO2: 99g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: A (free)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now
Verdict
A bite-size slice of la dolce vita

CRITIC'S RATING ★★★★☆

PROS
✓ Cute enough to get you a date
✓ Great for fans of submenus
✓ Decent power from a tiny engine

CONS
X Its diminutive size won't help you in London
X Tiny in the back. Tiny.
X Small cars = more chance of injury in a crash


Fiat 500

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1634666.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-fiat-500/

[RedMoon11]

Not coming to a young boy’s bedroom wall near you . . .

Jeremy Clarkson              Published: 29 November 2015


Renault Kadjar, from £17,995

AS YOU know, I try every Sunday morning to brighten your day with some frivolous and not-at-all important observations about the car I’ve been driving the previous week. But today is different. Today I need to be a bit serious.

Right now, all the world’s big car makers are engaged in a mad dash to replace the petrol engine with something more in tune with the times. Honda and Hyundai are rushing towards hydrogen fuel cells, and BMW is looking at electric propulsion with small generators to keep the batteries charged. Elsewhere there are pure electric cars, plug-in hybrids and ultra-low-emission diesels.

It all sounds very interesting, but it’s pointless, I’m afraid, because in 10 or 20 years the three biggest car makers in the world will not be Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors. They will be Google, Apple and Uber. That’s because they have come to understand something more important than what goes under the bonnet. They’ve come to understand that you don’t need a car. But you do need one tomorrow morning, at about ten past eight. And on Thursday afternoon for a couple of hours.

Think about it. This morning your car is parked outside your house doing nothing except costing money. You probably won’t use it at all until tomorrow morning, when you’ll be forced to drive through all the roadworks and all the jams so that you
can leave it outside your office all day. Where it will probably be keyed, or broken into.

Life will go on like this for months until one day it needs a service, or it breaks down, and that’ll be a nuisance because then you’ll have to make alternative travel arrangements, which will be a chore. You’re paying thousands of pounds a year, then, for something that you use for — what? — 5% of the time? Two per cent?

The car, therefore, has become like a fondue set. You have one because that’s the done thing. But if you actually stop for a moment you can’t for the life of you work out why.

It’s the same story with your fridge. Why do you have one today, taking up a corner of your kitchen and making noises, when you can have milk and butter delivered every day and there’s a supermarket on every street corner? Why not let Waitrose pay the electricity bills to keep your food fresh?

It really is the same story with your car. Wouldn’t it be better if you had access to some wheels only when you needed them? Of course it would, and that’s what Google and Apple and Uber have grasped. We won’t buy their cars. We will share them.

So if you decide on a whim to visit your parents one afternoon, you tap a few passwords into your phone and in minutes a car arrives. Maybe it will have a driver. Maybe it will be driven by nobody at all. Maybe it will run on electricity from the mains or electricity created by hydrogen fuel cells. All you care is that a) it will get you where you’re going and b) when you’ve finished with it, it will cost nothing at all.

Never again will you have to look for a parking space, or worry about the meter running out, or pay for insurance, or book an MoT test, or break out the bucket and sponge on a Sunday morning.

If I were running one of today’s big car companies I’d be worried sick about all this, because the whole business model on which their empires are founded is daft. They’re making us pay thousands and thousands of pounds to buy something that we won’t use 95% of the time.

And that in the remaining 5% is a bloody nuisance, because of the jams and the buses and the cyclists and the Gatso cameras and the CCTV-monitored junctions and the speed-awareness courses and the 20mph limits that are being imposed because every council is now being run by a bunch of frizzy-haired lunatics.


The Kadjar’s cabin is something you will never see recreated in a Forza Motorsport video game

Of course, in our minds the car is still glamorous and exciting. It’s a big Healey sweeping through the lanes at 100mph. It’s an Alfa Romeo on the Amalfi coast with a young woman in a headscarf in the passenger seat. It’s a growl and a roar.

But it isn’t. Peel away the history, put down the rose-tinted spectacles and you’ll see very clearly that it’s just a tool. And that because it’s just a tool, it’s vulnerable to pressure from a newer tool that makes personal mobility cheaper and easier.

The only way today’s big car companies can fight off this new pressure is to make their cars more glamorous and more exciting than ever before. They need to accept that on a practical level they can’t compete with Google’s silent igloo and must inject their new models with the sort of pizzazz that will make a grown man drool. They need to rekindle the spirit of the big Healey and the convertible Alfa Romeo.

Watchmakers did it when Casio came along. Restaurants did it with the dawn of fast food. Airlines and supermarkets are trying to do it now to fend off budget alternatives. But car makers are not doing it. They are so obsessed with eco-twaddle and new propulsion systems that they are forgetting about the one thing that will keep us buying their products: excitement.

You get none from the car you see photographed this morning. It started out in life as the perfectly sensible but dreary Nissan Kumquat and was then turned, for accountancy reasons, into a Renault Kadjar. A name dreamt up by an agency when all the other names have gone.

No one is going to yearn for the day they own a Kadjar. No one is going to spend hours on a configurator, seeing what it would look like in orange or with bigger wheels. No one will search for it on YouTube. It will never be seen in a Fast and Furious film. It’ll never be an option in the Forza Motorsport video game. It’ll never be a poster on a small boy’s bedroom wall. There will never be a Renault Kadjar Airfix model, or a fast “R” version that will sweep to victory on a racetrack or in a rally stage.

The Kadjar offers absolutely nothing that would make you buy one if you could use a Google Igloo instead. Both are soulless tools. But one is much, much cheaper.

I’ve singled out the Kadjar because that’s what I’ve been driving for the past week. But the same thing is true with the majority of cars you can buy these days. They’re just an expensive, awkward hassle that you can do without.

Of course, the car as we know it will survive. Niche manufacturers such as Ferrari and Bentley will soldier on, perhaps making luxury or speedy versions of the Igloo. And you’ll still be able to buy classics.

But I can assure you of one thing: many, many years from now, when people gather at a racetrack to give their old self-drive, self-owned, petrol-driven “cars” a bit of a blast, no one will turn up with a Renault Kadjar.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for Renault Kadjars

Renault Kadjar dCi 130 Signature Nav
Engine
1598cc, 4 cylinders
Power
129bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque
236 lb ft @ 1750rpm
Transmission
6-speed manual
Acceleration
0-62mph: 9.9sec
Top speed
118mph
Fuel
62.8mpg (combined)
CO2
117g/km
Road tax
C (free for first year; £30 thereafter)
Price
£24,795
Release date
On sale now
Verdict
Another milestone on motoring's road to oblivion
CRITIC'S RATING ★★☆☆☆


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1637460.ece

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 PEUGEOT 308 GTI

Et voilà! School Run Mum slips into her thigh boots

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 6 December 2015



Peugeot 308 GTi, £28,115

THIS morning you were supposed to be reading about some kind of new Mitsubishi pick-up. But at the last minute a chap from the company called to say he would not be lending it to me because a workaday car such as that with its good turning circle for builders’ yards would not be of much interest to the readers of The Sunday Times.

In his mind, then, builders and plumbers and gamekeepers read the Daily Mirror and are too busy lamenting the demise of Nuts magazine to be thinking about buying a new pick-up any time soon. Which will surprise the builders and chippies who are currently making noises in my sitting room because they all read The Sunday Times and they all drive vans and pick-ups.

To make matters worse, the chap from Mitsubishi also says that my booking to drive some kind of electric car in a few weeks has been cancelled as well. “Dom Joly has already written about it in The Sunday Times,” he says by way of explanation.

I’m not sure that argument stacks up. Film companies do not ban Claudia Winkleman from reviewing a movie because Camilla Long has already written about it in The Sunday Times. Restaurants do not ban AA Gill because Giles Coren has already done a piece in The Times. Of course, he gets banned for lots of reasons, but not that one.


Unlike many previous Peugeots the 308 GTi is solidly built, and its centre screen is a triumph of common sense



I think it’s fairly obvious what’s happened. The man from Mitsubishi is peeved about the firm-but-fair review I wrote about his Outlander PHEV plug-in electric vehicle last year and I’ve been cast into the wilderness as a result.

That’s his right. And I don’t mind. Secretly, I’m rather proud. It shows I’m doing my job properly. And certainly I’m not going to wake up every morning from now on thinking, “Oh no. I won’t be driving a Mitsubishi today. I shall have to make do with a Mercedes-AMG GT instead.”

It’s not even much of a professional bother because if I really do need to test a Mitsubishi I shall simply rent it. Or if I need it for the new Amazon show, buy it.

Over the years, I’ve been banned at various times from driving Toyotas for saying the Corolla was about as interesting as a fridge freezer, Vauxhalls for refusing to say anything at all about the Vectra, and BMW for saying its cars were driven by cocks. Weirdly, however, I have never been banned by Peugeot.

I’ve not had a kind word to say about any of its products for many years. I even devoted a large chunk of Top Gear last year to ridiculing its customers. And yet still the PR department keeps on coming back from more. Secretly, I think its press fleet manager is Anastasia Steele.

Perhaps in an attempt to suffer more pain and humiliation the company last week sent round its new 308 GTi, which was red at the front and black at the back. Instantly, this aroused the eye-rolling cynic that lives in my head. “The only reason it would do that,” it said, “is to take your mind off all its shortcomings.”

Inside, there was more. The steering wheel is about the size of a shirt button and sits below all the dials in the instrument binnacle. Until you raise it so that it’s no longer between your knees, at which point it sits right in front of all the dials in the instrument binnacle. Revs? Speed? Fuel level? No idea.

“It’s done this on purpose,” said the eye-rolling cynic. “Because if you’re focused on the invisibility of the dials and the two-tone paint, you won’t notice that the door mirror has fallen off and that the radio’s broken.”



The thing is, though, nothing did break. In fact everything felt a lot more solid and well made than is normal in a modern-day Peugeot. By which I mean any car the company has made since 1971.

There’s more. Most of the functions are now controlled by the centrally mounted screen, which is a triumph of common sense. Except for the Sport button that makes the car more zingy. That sits in the centre console and when you press it, all of the dials in the instrument binnacle turn red. Apparently. All I could see was the steering wheel.

And it was annoying me because the actual system it controls isn’t that brilliant. There’s no real feel. It gives no sense that it’s concentrating on the job in hand. It’s fine around town but when you’re zooming along, it delivers no real joy, which is a shame because the rest of the package delivers it in spades.

It may have only a 1.6-litre engine — most of its rivals come with two litres — but there’s no shortage of oomph. And it may come with an old-fashioned manual rather than a flappy-paddle system, which can be a chore sometimes, but ooh, it’s fun.

Finally, it seems, Peugeot has managed to recapture some of the magic that made the 205 GTI such a monster hit back in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook days of Mrs Thatcher.

This is a car you want to drive. It’s a car you will find an excuse to drive. Yes, it’s practical and sensible on the school run, but on the way home, after you’ve dropped off the kids, it pulls off the traditional hot-hatch trick of slipping out of its slippers and into a pair of PVC thigh-high boots. It becomes a raunchy, up-for-it playmate.

Weirdly, you can buy the new car with less power and a less sophisticated limited-slip differential but I really can’t see why you would want to do that. Because it’s not like the full-fat version is expensive. Compared with its rivals from Volkswagen and Ford, it’s very good value indeed. But all things considered, is it as good?

Ah, that’s the big one, isn’t it? I have a Golf GTI for several reasons. My mum always had Beetles. I want to support Volkswagen in the emissions saga. And it reminds me of the good old days in the White Horse in Fulham when everyone had one, with Val d’Isère mud up the side and an army cap in the boot.



It’s possible — probable even — that none of these things matters to you. Maybe you’re a working-class boy done good, in which case you’ll want the Ford Focus ST. You see it as a metal embodiment of yourself. A blue-collar car with humble origins that can mix it with the blue bloods. Bruce Springsteen with windscreen wipers.

We all have our reasons for wanting to buy one brand more than another. My son has a Fiat because he likes Italian football. I used to have a Mercedes because it annoyed Richard Hammond. My grandfather had a Bentley to irritate those with Rolls-Royces. Some people choose Mitsubishis because, er, I can’t help you with that one at the moment. Sorry.

And then we have those people who want to buy a French car because in these troubled times they want to be supportive. They fancy a Peugeot because back in the day they had a 205 1.9 GTI and they reckon its modern-day equivalent would help rekindle some of their lost youthfulness.

Well, the good news is that today, for the first time in ages, you can. You can follow your heart, buy a 308 GTi and not spend the next couple of years regretting it.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Peugeot 308s

The Clarkson review: 2015 Peugeot 308 GTi
★★★☆☆
Je suis Peugeot

PROS
✓ Recaptures some of the 205 GTi magic
✓ Great value compared to rivals
✓ It's not a Mitsubishi

CONS
X Silly two-tone paint job
X Tiny steering wheel blocks instruments
X Sport mode disappoints

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1640506.ece

www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-peugeot-308-gti/

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[RedMoon11]

Clarkson’s Christmas turkey

Jeremy gives a rare zero-star rating to his worst car of the year — and you’ll never guess what it is

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 NISSAN GT-R TRACK EDITION

Think hard before you hit the throttle in the camber gambler

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 20 December 2015



Nissan GT-R Track Edition, £88,560

IN MY most recent review of the Nissan GT-R I said it was pretty much perfect in every way and declared at the end that it’s not a five-star car. It’s the five-star car. I stand by that. If you want to go fast, in any weather, on any road, there is simply nothing else that even gets close.

You know the space shuttle. The pictures would suggest that it lumbered off the launchpad as though it were getting out of bed after a heavy night, but nothing could be further from the truth. When the restraining bolts were released and those 37m-horsepower engines could do their thing, it exploded upwards so vigorously that it was doing 120mph before its tail had cleared the gantry.

Anyone familiar with the Nissan GT-R would call that “a bit pedestrian”. Maybe on a sweeping ribbon of tarmac in the Scottish Highlands on a dry, hot, sticky day the McLaren P1 could just about keep up. But it’s doubtful. And what makes this so extraordinary is that the Nissan has four seats and a big boot and to the casual observer appears to be “just a car”.

I have no idea why Nissan makes it. It costs a little over £78,000, so the margins must be small. So is the volume. Which means the company probably makes more money each year from its factory-floor vending machines. And it’s not as though the GT-R creates any form of meaningful halo for Nissan’s other cars. Nobody in the world has ever said: “Ooh, I admire the GT-R’s ability to get round the Nürburgring in four seconds so I shall buy a Juke immediately.” The GT-R sits in the Nissan line-up in the same way as a Fabergé egg would sit on the shelves of your local Lidl.



I suspect Nissan makes the GT-R primarily to keep its engineers awake and loyal. Most companies put photographs of their employees of the month on a wall in reception. But at Nissan if you do good work on the rear light cluster of the dreary Kumquat SUV you are allowed to develop a differential for the GT-R.

That’s great, but how do you reward your brightest and best when there will be no new GT-R for at least five years? Simple. You let them make the existing car even better.

This recently resulted in the Nismo version. I have not driven it but I gather from speaking to the hollowed-out, mumbling wrecks who have that it’s almost stupid in its ability to bend, break and then eat the laws of physics.



I’m also told that while it works extremely well on a track, it’s far too raw to work on a road. Think of it, then, as a scuba suit. You need it if you want to look at a turtle, but it doesn’t really work on the Tube or in meetings with clients.

So now Nissan has come up with the Track Edition, which is supposed to be a halfway house. You get the standard car’s V6 twin-turbo engine and the standard car’s interior fixtures and fittings. But you get the Nismo’s handling tweaks. Which include this: glue to supplement the spot-welds and make the body even stiffer.

This is the sort of thing that makes an enthusiast of the brand need to repair to the lavatory for a little “me time”. To the people who populate GT-R internet forums a car that uses glue as well as spot-welds for added stiffness is way beyond Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson in a bath of warm milk.



The standard GT-R is Jeremy’s favourite car but he found the Track Edition unusable
 
This is all part of the GT-R legend. It’s a car that is built in a hermetically sealed factory and has tyres full of nitrogen because normal air is too unpredictable. It uses an engine that’s built by one man and is mounted out of kilter to the transmission so that when you accelerate and the torque causes it to rock backwards, all is in perfect harmony. No one can tell if any of this stuff actually makes any difference. But knowing the car was built this way makes its fans priapic.

There’s a problem, though. Because the body is now so stiff and the suspension is so unforgiving, the car is completely undriveable on the road. It’s so bad that after one run from London to Oxford and back I parked it in my garage and have not even looked at it since.

There is no give. At all. Drive over a manhole cover and you get some idea of what it might be like to be involved in a plane crash. You actually feel the top of your spine bouncing off the inside of your skull.

Jimmy Carr was in the passenger seat and after less than half a mile he asked if the sat nav was programmed only to take the occupants to the nearest chiropractor.

But I wasn’t really listening because the Track Edition was serving up another unwanted party piece: any minor camber change in the road surface causes it to veer violently left or right. I’m always hesitant to say that a car is dangerous because it’s a legal minefield, but this one gets bloody close. Twice in just an hour I very nearly had an accident because of the sudden and unexpected changes in direction.

It wouldn’t have been a big accident because it happens mostly at slow speed but it would have been annoying and embarrassing explaining to the driver whose car I’d hit why I’d suddenly driven into his door for no reason.

Naturally you’d expect that on a track there would be some upside to these issues — but I can’t answer that because driving this car to a racing circuit to find out would be too uncomfortable and too fraught with danger.

One American magazine found that the standard car can generate 0.97g in a corner and the Track Edition 1.02g. That’s not much of an improvement, and when you factor in the fact that the track was stickier when it tested the new car, it’s not really an improvement at all.

It’s no faster in a straight line either because it has the same engine. In fact it may even be slower over a quarter of a mile because it will spend most of its time veering left and right. The normal GT-R can and will go from A to B on a drag strip in the shortest possible distance. Which is a straight line.

Still, you might imagine that because the Track Edition is compromised so badly, it will be cheaper. Not so, I’m afraid. It is in fact about £10,500 more expensive.

So we are left here with a rather tragic conclusion. The standard GT-R is a five-star car. It is one of the very, very best cars in the world. And yet this track-day abomination gets no stars at all. Because it’s pretty much useless.

I’ll sign off, then, with a simple message to Nissan. If you feel the need to tinker with your masterpiece again, stick to the styling. Because that’s the one area where a little bit of TLC wouldn’t go amiss. Everything else: leave it alone.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Nissan GT-Rs

CLARKSON'S RATING ☆☆☆☆☆

PROS
✓ Fanboys love the tech
✓ A tiny increase in downforce
✓ Probably OK on a track

CONS
X Undriveable on the road
X No quicker than a standard GT-R
X You'll pay more for the car... and in chiropractic fees


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1645936.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-nissan-gt-r-track-edition/

[RedMoon11]

But what’s it like at 3mph?
Clarkson reveals the true secret of supercar success...

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2015 AUDI R8 V10 PLUS

I was ready to wrestle a fire-breathing raver, not an IT geek

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 27 December 2015


Audi R8 V10 Plus, £134,500

IN ITALY, or Spain, or America, or anywhere but here, really, when you fill an expensive and fast car with petrol you are approached by people who want to tell you how lovely it is. They smile and they purr and then ask if it’d be all right for the children to have their pictures taken in the driving seat.

Things are rather different in “It’s all right for some” Britain where some bloke invariably says: “I bet you don’t get many miles to the gallon out of that.” Or “I can get more in the boot of my Austin Maestro”, or — and this is the one I’ve always hated most of all — “Where the hell can you ever drive a car like that?”

The answer is: “Well, I’m very rich, obviously, so I can hire a racetrack.” But instead we smile sweetly and try our hardest not to put the nozzle down his trousers and set him on fire.

He is quite right, though. You can’t really open up a supercar these days because the bitter and twisted, mealy-mouthed Maestro-driving caravan and cycling enthusiasts have taken over the town halls. I was up in Staffordshire last weekend tootling about in my old stomping ground and on the A515, which goes from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all via various places that only mean anything to me, there were regular speed cameras in all the villages and average-speed cameras on the bits in between.

And to make matters worse, this fast and really rather good road is now governed by a 50mph speed limit. A speed that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have designated as pathetic. He’d have been right. It is pathetic: 50mph is for animals.

This ridiculous attitude to speed is catching on all around the world. Even the French have completely lost their sense of humour about a bit of flat-out screamery on the autoroutes. And I haven’t found a stretch of derestricted autobahn for years.

Which brings us back to our friend in the cardigan-and-Maestro combination and his question: “What’s the point of a 1,000 brake horsepower, mid-engined, fire-breathing rip-snorter when you are forced to travel at the same speed as a dog or a rabbit?”

He is completely missing the point because supercars are not supposed to be driven at five thousand miles an hour round the Nürburgring. That’s what a Subaru or a Volkswagen Golf R is for. Supercars are for doing 3mph round Harrods.

If you try to go any faster than this you will crash. Which is why, when you fire up YouTube and ask it to find some amusing supercar crashes, they invariably show a Ferrari or a Lamborghini whizzing into a bus stop or a lamppost or some other bit of urban street furniture.

You don’t see them crashing into trees and hedges because they’re to be found in the countryside and in the countryside no one’s looking. And if no one’s looking, what’s the point of putting your foot down in a supercar? Or even driving one in the first place?

Supercars are tricky little sods. If you put your foot all the way to the floor in a normal hatchback, it will pick up speed. If you put your foot all the way to the floor in a supercar, it will spear into a bus stop. The acceleration these days is very vivid indeed.

That’s why my current favourite supercar is the Lamborghini Aventador. It may not be the best for going round Stowe Corner and it may not have the best brakes in the world but for snarling round Knightsbridge at two in the morning it’s fantastic. It’s just so amazing to behold. And that is the whole point.

The Audi R8 isn’t amazing to behold. It’s an odd one, this. It’s a mid-engined two-seater with a million brake horsepower, a V10 and four-wheel drive. It really is a Lamborghini underneath. And yet Audi, which owns Lamborghini, has done everything in its power to make it sober and refined and comfortable.

Mostly, it’s done a very good job. In the socialist boroughs of London where the worker Johnnies only repair potholes with speed humps it rides like a Lincoln Town Car from the 1970s. It’s also roomy, for two people, and quiet.

There are some issues, though. No one looks at it. And if no one is looking at it and you can’t drive it quickly, why put up with the tiny boot? Because it will appreciate in value? No, it won’t. The last R8, albeit with a V8 engine, had the same problem and is now about £40,000.

The biggest issue, however, is the tech. I commend Audi for trying something new; the instrument binnacle is a computer screen. I commend it also for nearly making it work. But everything else is just too complex. It’s a big problem with cars these days. How do you make all the electronic add-ons intuitive and intelligible? RAF pilots train for years before they are allowed in a Eurofighter and, let me tell you, there’s way more stuff to learn in an R8. Way more.

I’d learn how to shuffle tracks on my iPod or answer the phone or input a sat nav address and then after I learnt some more things, such as how to change the interior lighting, I’d forget the first stuff again. This meant I spent most of my time behind the wheel wearing my reading glasses to peer at the screen and swearing gently when I got it all wrong.

The sat nav is an issue too. It’s set up in a widescreen layout, which means you can see where Wales is, and New York, but not how to get to the street that is half a mile to the north.


Audi has tried hard to make the R8 an everyday car — but hasn’t quite succeeded

In other words, Audi has tried hard to make the R8 an everyday car — it even has cupholders — but it hasn’t quite succeeded. The suspension isn’t quite right either. No matter what setting you choose, the car has a curious vertical bouncing gait, which is a bit annoying. Oh, and on the motorway it would sometimes have an electronic burp and make what felt like a botched gearchange. If I wanted gremlins, I’d buy a Lamborghini, thank you very much.

Which is pretty much how I feel about the Audi. If I wanted a supercar, I’d buy its virtually identical brother: the Lamborghini Huracan. In lime green. With orange seats.

I can see what Audi’s tried to do with the R8 and it’d be a clever trick if it had pulled it off: a car that can corner at two million miles an hour, go from zero to a hundred thousand in a quarter of a second and then become a Golf for the ride home. But it hasn’t quite managed it.

And even if it had, I’m not sure anyone would be interested because what we really want from a supercar are lasers and photon torpedoes. Not cupholders and a Comfort setting on the suspension menu.

View the used Audi R8s for sale on driving.co.uk

2015 AUDI R8 V10 PLUS SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £134,500
ENGINE: 5204cc, V10
POWER: 602bhp @ 8250rpm
TORQUE: 413 lb ft @ 6500rpm
TRANSMISSION: 7-speed S tronic
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 3.2sec
TOP SPEED: 205mph
FUEL: 23.0mpg (combined)
CO2: 287g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: M (£1,100 a year, £505 thereafter)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆

Staid in Chelsea

PROS
✓ Comfortable
✓ Fast
✓ A Lamborghini underneath

CONS
X Bewildering tech
X Will lose value
X Audi has removed the edges


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1648444.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2015-audi-r8-v10-plus/

[RedMoon11]

JEREMY CLARKSON'S TOP 10 MOST READ CAR REVIEWS OF 2015

Top Year

By Sunday Times Driving     Published 29 December 2015

Jeremy Clarkson



TO SAY that 2015 has been an eventful year for our man Clarkson would be, to put it very mildly, a large understatement. But through it all, JC has kept the faith with his petrolhead audience at The Sunday Times, week in and week out bringing us his insights into the latest wheels to grace his drive.

And it’s not all supercars and luxury barges, although there have been a fair few of those – JC can get just as excited by a Ford Fiesta as he can by a supercharged Range Rover. Sometimes even more. Read on and you’ll see what we mean.

www.driving.co.uk/news/jeremy-clarksons-top-10-most-read-car-reviews-of-2015/

[RedMoon11]

I asked for a Roller...
Clarkson takes delivery of his new company car


Remember the rolling Robins? Well, I’ve a confession to make

Jeremy Clarkson  Published: 10 January 2016



Reliant Robin, second-hand only

TO JUDGE from the letters I get and the remarks in the street, it seems the most memorable thing I did on Top Gear was a short segment about the Reliant Robin. You may remember: I drove it around Sheffield and it kept falling over.

Well, now’s the time to come clean. A normal Reliant Robin will not roll unless a drunken rugby team is on hand. Or it’s windy. But in a headlong drive to amuse and entertain, I’d asked the backroom boys to play around with the differential so that the poor little thing rolled over every time I turned the steering wheel.

Naturally, the health and safety department was very worried about this and insisted that the car be fitted with a small hammer that I could use, in case I was trapped after the roll, to break what was left of the glass. Not the best idea ever, because I distinctly remember seeing the hammer in question travelling past my face at about 2,000mph during the first roll. After that I invited the health and safety man to eff off home, with the hammer in his bottom.

Since then I’ve used similarly doctored and similarly hammer-free Reliant Robins in countless games of car football during our live shows. And as a result there’s probably no one on the planet who’s rolled a car quite as much as I have.

It makes me sad, if I’m honest, because rolling a Reliant Robin on purpose is a bit like putting a tortoise on its back. It’s an act of wanton cruelty. When you see it lying there with its three little wheels whizzing round helplessly, you are compelled to rush over and put it the right way up.

I feel similarly aggrieved when people — and everyone does this — calls it a Robin Reliant. That’s like saying you worship Christ Jesus or that you drive an Acclaim Triumph. Or that your favourite Fifa presidential hopeful is Sexwale Tokyo.

I’ll be honest with you. I really like the Reliant Robin. I know that Del Boy did his best to turn three-wheelers into a national joke. And I know Jasper Carrott went even further — the bastard. But the truth is that the Reliant Robin has a rorty-sounding 848cc engine and the sort of snickety gearbox that makes you lament the passing of the proper manual.

Plus, it’s an absolute hoot to drive, partly because it’s light and nimble and partly because passers-by are genuinely fond of it. It’s like going about your business in one of the Queen’s corgis. Mostly, though, it’s a hoot to drive because you know if something goes wrong, you will be killed immediately. There’ll be no lingering and agonising spell in hospital. No priest with his last rites. One minute you’ll be bouncing up and down wearing a childlike grin and the next you’ll be meat.



In fact, I like the Reliant Robin so much that when Richard Hammond, James May, Andy Wilman and I formed our new production company, I rushed out immediately and bought one as a company car. Interestingly, the other three did exactly the same thing. So now we have a fleet sitting in the executive car parking spaces at our offices and we love them very much. Especially the fact that they cost us less than £15,000. That’s £15,000 for four cars.


Clarkson takes the Robin Reliant for a spin

Of course, they’ve all been fettled to suit our tastes. May’s is an ivory white estate model that is standard in every way, right down to the chromed overriders. Hammond’s is a lovely chocolate brown with whitewall tyres. Wilman’s is finished in racing green and inside is fitted with a wooden dashboard and lambswool seat covers — as befits, he says, the chairman of our enterprise. Mine — a coupé, naturally — is finished in winner blue and is fitted with an Alcantara dash and quad tailpipes. Minilite wheels complete the vision of sportiness.

A lot of people think we have bought the cars purely as some kind of weird publicity stunt but, actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Because we really do use them on a daily basis. Or, to be honest, we try to use them . . .

My first attempt had to be abandoned, because the engine decided that tickover should be about 5500rpm. Which meant that in fourth gear I was doing about 80mph without putting my foot on the accelerator. I say “about”, because the speedometer wasn’t working. For an accurate reading I’ll have to wait for a letter from the speed camera people.

Hammond’s has no functioning fuel gauge and he would therefore like to apologise to everyone on London’s Cromwell Road for running out of petrol the other night while turning right into Earls Court Road. Apparently the chaos he caused was quite spectacular.

Wilman’s hasn’t actually gone anywhere at all because as he tried to put it into reverse, the gearlever came off in his hand. I’m not sure what’s wrong with May’s. He tried to explain but after four hours I nodded off slightly.



We didn’t give up, though. And the other night I went all the way from our old offices in Notting Hill to our new offices, appropriately enough, in Power Road, in Chiswick, west London, and then — get this — all the way back to a party in Chelsea. Where the car spent the night, because its starter motor had broken.

Hammond said he’d come to the rescue, but annoyingly his ignition barrel came out as he turned the key, and Wilman was of no use because the gearlever popped out again when he went for first. So I rang May, who turned up in his Ferrari.


Top Gear series 15 included a lot of footage of Reliant Robins on their sides — after Jeremy had the diff fiddled with

Anyway, on my trek across London I learnt many things about my Reliant Robin. First of all, to get my right shoulder inside, I have to drive with the window down, which makes life a bit chilly. And there’s not much I can do to rectify that issue, because while there is a knob on the dash that says “Heater”, it doesn’t seem to do anything. The only other knob says “Choke”. Pull that and immediately the whole car fills with petrol fumes.

But despite the cold and the likelihood of it suddenly becoming very hot, the Reliant Robin is brilliant to drive. The steering is extremely light, possibly because there’s only one front wheel to turn, the acceleration is great, for anyone who’s used to, say, a horse, and in a typical London parking bay it’s so small and looks so lost and lonely, you are tempted to give it a carrot or some other treat.

This is what makes the Reliant Robin such a joy. My Volkswagen Golf is a car. The Porsche Cayenne I used over Christmas and will review next week is a car. You drive a car. But the Reliant Robin is not a car. It’s not even three-quarters of a car. It’s more than that.

It’s sitting in its parking space outside the office now, in the rain. And I’m worried about it. I hope it’s OK and isn’t missing me. Owning a Reliant Robin is like having a family pet. Yes, it’s a nuisance sometimes, and, yes, it can be stubborn and unreliable, but it scampers when you go out together, and if you play with its differential, it will even roll over so you can tickle its tummy.

RELIANT ROBIN 850 SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £1,463.78 when new 40 years ago
ENGINE: 848cc, 4 cylinders
POWER: 40bhp @ 5500rpm
TORQUE: 46 lb ft @ 3500rpm
ACCELERATION: 0-60mph: 16.1sec
TOP SPEED: 85mph
FUEL: 60mpg at 50mph
ROAD TAX BAND: Free (classic car exemption)
RELEASE DATE: 1975

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆

Verdict: Man's best friend

PROS
✓ A hoot to drive
✓ Genuinely satisfying gearchange
✓ As popular as the Queen's corgis

CONS
X Have to roll down the window to fit in my shoulder
X As classics, they can be a touch unreliable
X Some fools think they're a joke

Browse 360,000 used cars for sale on driving.co.uk

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1653405.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-reliant-robin/

[RedMoon11]

The turbocharged mammoth stampedes away from extinction

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 17 January 2016


Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, £118,455

I HAVE driven a Bentley Continental many times, and at no point have I ever thought, “Hmmm, I like the opulence and the strange sensations of cultured thuggery but I wish I could buy a version of this car that has a slightly lower top speed and is a lot less wieldy and considerably more expensive.”

Bentley has recently launched a large SUV that covers all those bases. It’s called the Bentayga, and in essence it is a Continental that’s been ruined. It’s also a little bit ugly, and yet I guarantee that it will sell by the bucketload. In the Christian Louboutin and Chanel part of town you won’t be able to move for the damn things.

Lamborghini, too, is said to be working on a jacked-up supercar. It will, I understand, look like an Aventador on stilts, which means it’ll be like an Aventador, only slower, less economical and worse round the corners. That’ll sell as well.

The demand for leather-lined SUVs has gone berserk. I was at the Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire last weekend and the car park was hysterical. Everyone looked at me arriving in my Volkswagen Golf with open-mouthed wonderment. “How did you get here in that?” they exclaimed.

Almost everyone else had turned up in a black Range Rover. Indeed the Range Rover is now so popular that Land Rover’s sister company, Jaguar, has a rival — the F-Pace— arriving on forecourts this spring. It’ll be ideal, I should imagine, for all those who choose not to buy the Maserati Levante, another SUV, which will make its debut at the Geneva motor show in March.

It’s easy to see why all these car makers are so keen to make SUVs. The profit margins are huge, because you’re selling farmyard technology at farm shop prices. And when I say farm shop, I mean Daylesford.

A saloon car has to be fast and comfortable and refined, and all of this stuff costs millions of pounds to develop. An SUV just needs to be big and full of buttons. That costs 8p. For an extreme example of this in action, peer underneath America’s offerings. They’re just pick-ups with tinted windows. Rationally, then, SUVs make no sense. And yet . . .


Despite a facelift in 2014, the Cayenne feels old as soon as you enter the cabin



I know that driving along in an SUV is like inviting all the poor people in your village to watch you build a bonfire out of tenners. I know SUVs are ridiculous and that they simply arm those who want us to go to work in a Google Igloo. But I must admit that my inner nine-year-old rather enjoys being at the wheel of a massive and turbocharged Tonka toy.

Which is why I was pleased when Porsche said I could use a Cayenne Turbo S over the Christmas holidays.

The Cayenne is an old car now. There is a city named after it in French Guiana. And a pepper. They’ve even found prehistoric cave drawings of it in various parts of the world.

In 2014 there was a small facelift that included the fitting of LED daytime running lights, but as soon as you step inside you know it’s old. The sat nav screen, for instance, in most modern cars is 16ft across, whereas in the Cayenne it’s the size of a stamp. And get this: to start the engine you have to put a key in a slot and then turn it. That’s as quaint as Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

The other thing that hasn’t really changed over the years is the styling, and that’s a bad thing. This is not a looker, and age has not improved matters one bit. It still appears as though the stylists were consumed by the idea of making the front look like a 911 and then had a tantrum and gave up completely with the rest of the car when their efforts failed.

However, there is no getting away from the fact that in one important respect the Porsche feels bang up to date. It is extremely fast. Bonkers. Insane. Eye-swivelling.

Under the bonnet is a 4.8-litre twin-turbo V8 that produces 562bhp. And that makes it — since the 918 Spyder is sold out — just about the most powerful car Porsche builds. It’s so powerful, it holds the SUV lap record at the Nürburgring, having smashed the Range Rover Sport SVR’s time by almost 15 seconds.

It’s not just fast for an SUV, either. In a straight line to 62mph it’ll embarrass the driver of an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Flat-out it’ll be doing as near as makes no difference 180mph.

My test car was fitted with the optional sports exhaust system, which produces the sort of deep, crackling rumble that frightens dogs. And it also helps to mask the sound of the fuel pumps, which, I presume, are a bit like a bank of firemen’s hoses.

To try to keep all this weight and all this power in some kind of check there are many buttons, all of which when pressed make the experience a bit less comfortable. I went for the softest setting, and — I’ll be honest — it wasn’t bad. Of course even in sporty mode it’s no 911 — it’s too high up for that — but then at least you aren’t sitting there thinking, “Oh no. I’m going to crash at any moment.” And that’s the best you can hope for, really, in a car such as this.

Bigger stopping distances. Lower cornering speeds. Thirst. These are the prices you pay for all the extra . . . um . . . er . . . height? Ground clearance? Off-road traction?

Well, yes, you get all that and a lot of clever electronic trickery, but the truth of the matter is that a car this big and this heavy is going to get stuck on a wet grassy hill. The only way round that is to fit it with off-road tyres, and if you do that, it’ll be a noisy, wayward nightmare on the way home.

Which brings us right back to the beginning. Why spend almost £120,000 on a Cayenne Turbo S — and that much again if you want it to have doors and a steering wheel and a radio — when it won’t work in the sort of off-road conditions that we get in Britain? Why not buy a Panamera instead? Or a BMW 530d? Or a Golf R and a Toyota Hilux?

Admit it. You want a big SUV because it’s part of today’s uniform. It tells people that you have a second home in the country and that you shoot. It says that money’s not a worry. All of this is human nature. It’s silly but it’s how we are.

The question is, however: having made the decision to buy a large SUV, should you buy a Cayenne Turbo S, with its quaint key slot and stamp-sized sat nav screen?

Well, yes, if you want the fastest SUV on the road. But bear in mind that within a year or so, once Bentley and Lamborghini are offering rivals, it won’t be.

Go to driving.co.uk to search for used Porsche Cayennes

PORSCHE CAYENNE TURBO S SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £118,455
ENGINE: 4806cc, V8
POWER: 562bhp @ 6000rpm
TORQUE: 590 lb ft @ 2500rpm
TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 4.1sec
TOP SPEED: 176mph
FUEL: 24.6mpg (combined)
CO2: 267g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: M (£1,100 for first year; £505 thereafter)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆
The fastest brick on the block — for now

PROS
✓ Insanely quick
✓ Best SUV round a track
✓ Still a decent ride in softest suspension setting

CONS
X It hasn't got any prettier
X Interior really needs updating
X Why not get a proper 4x4 and a great sports car for the same money?


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1655886.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-porsche-cayenne-turbo-s/

[RedMoon11]

Oh you’re good, Audi, but I bet you can’t give it vertical take-off

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 24 January 2016


Audi A4 quattro, from £33,960

TOWARDS the end of the 18th century a chef in the Italian city of Naples decided that he’d like to invent an easy way for the locals to eat their food when there was no cutlery to hand. Presumably, he had encountered a haggis and decided that, while the idea was sound, the execution wasn’t.

So then he looked at the pasty, which, he’d heard, could be eaten even by people with sooty hands in a mine. But there was a problem with that too. A meat pie would work in a country where there was rain and flabby people who would be happy later on to drive around in a Morris Marina. But it would not work, he reckoned, in a country that had given the world Rome and the Renaissance and would go on to provide it with Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.

Having looked at a burger and decided it was far too American, he came up with the pizza. And I presume that, having created the base, he experimented for several years before deciding that the topping should be made from cheese and tomatoes. In the next 200 years every chef would refine and hone our Neapolitan friend’s original design until one day someone came up with the American Hot, and that was that. The pizza was finished. Perfect. Unimprovable. Move on.

But people didn’t move on. They kept coming up with new designs and new toppings. Adding leaves and weeds and lumps of buffalo garnished with guillemot. They went for cheeses that have no place outside the fridge of Blur’s bassist and cooked them in ovens that filled the restaurant with the pungent smell of a forest fire.

They invented the pizza delivery man, who would go on to star in a million low-rent porn films. They added sultanas and lentils and beans. And the customers came and their shoulders sagged because all they wanted was an American Hot. Because that’s what a pizza is.



The American Hot is pretty much where we’ve got to in the world of cars with the new Audi A4. The idea of personalised mobility using internal combustion was dreamt up by Karl Benz, and for the past 130 years everyone’s been fiddling around with his original concept until we’ve arrived at the point where there’s nothing left to do. Except think of a new concept.

It’s almost impossible to review the A4, because there’s almost nothing to say. The boot is big enough for your suitcases, the doors don’t fall off when you go over a bump, the dashboard is laid out to look like a dashboard and the 3-litre turbodiesel engine in my test car hummed like a contented monk. You may think that the engines in all modern saloon cars hum like contented monks, but the humming in this Audi seems to be coming from very far away. It is remarkably refined. Astonishingly so, in fact.

Audi had obviously been paying attention to the weather forecast and supplied the car on skinny and knobbly winter tyres that until recently would have sat in the mix in the same way as a large turd would have sat on your American Hot. But not any more. They were quiet and grippy, even when the weather was nowhere near as frosty as the overexcitable Met Office had predicted.


The sat nav graphics are a bit Mothercare but it’s hard to find any other faults in the A4

Because the snow terror and the ice chaos never arrived, I had a good whizz about in the Audi and can report that, even though it is whisper quiet, it’s startlingly fast. Not that long ago BMW M5s had such performance figures. And it’s a diesel.

It handles nicely too. The quattro badge may have begun in the forests and on the icy tracks of the world rally calendar, but it quickly became nothing more than a marketing tool, a handle that sounded cool and interesting but actually gave your car handling that was woollier than a Swede’s jumper. Not any more. Thanks to all sorts of clever-clever electronics, the quattro now feels how a quattro should feel. And never has.

It’s the same story with the comfort. As recently as five or six years ago Audis didn’t ride properly. They jiggled and pittered and pattered. A road that in most cars was billiard-table smooth was a ploughed field in an Audi. But not any more. Now you glide.

This car is so magic-carpetish that you may nod off, but that’s OK because up to 37mph in a city there is an option that lets it drive itself. Outside the city it can steer itself down the motorway and stop if the car in front stops, and all while you’re sending a text. It also knows where it’s going, and because the monk up front runs on diesel, you’ll be able to get from London to Scotland and back without stopping for fuel.

Niggles? It’s as hard, really, as niggling about your Pizza Express American Hot. Only people who write on TripAdvisor could do that. And that lot are so mean and bitter, they’d even find fault, publicly, with their wife’s breasts.



I could tell you the sat nav graphics are a bit Mothercare and I don’t need a warning buzzer to tell me that the door is open. I know it’s open because I just opened it. And, er, that really is pretty much all. The only genuine gripe is the price. A base-level 3-litre TDI A4 quattro is knocking on the door of £36,000, which is a lot for a car that, let’s not forget, started out in life — in the form of the 80 — as a rival for the Ford Cortina. I can’t say for sure because life’s too short to work it out, but I reckon the car I drove, which was fitted with quite a few choice extras, would cost in excess of £50,000.

This may cause you to wonder if perhaps you would be better off with a BMW or a Mercedes or a Jaguar instead. Well, that’s up to you. Because the truth is that their mid-sized saloon cars are all pretty good as well. The Jaguar XE especially. It’s surprisingly excellent, that thing.

Or maybe you want to wait and see what Alfa Romeo’s Giulia will be like. That’s the car I’m most looking forward to driving this year. Mostly because I just know there will be loads to say about it.

And that really is the Audi’s biggest problem. There isn’t. It’s a car, filtered and refined and honed so that every last little foible and idiosyncrasy is gone. It’s everything a car can be and should be, and as a result it’s a little bit dull. There’s no flair, no pizzazz, no wow factor. It’s as characterful as a toaster.

What we need now, then, is no more development of the original idea. We’ve done that. We’ve achieved peak pizza. What we need now is new thinking, new means of propulsion.

Our man in Naples didn’t look at the pasty and think: “Oh, well, that’s that, then. It’s been done.” He started a new idea from scratch. It’s time for the car makers to do the same thing.

2016 AUDI A4 3.0 TDI QUATTRO S LINE SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £38,950
ENGINE: 2967cc, V6
POWER: 268bhp @ 3250rpm
TORQUE: 442 lb ft @ 1500rpm
TRANSMISSION: 8-speed Tiptronic sequential/automatic
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 5.3sec
TOP SPEED: 155mph
FUEL: 55.4mpg (combined)
CO2: 134g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: E (£130 a year)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★★☆
A slice of dull perfection

PROS
✓ Amazingly quiet cabin
✓ Surprisingly quick
✓ Handles briliantly

CONS
X So good it lacks character
X BMW, Mercedes and Jaguar rivals are also great
X It's how much?!


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1658613.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-audi-a4-quattro/

[RedMoon11]

It could swallow a horse and 47 other things. Anyone with 48 must get a lorry

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2016 VOLKSWAGEN TOURAN 2.0 TDI

Jeremy Clarkson    Published: 7 February 2016


The Touran SE Family: a sensible car for parents who’ve given up on life

Volkswagen Touran SE Family, from £25,115

AFTER a long and dreary drive down the M1 last weekend, the sat nav said I had just six miles to go. And even though it would be six miles across London, I figured that in half an hour I would be kicking off my shoes and sitting back to spend the rest of the day watching television and eating chocolate.

So would you like to guess how long it actually took to cover those six miles? No, I’m sorry, but you’re not even close. It was two hours and 35 minutes.

I have never seen so many roadworks and cones and temporary traffic lights and buses on diversion. And in every single one of the endless snarl-ups there’d be an Uber driver in his infernal Toyota Prius making everything worse. Or a senior citizen in a Peugeot. And every single rat run I took was festooned with speed humps and width restrictions and dead ends and more Uber drivers pootling about while under the influence of God knows what. Not speed, though, that’s for sure.

It’s a fairly typical story these days. Everywhere you go, the roads are being turned into cycle ways and bus lanes and pedestrian zones. Which means you are being inconvenienced while the council builds something to inconvenience you for ever. And last week that made me stare with barely concealed contempt at the gearlever in my Volkswagen Touran test car.

“Why,” I wailed inwardly, “would anyone ever buy a car with a manual gearbox these days?” It’s like saying: “I don’t need a television with a remote control. I’m perfectly capable of walking over to it and changing the channel myself.”

Yes, on a racetrack or a deserted switchback road in the Atlas mountains a manual gearbox is sublime. Snapping it up a cog when you reach the red line and double declutching on the way back down . . . ooh, it makes me go all tingly.

But we don’t drive on racetracks or in the Atlas mountains. We drive on the Oxford ring road, where there are narrow lanes and signs saying you are not allowed to overtake cyclists. And here a car with a manual gearbox is just annoying.

I had it in my mind as I sat in the Touran, fuming, that these days — with flappy-paddle gearboxes and automatics being fairly cheap and easy — the only people who would buy an old-fashioned gearstick manual are the sort who choose not to have a washing machine because they prefer to clean their clothes in the local river.



It seems, however, that I’m wrong. Yes, automatics in whatever form are becoming more popular, but even so, more than 70% of all cars sold in Britain have manual gearboxes. That means more than 70% of Britain’s car drivers are mad.

There was a time when automatics chewed fuel, weighed a ton and cost about the same as a house. And there was a time too when the halfway-house arrangement — usually a manual gearbox operated without a clutch pedal via flappy paddles on the steering column — was jerky and complicated and completely incapable of setting off without making more smoke than a First World War battleship. Those days are gone. Flappy-paddle gearboxes now are sublime. Fast. Easy. Rewarding. Nice.



But there I was in the Touran, pumping away at the clutch and manually moving the sort of lever that would be familiar to any Victorian signalman. And I felt like one of those people who won’t have a mobile phone because they’ve a perfectly good Bakelite landline device at home.

Before we get on to a road test of the actual car, I should make one point. If you pass your driving test in a vehicle with a flappy-paddle setup, which is technically a manual, you are only permitted to drive automatics on the road. Which means, of course, you can drive a car with flappy paddles. Even though — as I just said — it’s technically a manual. Odd, eh?

Anyway, the car. Well, it may be called a Touran and it may be billed as a people carrier — it comes with three rows of seats — but when all is said and done it’s a Golf. So you get all the Golf features, including eco-tips that flash up on the dash asking you to maybe think about driving more ecologically, to which you can now reply: “If I wanted to drive ecologically, I wouldn’t have bought an effing Volkswagen diesel, would I?”

You also get a sat nav system that sometimes turns itself off. A quick check on Google says this is a common fault and the cure is to stop the car, get out, lock it, unlock it, get back in and start the engine again. In other words it’s the same as your Sky box and your phone and your laptop. You turn it off and on again.


The Touran is classed as a people carrier, but it’s basically a Golf — complete with eco-tips that flash up on the dash 

And that’s about it so far as faults are concerned. Even the styling is right, chiefly because there isn’t any. It’s modelled, from what I can see, on the box in which chest freezers are delivered, and that’s exactly how it should be, because anyone who needs three rows of seats has plainly done the children thing and no longer has any need for sleek curves and a barking, snarling exhaust. Or they are a taxi driver. In which case the same thing applies.

Inside, the seats can be moved about so easily that even I managed it without swearing once. And when they are folded away, the boot is more than 700 litres bigger than the boot in a Golf. It’s so big in fact that you could transport a medium-sized horse, no problem at all.

And get this: there are 47 cubbyholes. Which means it’s no use at all for someone who needs 48 places to store stuff. But for everyone else it’s great. My test car also had a glass roof. Which was nice, for no reason that I can think of.

Other touches include an optional system with an app called Cam-Connect that when used in conjunction with a GoPro Hero4 camcorder feeds an image or — if you’re stationary or driving slowly — footage of what’s happening in the back to the screen on the dash. I thought at first this might be some kind of porn-based feature, but it’s so you don’t have to turn round to see if the children are fighting.

And you don’t have to shout at them either because your voice is picked up by the hands-free unit and fed via the speakers to the people in the back. VW really has thought this one through.



To drive? Well, apart from the manual gearbox, it was pretty good. Perhaps it’s not quite as comfy over the bumps as a Renault Scénic, but the upside of this is that the people in the back are less likely to become vomity should you ever find yourself on a switchback road in the Atlas mountains.

I’ve said for many years that the only people carrier worth buying is Volvo’s XC90, but the new one is very big — and pricy. I also used to quite like the Vauxhall Zafira, which had a clever seating arrangement, but I see from the tabloid newspapers that these days Vauxhalls are even more likely to burst into flames than hoverboards.

And so if you’ve given up on life, you’ve got children and you just need a sensible family car to move you around while you wait to die, the Touran is probably your best bet.

VOLKSWAGEN TOURAN SE FAMILY SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £28,215
ENGINE: 1968cc, 4 cylinders, diesel
POWER: 148bhp @ 3500rpm
TORQUE: 251 lb ft @ 1750rpm
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 9.3sec
TOP SPEED: 129mph
FUEL: 64.2mpg (combined)
CO2: 116g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: C (Free for first year; £30 thereafter)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆
Give us an automatic for the people

PROS
✓ It's a Golf with three rows of seats
✓ Boxy on the outside, big on the inside
✓ 47 cubbyholes

CONS
X Screen for sat nav and infortainment system plays up
X Give me an automatic gearbox any day
X Ride could be more comfy


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1664281.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-volkswagen-touran-2-0-tdi/

[RedMoon11]

[RedMoon11]

cdn.videos.sundaytimes.co.uk.edgesuite.net/15ZHh1MDE6CAjGpANg9VM-igSRHvVsgO/DOcJ-FxaFrRg4gtDEwOjFsaTowODE7WX

An old advert

[RedMoon11]

[RedMoon11]

A sporty number... for Terry and June

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2016 SUZUKI VITARA S

Jeremy Clarkson  Published: 14 February 2016


Suzuki Vitara S, £20,899

BACK in the 1950s, when James May was an old man and everyone on the radio sounded like the Queen, Hillman launched a two-tone version of its Minx saloon called the Gay Look. Autocar magazine was very impressed and put it on the cover, under the headline “Go gay with Hillman”.

I’m not sure why I’ve brought that up. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been thinking about the old Suzuki jeep. Actually, Jeep is a registered trademark, so we can’t call it that. And we can’t call it gay either. But you know the car I mean: the SJ410. That sit-up-and-beg runabout that was popular with hairdressers and airline stewards in Brighton in the 1980s. God, it was terrible. Putting the roof on was more complicated than building a circus marquee, and it never quite fitted properly, which meant that if you actually wanted the poppers — oo-er — to do up, you had to use your fingernails to stretch the fabric until they all came out.

So then you’d have no fingernails and you’d think life couldn’t possibly be worse, but it was, because then you’d have to get inside and go for a drive. Except you didn’t drive a Suzuki SJ. You bounced. It was fitted with the same suspension — and I mean exactly the same — as you would find on a medieval ox cart.

This meant that it was simply a system for suspending the body. And that’s all it did. It had less give than a dining room table, so if you ran over a speed hump at anything more than 15mph, you took off. And then you bounced down the road with blood pouring from your ruined fingers until you hit the next speed hump. Or a manhole cover. Or a small piece of gravel. Which would cause you to bounce into a parked car, or a lamppost.

On a motorway things were extremely scary, because in an accident the car could bounce and then land sideways, which would cause it to roll over. And because it was a convertible, your head would come off and then you’d be gouting blood from your severed neck as well.

Happily, the top speed was very low. Or at least I think it was. It’s hard to say for sure, because once you got above about 40mph, the noise from the 1-litre engine was so enormous that your ears would start to bleed.

And then we get to the steering. There was a wheel, which gave you hope, but any attempt to use it as some kind of directional control device was pointless. Because when you are bouncing, the wheels are mostly off the ground and, as a result, you have no real say in where you’re going. Once, I drove a Suzuki SJ and ended up at Spurn Point in East Yorkshire.



And the prospect of driving back to London and possibly ending up by mistake in Paignton was so awful that I seriously considered staying there for ever. A lifetime in Hull? It’s better than three hours on a motorway in an SJ.

Weirdly, however, on holiday I would often rent an SJ. It was a cheap way of putting some wind in my hair. And around town, on a sunny day, it was an unusual and rather endearing alternative to the hatchback norm. It was cheaper, too.

If I’d had a farm, or a shoot, or some kind of agricultural job back then, I’d have had an SJ, because it had four-wheel drive and it was fitted with nothing other than four seats and a couple of windscreen wipers. So there was nothing to break. That car? It was horrid. But it was honest.



Today, the spirit of the SJ lives on. The modern Suzuki Jimny is certainly safer. But it has a permanent roof, so the main appeal of the original is gone. Shame.

There are glimmers of the spirit in the larger Vitara, too. But even in the apparently sporty 1.4 S model I drove, they are buried beneath a Terry-and-June suet pudding of bland, inoffensive, dreary, lacklustre, unimaginative pigswill. This car is wilfully boring. They’ve painted the wheels black and the air vents nail-varnish pink in a desperate, last-minute bid to give it some soul, but it hasn’t worked. Partly because the exterior of my test car was red. And red and pink work together only in the mind of the Queen’s interior designer.

I pretty much hate all the small SUVs. The Nissan Juke. That Renault thing. The Ford with the sliding doors. There’s a Vauxhall, too. No idea what it’s called. I hate the fakery, the way they seem to suggest they are rugged and sensible four-wheel-drive off-roaders that will work at a gymkhana, but actually they’re just expensive, ugly hatchbacks.

The Vitara has another problem. It feels quite astonishingly flimsy and cheap. The rear doors couldn’t weigh less if they’d been made from tracing paper, and the dash has less of a robust feel than a supermarket carrier bag.



However, there’s an upside to this. Because there’s no substance at all to any of the components in this car, it weighs a bit less than a mouse. And that means it is more fuel-efficient and faster than it would be if it felt heavy and durable.

And there’s more. My car came with a reasonably sophisticated four-wheel-drive system, so it actually could go into gymkhana car parks. And then come out again.

A little more digging reveals that, for the money, you get quite a few toys as standard. There’s DAB radio, which cuts out if you’re near a building, and all sorts of “connectivity”, whatever that is. You even get a system that beeps if it thinks you are going to run into the car in front. That sounds tremendous, but it was plainly set up by the winner of last year’s butter-side-down award, because, ooh, it was pessimistic. “Beeeeep,” it would shriek, as you joined the A1 in London. Because, in its mind, you were definitely on a collision course with Edinburgh Castle.

Other issues. Well, getting in and out’s not easy, because the roof line is too low — it’s worse, apparently, if you have the panoramic sunroof. And putting just about all the controls on the central screen may have sounded a good idea in a meeting, but in practice it doesn’t work at all. When a nasty song comes on the radio, it takes you a long time to find your spectacles, and even longer then to find the volume graphic.

There’s plenty, then, to not like in this car. It’s very boring to look at, it feels more flimsy than pretty much anything on the road and there are some practical annoyances. But hidden beneath all this is an honest little car, and one that is quite likeable. It drives well, zooms along and is made in Hungary, which is a byword for good quality.

If you have a not-very-successful fencing repair business, it might be just the job.

2016 SUZUKI VITARA S SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £20,899
ENGINE: 1373cc, 4 cylinders, turbo, petrol
POWER: 138bhp @ 5500rpm
TORQUE: 162 lb ft @ 1500rpm
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph: 10.2sec
TOP SPEED: 124mph
FUEL: 52.3mpg (combined)
CO2: 127g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: D (Free for first year; £110 thereafter)
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★★☆☆
Flimsy but likeable

PROS
✓ Competitively priced
✓ Drives well
✓ Zippy performance

CONS
X Feels flimsy
X Nannying driver aids
X Styled by the Queen's interior designer

Go to driving.co.uk for our selection of the top 100 cars of 2016, plus more than 300,000 cars for sale

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1666851.ece
www.driving.co.uk/contributors/jeremy-clarkson/

[RedMoon11]

The beancounters’ gift to box‑haulers

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2016 BMW X1 XDRIVE25D

Jeremy Clarkson  Published: 21 February 2016





JOHN TERRY is the lion-hearted soul and backbone of Chelsea football club. If he leaves at the end of the season, as has been reported, and is carted off to a home for used footballers, he will be replaced by someone called Schmitt or Ng or Aspuertoli-Detomaso-Gorva-Didivichlaboueff. And then will Chelsea be Chelsea any more?

What will give the team their character? How will they be different from Arsenal or Manchester United, or any of the other clubs that, behind the chanting, will be just businesses that employ the best people?

At present my son argues pretty much all the time with his mates about football. He loves Chelsea. His mates don’t. But how will they be able to stoke up that level of passion when their clubs become like Sainsbury’s and Tesco and Lidl? Because nobody gets into all-night debates about which of those does the best sandwiches.

I worry about this sort of thing with car manufacturers too, because all of them earned their reputations back at a time when their products were designed and engineered and built by people from a specific area. An Alfa Romeo felt Italian. An Austin really didn’t. That was important.

But today car makers have to keep that spirit and that heritage alive when it isn’t second nature to the people who work there. The Germans who run Rolls-Royce have to guess what a British engineer would do. The Italians who run Jeep have to think American. And the Indians who run Jaguar have to read in history books what a Jag should be like. (And sometimes I wish they’d pay more attention.)



Look at Citroën. Its design offices will be more international than Arsenal’s Christmas party, but somehow it’s got to make a product that feels French and quirky and odd. You can see this in the products, this desperation. And you can feel it too — a sense that it has built an ordinary, global car and then given it some silly design touches that it hopes will cause customers to imagine they are driving around in President Charles de Gaulle.

That’s a bit like replacing John Terry with an Argentinian and then asking him to call everyone “geezer” at post-match press conferences. We won’t be fooled.

Amazingly, though, we are mostly fooled by cars. The Suzuki I reviewed last week is built in Hungary, but it still feels Japanese. A Bentley is built largely from Volkswagen components, but at no point when you are driving a Continental GT do you think: “Mmmm. It’s as if I’m in a bar in Baden-Baden.”

And the Alfa Romeo 4C? Not once when you’re behind the wheel do you ever think: “I wonder. Is this Australian?”

Then there’s BMW. Its cars are made from the same components that you find in any other vehicles, and I don’t doubt the design team is fully international, and yet they all feel as though they were conceived and built by a team that started the day with a few star jumps and then went to work wearing raspberry- or mustard-coloured jackets and extremely clean shoes. They feel utterly German.



Except for the horrible old X1. You got the distinct impression that BMW’s engineers —quite rightly, in my view —didn’t want to build a so-called crossover. They felt such carswere all right for Renault and Chrysler and Terry and June, but not for a company that had spent 50 years building a reputation for finesse and driving pleasure. BMW making a hatchback on stilts? That’s like Rolls-Royce making a van.




So they had it made in factories in India, China and Russia and it felt like it. In fact it felt like a cement mixer. It was rough, impractical, ugly and slow. No crossover car is particularly nice, but this one? Ooh, this one missed the bar by about 40 miles.

Unfortunately for the BMW purists, it was a huge sales success, so the company had to make a newer version. And with this it has really thrown away not just the bathwater and the baby, but the bath as well. It has a BMW badge, but it doesn’t feel, sound or drive like any Beemer I’ve been in.

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the accountants met the engineers for the weekly catch-up. “Look, you lot. We are in business, and to survive we must make this car. It’s what customers want these days, so stop cocking about and do it properly.”

Well, they didn’t. They simply decided to mount the new car on the same platform as the Mini. Which means the engine is mounted sideways — that goes against the grain for BMW — and in some models it drives the front wheels, which is the devil’s work so far as they’re concerned. The styling? I think they did that with the lights off.

They’ve even fitted the gearlever surround with a shiny plastic that reflects everything you drive under. So when you go down a motorway you can see out of the corner of your eye the lampposts speeding by. After a few miles this will give you an epileptic fit.



BMW says that despite the way it looks and the people it’s aimed at — caravanists, basically — it’s still pretty fast. But the range-topping TwinPower 2-litre diesel that I drove didn’t feel speedy. In fact it left the line about as enthusiastically as its designer got out of bed in the morning. With a plaintive cry of: “Must I?”



My test car was fitted with four-wheel drive, so you might think it’d be able to deal with a bit of muddy ground. Nope. On a short piece of level grass it was skidding about all over the place.

Comfort? Well, the suspension’s not bad, but the seats put me in mind of my old school desk. And while the boot is quite long, it’s not very wide. I suppose it’d be all right if you had to transport a coffin. Or me. The only other thing of note back there is how you open the boot. You wave your foot about as if you’re doing some kind of Riverdance routine and it pops up.



I’d love to be able to say at this point that because the X1 is so meh — that’s the first time I’ve used this word — and because it’s based on the Mini, it is at least priced keenly. But compared with its rival from Nissan it’s actually quite expensive.

I suppose that, all things considered, it’s not a bad car. It doesn’t crash all the time, or explode. If it were a Kia or a car from one of those weird Chinese companies, you’d say it was quite nice. But because it says BMW on the back, and because you know just how good BMW can be, you expect something better.

2016 BMW X1 XDRIVE25D XLINE SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £36,210
ENGINE: 1,995cc, 4 cylinders
POWER: 228bhp @ 4,400rpm
TORQUE: 332 lb ft @ 1,500rpm
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph in 6.6sec
TOP SPEED: 146mph
FUEL: 54.3mpg (combined)
CO2: 137g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: E (£130 a year)
DIMENSIONS: 4,439mm x 2,060mm x 1,612mm
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

CLARKSON'S RATING ★★☆☆☆

PROS
✓ Decent ride comfort
✓ Deep, if not wide, boot
✓ If it were a Chinese car it'd be considered good

CONS
X Doesn't feel like a BMW
X Styled with the lights off
X Lethargic on-road, useless off-road


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1669191.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-bmw-x1-xdrive25d/

[RedMoon11]

I did not expect the wandering hands

The Clarkson Review: BMW 7-series

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 28 February 2016



IF YOU are the Austrian finance minister, or an African dictator, or the managing director of a successful carpet business in West Yorkshire, then you will have a chauffeur-driven S-class Mercedes. And it’s easy to see why.

Mercedes tests every new invention to see if it really offers any benefit. And if it does, Mercedes fits it to the S-class. So this was the first car in the world to have airbags. The first with seatbelt pretensioners; the first with crumple zones. This means it’s always ahead of the pack. It’s always the yardstick.

But BMW has come up with a cunning plan for its new 7-series. The company has looked at what you get in the S-class and then it’s added a bit more. Let me give you an example. Mercedes fits the S-class with a system that monitors the driver’s face. If it thinks he’s getting drowsy, it sounds a gentle bong and suggests he pull over for a cup of coffee.

BMW has gone further, so that with its system the driver can choose what level of drowsiness he must achieve before the bong sounds. Seriously. You can tell the monitors to leave you alone if you are just having 40 winks but wake you if you fall into deep REM sleep. Can you see why this would be useful? No? Me neither.

Then you get an optional system that means you can remotely park the car. I kid you not. You can pull up. Get out. And tell the car to park itself. That’s fantastic, but Mercedes would have said: “Why would someone want to be outside the car, in the rain, while it parks?” And it’s a good question, if I’m honest.

BMW has also reinvented the ignition key. It’s now a sort of mini iPad, and it will tell you how many miles your car can go before it needs refuelling and when it requires servicing. You can even use it to start the air-conditioning. Lovely. But the key is so big, it sits in your pocket like a brick.



By far the worst feature of the car, however, is the rear seating, which is fitted with a massage facility. We’ve seen this before, of course, but BMW has gone berserk by offering a whole range of massages, none of which comes with a happy ending.



There’s one that comes close, though. It gives you the sensation of someone fondling your buttocks. I found it vaguely horrifying. I needed to turn it off and reached for the central command screen, which is located in the armrest. I turned it on and it said it needed to receive a system update. Crying with the shame and humiliation, I waited until the update was complete, dived into the menu, found the seat controls and stabbed at the massage button, only to be told this feature needed a system update too.

Eventually I realised that you can turn the massaging off with an old-fashioned button, but when I did that, one of the little bags that inflate and deflate remained pumped up, so it felt as if I was sitting on a snooker ball.

And even when I did manage to get the seat to be just a seat, it wasn’t very comfortable, and there was an annoying rattle, possibly from the rear privacy blind or possibly from the fridge.



After that, I sat playing with the voice-activated system, which, it turns out, understands what you’re on about only if you impersonate Donald Sinden. You need to roll your “r”s and enunciate as if you’re the overeager lead in an am-dram production of The Corn Is Green.

Because this is tiresome, you may be inclined to use the touchpad. On this, you simply trace the letters of, say, the town you want to go to. But it is in the centre console, so you must use your left hand. Which means that if you’re not left-handed, the car thinks you’re a drooling infant.

If you don’t want to write like a three-year-old or talk like Donald Sinden, you can use gesture control. Seriously: if you wave your index finger like Robert Duvall summoning a chopper evac from a Vietnam battlefield, the volume on the stereo goes up. Which is tremendously clever. But it does cause people in cars alongside to think you have taken leave of your senses.

It’s worse, though, if you want to skip to the next track, because then you must flick a V at the stereo. And because it won’t register the first time, you have to do it again. And then usually again.

That’s exactly what I was doing one evening last week when my rear-view mirror filled with blue lights. It seems that while I was telling my car to eff off over and over again, I’d driven past a government camera that had noted the 7-series was uninsured.

While calls were made and checks done, I stood with one of the officers, laughing about the technology that had made the mistake. “You don’t need a camera linked to a central database to find uninsured cars,” I said. He agreed, and at that moment a six-year-old Skoda Superb minicab went by. We both laughed because, of course, the point was made.



You sense the same issues in the new 7-series. It uses the sat nav, for example, to decide what sort of road surface and what sort of bend lie ahead, and then it sets up the air suspension to provide the right balance between comfort and handling. I can’t even begin to imagine how much software code is needed to do this. But I do suspect that a boffin in a brown store coat could achieve better results using a spring.

The Comfort Plus mode does make the ride almost unbelievably soft, but in high winds on a motorway it felt as if the damn thing was chine walking.

Also, the 7-series is confused by potholes and it’s not quite as quiet as you might imagine. You sense that there was a dilemma in the early stages of this car’s design: should it be a BMW with inherent sportiness, or should it be an out-and-out limo? The result is a car that’s sort of neither.

That said, the interior design is lovely — far nicer than in the Mercedes. And because there’s so much stuff to play with, you will never get bored in a traffic jam.

But I think the main reason you’d buy the 7-series is that everyone else has an S-class. It’s a reasonable point, except the reason everyone else has an S-class is: it’s a better car.

2016 BMW 730LD M SPORT SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £72,260
ENGINE: 2,993cc, 6 cylinders, turbodiesel
POWER: 262bhp @ 4,000rpm
TORQUE: 457 lb ft @ 2000rpm
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph in 6.2sec
TOP SPEED: 155mph
FUEL: 56.5mpg (combined)
CO2: 132g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: E (£130 a year)
DIMENSIONS: L: 5,238mm W: 1,902mm H: 1,479mm
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

JEREMY'S RATING ★★★☆☆
It's not an S-class - but it's not as good

PROS
✓ Interior design
✓ Spacious cabin
✓ Gadgets galore

CONS
X Massaging seats don't offer a happy ending
X High-tech' suspension not as good as old fashioned springs
X Gesture recognition controls will drive you mad

Write to us at [e-mail], or Driving, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

Visit driving.co.uk for our selection of the top 100 cars of 2016, plus more than 300,000 cars for sale

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1671543.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-bmw-730ld-m-sport/

[RedMoon11]

Sit back and let it torque the torque

The Clarkson Review: Lexus GS F

Jeremy Clarkson Published: 6 March 2016



When the Lexus you see in the photographs first arrived at my house, I decided I liked it. And when it went away a week later, I liked it even more. Even though it had been annoying.

I think one of the reasons I like it is that I like most smallish, fast saloon cars. They seem to make sense, because you don’t really need six acres of room in the back. The rear seats are for children, and after a party they’re happy to sleep on the floor, so they certainly won’t mind being squashed for a few minutes. And it is only ever a few minutes. It’s not as though you take them to the Kamchatka peninsula every morning, so they’re not going to develop gangrene or anything like that.

No, a smallish saloon the size of a BMW 3-series is all you really need. Which of course brings us on to the father figure and trailblazer of the 3-series range. The M3. The latest incarnation is not perfect. If you put the steering in anything other than Comfort mode it feels lifeless and twitchy at the same time.

Also, its engine is turbocharged. There used to be a time when turbocharging meant that you put your foot down and nothing happened while the exhaust gases spooled up the fan. Then everything happened all in a big rush and you careered into a tree. That doesn’t happen any more. There is no discernible lag at all in an M3, but all the time you know the power is coming from witchcraft and that if it weren’t for various pie-in-the-sky EU emission regulations, BMW would not be using forced induction. It’s effective. But it’s not proper. It is to engineering what cornflour is to cooking. A cheat.



The engine in the Lexus GS F is not turbocharged. It’s a 5-litre 32-valve double-overhead- camshaft V8. It’s old-school. It’s a roux. And I liked it a very lot. I especially liked the noise. In the mid-ranges — up to, say, 4500rpm — it sounds baleful and hollow, like a lonely wolf. But if you keep your foot planted in the carpet and go up past 6000rpm, it starts to sound as though it’s angry about being a hollow wolf. It sounds — and this is the highest praise you can lavish on any car — like a Ferrari 458 Italia.

It doesn’t develop as much torque as a BMW M3, but at no point do you ever think: “Hmmm. This is a bit slow.” Because it isn’t. And it isn’t fitted with a speed limiter either , which means that flat out you’ll be knocking on the door of 170mph.

If anything, it stops even better than it goes, thanks to enormous Brembo brakes, and because it’s fitted with an eight-speed gearbox — which I thought was completely unnecessary when Lexus announced it — you’re never in a torque hole. Not that the holes from a 5-litre V8 are likely to be that deep anyway.

I’ve got to heap praise at this point on the comfort. Yes, this is a stiff car, and, yes, the suspension is firm. But even at slow speeds on Boris’s ploughed roads in London, it’s never harsh or wince-inducing.

The only fly, really, in the driving ointment is the steering, which at low speeds feels as if it would rather be doing something else. It’s always fidgeting, as though it just wants class to end so it can go home. At higher speeds, however, I’ve no complaints at all.



I read a road test of this car in one of the “oversteer is everything” car magazines recently, and the writer said that he preferred it to the AMG Mercedes and the BMW M3. And, thinking of it as a driving tool, I’m with him. It really is that good.



But, oh deary me, it doesn’t half try its hardest to make you hate it. First of all, if I put anyone in the passenger seat, the brakes squeaked, and every time anyone tried to retrieve a can of zesty drink from the cup-holders, the sat nav immediately decided it wanted to go to Pinner.

The problem is, Lexus decided several years ago that a computer- style trackpad was the best way to operate the central command and control system. Time has taught everyone else that it isn’t, because it’s too fiddly and too sensitive and the trackpad itself is mounted right next to the cup-holders. Lexus, however, will not be deterred, so instead of enjoying the braking or the old-fashioned V8 power, what you’re actually doing most of the time is concentrating, with the tip of your tongue out, on getting the little arrow over the icon you want and then swearing when you miss and end up going to Pinner again.

Oh, and once it’s decided it’s going to Pinner, then that’s where it’s going. There is no changing its mind. And to make everything worse, it tells you every 15 seconds that it has found a new route, and would you like to accept it? I learnt eventually just to say yes and let it get on with its trip to the London suburbs while I used signposts and common sense instead.



Other things? Plenty. The wiper stalk is on upside down; there are several million buttons on the steering wheel that all retune the stereo system to Radio 3; and just about the only knob of interest is the big silver one on the centre console that ruins everything. It changes the settings of the car to either Eco, which isn’t interesting, or Sport S, which is bumpy, or Sport S+, which would work only at the Nürburgring. But you’re not at the Nürburgring, because you’ve just reached for your can of refreshing orange pop and now you’re going to Pinner again.



I’d love to tell you that the problem is that the GS F is too clever for its own good, but actually there are almost no gimmicks at all. There’s no voice activation or wi-fi connectivity or any of the stuff you see these days on even fairly humble Fords. It can’t even park itself, for crying out loud. And my Golf GTI can do that.

I assumed that this back-to- basics approach would mean that the Lexus sat at the bargain- basement end of the spectrum. But no. I damn nearly fell off my chair when I found out it costs as near as makes no difference £70,000. That’s BMW M5 money.



And then I fell off my chair again when I found that, while it feels small and nimble like an M3, it’s actually — give or take 5mm — the same length as the 5-series. It’s uncanny. And it’s another tick in the box, because a car that shrinks around you is a good thing.

This is the best Lexus I’ve driven since the LFA, which is also riddled with annoying details, but remains my all-time favourite car.

I wouldn’t blame you at all if you went off and bought a BMW M3 or M5 instead. They’re both tremendous. But don’t assume they’re the best of breed. Because in my book this flawed old-school charmer has them beat.

2016 LEXUS GS F SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £69,995
ENGINE: 4,969cc, V8
POWER: 471bhp @ 7,100rpm
TORQUE: 391 lb ft @ 5800rpm
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph in 4.6sec
TOP SPEED: 168mph
FUEL: 25.2mpg (combined)
CO2: 260g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: M (£1,100 for first year, £505 thereafter)
DIMENSIONS: 4,915mm x 1,845mm x 1,440mm
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

Jeremy's Rating ★★★★☆
Irritatingly good

PROS
✓ Wonderful, old-school V8 engine
✓ Excellent stopping power
✓ Comfortable — in normal mode

CONS
X Sat nav will take you to Pinner
X Trackpad infotainment control is fiddly
X Eco, Sport S and Sport S+ modes are pointless


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1674066.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-2016-lexus-gs-f/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: SUZUKI SWIFT 1.2 SZ2

Bubbling with ideas for inventors to pinch

Filming in the waters of Barbados for his new TV show, Jeremy Clarkson finds the only available car is a nifty Suzuki Swift

Jeremy Clarkson   Published: 13 March 2016



I’m baffled by the car industry’s apparent reluctance to think more seriously about hydrogen as a replacement for petrol and diesel. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so we wouldn’t run out of it for about a billion years, and it’s clean too. A car powered by hydrogen fuel cells produces nothing from its tailpipe but water.

Right now we have the technology to make hydrogen-powered vehicles, and yet, by and large, the car industry is sitting on its hands. Several years ago, with a fanfare provided by a lone bugler on a distant hillside, Honda leased out a handful of test examples in California, but then the bugler stopped playing and went home. And we’ve heard very little since.

Like everyone else, Honda is now making hybrids that use two motors to combat the problem of overconsumption. And the demand for hydrogen is so low that, in the whole of the UK, only four public filling stations stock it.

Rather gamely, a small Welsh company called Riversimple is swimming against the tide and has developed a hydrogen car called the Rasa. It’s clever because it uses electricity garnered from braking to provide acceleration and electricity from hydrogen fuel cells to provide a gentle cruise.

But while the Rasa is made from all sorts of exotic materials, the company has given the poor little thing styling that Riley would have dismissed for being rather old-fashioned, and then added tyres that WO Bentley would have called “a bit thin”. Any normal person would look at it and think: “You know what — I think I’ll stick with my Ford Fiesta.”

This is what the modern-day pioneers of future propulsion systems must remember: we know how a car should look, and we simply won’t take the plunge if it looks odd in any way.

It’s like houses. We may swoon over the cleverness of modern architecture in magazines, but when push comes to shove, we all want to live in something that looks as though it was designed by a Georgian.


This is where Riversimple is going wrong. It’s no good saying that the Rasa weighs about the same as a mouse, uses almost none of the world’s resources to move about, produces only water and could be used at night, silently, to provide electricity for a whole street. Which it could. Because no one is going to drive a car that causes other people to laugh at them.



Extreme petrolheads crave the extraordinary and will even drive a car that has no windscreen if they think it will deliver one more mile an hour, but everyone else craves the ordinary. They want to blend. And going to the shops in a Rasa would be like going to a funeral in a scuba suit. You wouldn’t blend at all.

Talking of scuba suits, I recently needed one when I was filming in Barbados for my new Amazon Prime motoring show.



I also required some wheels for this important work, and that was a problem, because every single hire car on the entire island had been rented to someone else. Which turned out to be good news, because all these people had drunk far too many rum punches to know what a car was, or that they’d rented one, or where it was, which meant I could nick it.

The car I decided to nick was a small Japanese saloon with black wheels and extremely squeaky brakes. Each time I tried to slow down it sounded as if I was lowering a cement mixer onto a cat. Oh, and the steering wheel was loose. And the engine was so gutless that every time I tried to speed up, literally nothing happened.

Barbados is not a mountainous country — it can in no way be confused with, say, Bhutan or Switzerland — but there are a few gentle hills and all of them flummoxed my small, white Japanese saloon car. I’d row away desperately at the gearlever, but it was futile. The only way of getting up even the smallest incline (I nearly said “slope” then) was to arrive at it doing about a hundred miles an hour.
However, on the fourth day I grew to rather like it. And I didn’t work out why until the fifth day, when I realised that I’d somehow got into another small Japanese car and was using that by mistake. This one was different from the first one, partly because it was blue and partly because it had a bullet hole in the door. But mostly because it was excellent. So excellent that I went round the back to see what it was. And —surprise, surprise — it was a Suzuki Swift.

I know this car well. We used Swifts when playing games of car football on the Clarkson, Hammond and May world tour, so I know they are nippy and that they have a great turning circle, especially if you use the handbrake. I can also tell you, because car football is quite a violent contact sport, that they are good in a crash.

I have crashed a Suzuki Swift probably 500 times in the past few years, so I know they can take an enormous impact without breaking. The only real problem is that the washer bottle can burst if you slam the front left corner into James May’s door while doing about 70mph.



I’ve even driven a Swift on the road. It was the Sport model and I seem to recall I gave it four stars. I can’t recall why I didn’t give it five, because it was fast and fun and extremely good value for money.


Suzuki Swift

The car I drove in Barbados was not the Sport version. It was the cooking model, and I should imagine that it therefore represents even better value. You could probably buy the car I had for about a pound. Mainly because of the bullet hole.

As you probably know, my everyday car is a Volkswagen Golf GTI. I drive one because it costs less than £30,000 and does everything you could reasonably expect from a car today. Well, the Swift does everything for less than £10,000. So that makes it even better in my book.

It has whizzy acceleration, a smooth ride, space in the back for grown-ups, a decent boot, fun handling and excellent fuel economy. No, it can’t park itself, there’s no wi-fi hub and you have to use a map if you want to know where you’re going. But it has a fuel gauge and electric windows, and that’s all you need, really.



Best of all, though, you don’t stand out. It’s a plain-Jane, ordinary box — 12½ft of car. It’s the shortest poppy in the field. And it should therefore be the shape that all the future-fuel start-up businesses adopt.

Because if a car looked like this, produced only water and could power our house at night, we’d buy it. And then the motor industry would stop fiddling about with its pointless batteries and its hybrid-drive systems and get on the only road where there is actually a future for personal mobility. The hydrogen road.

SUZUKI SWIFT 1.2 SZ2 SPECIFICATIONS
PRICE: £9,499 (new)
ENGINE: 1,242cc, 4 cylinders
POWER: 93bhp @ 6,000rpm
TORQUE: 87 lb ft @ 4,800rpm
ACCELERATION: 0-62mph in 12.3sec
TOP SPEED: 103mph
FUEL: 56.5mpg (combined)
CO2: 116g/km
ROAD TAX BAND: C (Free for first year, £30 thereafter)
DIMENSIONS: 3,850mm x 1,695mm x 1,610mm
RELEASE DATE: On sale now

Jeremy's Rating ★★★★☆
The car on which all future-fuel cars should be modelled

PROS
✓ Peppy engine
✓ Decent space for a small car
✓ Bargain price (especially if it comes with bullet holes)

CONS
X Hmm. . . well, it can't park itself
X and there's no Wi-Fi hub
X Ah, yes: 70mph side impacts can damage the water bottle


www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/clarkson/article1675967.ece
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-suzuki-swift-1-2-sz2/ 

Call Up the Paparazzi Army to Take Brussels — and Keep Us in Europe
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[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson: My Worst Year


Jeremy Clarkson at the Coral Reef Club hotel in Barbados last month                                                                     Christopher Lane

Charlotte Edwardes
Published at 11:55AM, March 19 2016


He is Britain’s most successful TV presenter – and its most notorious. Twelve months after being sacked by the BBC for punching his producer, a period in which he also lost his mother and his home, Jeremy Clarkson talks to Charlotte Edwardes about life after Top Gear

I am on holiday with Jeremy Clarkson in Barbados. Sorry, I am working and he is working. He’s out here filming the new, as yet unnamed Amazon Prime version of Top Gear. I am interviewing him. “This is work!” he shouts over the squirrel spray of the jet ski, then skids at 45mph to douse me in seawater. “Work!” he insists as we stroll the length of a spongy beach, look around the island’s oldest church, eat warm banana bread and suck at rum sundowners against the bouncing chromatic beat of a steel pan.

But when a woman with a flute of pink fizz floats over in a nightie to ask for a selfie, Clarkson barks, “Can’t you see I’m on holiday?” And this is his gruff response (pathetic, may I say, because he always does pose for them) to the other 20-odd random people who ask him for his picture over the course of the weekend.

“The whole thing is an act, of course,” he says at one point. What? “My job, my TV persona. ‘Jeremy Clarkson.’ It’s a mask. We all wear masks. It’s not the real me.” Is he suggesting that the man who’s made £30 million from “being himself” is a con? “Yup.” Then who is the real you? “I’m not telling you,” he laughs.

Instead, he warns against the dangers of catching “c**t flu” in a paradise like this. It affects the rich and famous, he says, and stems from being surrounded by flunkies who won’t say no. “It’s basically when you see your helicopter and say, ‘I want a bigger one.’ ” He’s had a few attacks – once in rural New Zealand, when he couldn’t find a board game he felt like playing, so sent someone to Auckland to buy Risk.

“It’s one of the reasons rock stars will continue to expire at the age of 27,” he explains. “C**t flu kills them. ‘I can do what I want, therefore …’ That’s c**t flu. It’s selfishness, really.” Amy Winehouse had c**t flu, he says. “But what a singer.”

Still, he has moments of grumpiness, which is down to the “horrible, horrible” time he’s had lately: “My luck stopped suddenly three years ago.” I suggest it must be wearing to be interrupted to pose every five minutes. “No! It’s as Angela Rippon says, ‘When it stops is when you have to worry.’ ”

Actually, his popularity seems undented by his very public defenestration from the BBC’s Top Gear. A short walk on the beach is like being in The Truman Show. There are cries of, “I love you, Jeremy!”, “Good luck with the new show, I’ll be watching!” and (less reassuringly), “It’s you, innit? The one from whatsit?”

No one asks about The Alleged Punch. It’s almost exactly a year since Clarkson, 55, gave a cut lip to producer Oisin Tymon in a hotel in North Yorkshire for not, so the story goes, having a steak supper ready after filming. Three and a bit weeks ago he apologised, and Tymon’s lawyers said they had settled for an undisclosed fee (rumoured to be in excess of £100,000) for racial discrimination and personal injury (Clarkson allegedly called him “a lazy Irish c**t”).

“I can’t talk about it – legal reasons,” Clarkson says when I ask. Does he have a temper? “I can’t talk about it, honestly.” Was he really angry? He sighs. Does he argue a lot? “I don’t usually argue with people; I discuss. If I’m in a mood and I’m talking to an idiot, I might tell them to eff off. If you and I found a subject we disagreed on, you’d see.”

Later, in a harbourside restaurant suggested by TripAdvisor, we do have a disagreement. By then, warmed by sun, swimming and a bottle of rosé, he’ll be more relaxed and open about life in general.

I’ve been chasing Clarkson for this interview for more than a year, and having been batted away with multiple versions of “No, thank you”, I’m only here now because, in a moment of “bravado”, he texted me something along the lines of, “All right, come on then, but it has to be in Barbados tomorrow.”

When I arrive, he has a hangover. He’s spent much of the day sitting on the bottom of the swimming pool with an oxygen tank, refusing to be coaxed up by a desperate scuba instructor, on the grounds that he wanted to drown out the world. “It was so nice and peaceful down there. Why would I want to come out?”

All he can bear to recall of the previous evening is that he went down to “Second Street” in nearby Holetown (which develops a mythical quality over the course of the weekend) and bumped into Andrea Corr (of Irish band the Corrs) in a piano bar.

Tonight he’s skipped a “pyjama party” to meet me at the Coral Reef Club hotel, which is candlelit and colonial with shutters and palms, although the trees have been castrated of fruit and the area is sprayed with mosquito repellent, erasing the ambience of bugs.

Still, the crickets are going like an itch. And we’re drinking banana daiquiris topped with glacé cherries in the smoking area. At all times Clarkson is equipped with three packs of Marlboro Lights, which he spills onto the table along with boxes of matches, lighters, receipts, a “crappy student” cashpoint card and anything else that he can unearth from his pocket.

SPOILERS
The confusion over whether this is work or holiday is understandable. This is his itinerary over the next weeks: India, Jordan, America, Mozambique, Sweden. He’s already been in Portugal – “and Devon”. When I suggest this is all rather five star and enviable, he protests that he often shares a room with co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May, and that May snores like a beast.

Here they’re building a coral reef out of old cars. “You need to ‘seed’ reefs,” he explains. “Concrete is best, but steel is good, too. Just over there they sunk a ship not that long ago, and already it’s an island of marine life – turtles and fish. Beautiful. One day the ship will rust and dissolve and you’ll be left with a coral reef. I was reading about it in an in-flight magazine. I thought why use ships? There are awful, terrible cars with which you could actually create new life. So that’s what we’re doing in Barbados. That, and the fact that the crew will think we’re brilliant because we’re here rather than some godforsaken mountaintop in a country no one has heard of.” *

His job sounds like the world’s longest gap year. In the West Indies he’s played drunken dodgems on jet skis. He’s been in three plane crashes, including one in Libya and one in Cuba (during which he lit a fag as the plane went down). In Nepal, he remembers dragging his sleeping bag outside their dorm because “May’s snoring was worse than the alternative: sleeping on a bench next to a vomiting pig”. May regularly holds up their convoy with his 40-minute trips to the lavatory. “He says he can’t hold it, which means at least once in his life,” Clarkson muses, “that man must’ve had to interrupt sex in order to take a dump.”

There are tales of nervous moments spent confronting armed militias, cross-legged conferences around campfires, negotiations with multiple agencies on borders, and occasional last-minute about-turns – “I was too chicken to go into the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo]. Got all the way to the border and then thought, ‘Actually, no.’ ”

He flips through his iPhone to show me photos from 2011, larking about in Raqqa (now Islamic State’s stronghold) and Homs (now rubble and pock-marked, skeletonised buildings). Of course, jeopardy has always been a part of the show’s appeal. This is lads’ diplomacy – which at times goes hideously wrong.

While filming a Christmas special in 2014, they had to be evacuated from Argentina after his Porsche’s numberplates (H982 FKL) were said to be a deliberately provocative reference to the Falklands conflict. (Clarkson denies this: “It was just an impossibility for us to have chosen that numberplate on purpose. I drive thousands of cars a year; I never look at the registration.”)

The situation was so tense for the remaining crew – attempting to reach Chile cross-country – that Clarkson feared they’d be killed. “I rang [David] Cameron, who was out in Afghanistan. ‘Get someone over from the Falklands. You’ve got to help us out here, otherwise you’re going to have 40 dead English people.’ There were 40 stuck in that convoy. It was one of the most unpleasant nights of my life.”

What was the response? “Cameron said there was nothing he could do. And realistically there was nothing he could do. The High Commissioner came out, did his best. He could do about as much as the president of Argentina could do if some Argies got into trouble in England – nothing. Those days when you can send a gunboat, I’m afraid, are over.”

It was against a swirling background of “incidents” like this that BBC bosses commissioned a number of investigations into Clarkson’s “offensive behaviour”. For example, while trying to build a bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand (actually, as it turned out, the River Kok), Clarkson commented, when he saw someone walk across it, “That is a proud moment … but there’s a slope on it.”

He makes a noise of exasperation. “No one gave a s*** in Asia. They were alerted to the fact that there was a ‘deeply racist’ slur in the footage, and said, ‘That’s not deeply racist,’ and transmitted it unedited. Which is what I thought would happen.

“I genuinely don’t think it was bad. It was built up to be a huge thing. We don’t mind being called ‘roast beef’. The Aussies call us Nigel, a lot. Or Poms. We call the French ‘frogs’.” He has admitted to mumbling the n-word while reciting Eeny, meany, miny, moe and is apologetic for being rude about Mexicans.

“I’d say the one time we made a mistake – not one time, sorry, we made lots of mistakes; everybody does – but the biggest was Mexico. We got carried away in an item about a Mexican sports car and were very rude about Mexico and Mexicans and it was uncalled for. I apologised to the Mexican ambassador.”

Against a backdrop of heightened awareness of sexism, the Top Gear boys’ Carry On humour began to be scrutinised. When Clarkson revealed they’d all made up daily injuries as an excuse to see a “rather attractive” paramedic working with them, culminating in Hammond telling her “my willy tastes funny”, it provoked a paroxysm – and not of laughter.

Yet Clarkson seemed ever more defiant. I get the impression that he actually enjoyed winding up Danny Cohen, the BBC’s director of television at the time. He says Cohen ordered him into his office to ask if it was true he’d called his west highland terrier Didier Dogba (a play on Didier Drogba, the former Chelsea striker; Clarkson is a Blues fan). “I confirmed it was true. He said, ‘What colour is it?’ And I said, ‘It’s black.’ And he said, ‘You can’t call your black dog after a black football player.’ So I said, ‘Why not? Would you rather I called it John Terrier?’ ”

On another occasion, Clarkson tells me, he sat next to Cohen’s economist wife, Noreena Hertz, at dinner and asked her if she was a communist. “No,” she said, “a Marxist.” “What’s the difference?” he replied. “The next time I was in with Tony Hall [the BBC director-general] and Danny Cohen, I said, ‘Tony, you do know Danny is a communist, don’t you?’ Danny got really cross and said, ‘Just because two people are married doesn’t mean they have the same politics.’ ”

Today he says, “Danny and I were, and I suspect will remain for ever, very far apart on every single thing. Normally, you could find some common ground with somebody, but I think Danny and I could probably only get on perfectly well so long as we absolutely never had to think about each other for the rest of the time. Because I don’t mind anyone having an opinion that’s different to mine, just so long as they don’t mind my opinion, either. So long as it doesn’t impinge on what I want to do.”

But it did. Ultimately, Cohen won. Clarkson was sacked from Top Gear. “I wasn’t sacked. What was it? Oh yes, they ‘didn’t renew my contract’. I was sacked.” There was public outcry. A petition calling for his reinstatement was signed by more than one million people. He says David Cameron quipped, “Well, if you go, they’re just left with Hammond and May, and from my experience that’ll never work.”

In the end, much of the Top Gear team – Hammond, May and some key crew members – defected to Amazon Prime with him. (The BBC has rebuilt Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc at the helm, about which Clarkson is entirely nonchalant. “Nobody says, ‘What? Someone’s doing another cookery programme?’ Why shouldn’t there be more than one car programme?”)

But despite the jibes and the shrugs and the bluff and bravado, these were dark times for Clarkson. When I probe, he swerves, shrugging off tricky questions with, “Wait just a cotton-picking minute. I drive round corners too quickly while shouting. That is my job. Ask me what it’s like to have a Ferrari sliding sideways and you’ve got to do a piece to camera before the power slide is over.”

And then he says, “In one year I lost my mother, my house, my job. How do you think I f***ing felt?”

----------

At 10am the following morning we have breakfast. He’s been up since dawn with a trainer called Junior. “He has no mercy. I must look close to death and he says, ‘Do it more!’ ” He does daily weights at 8am and plays tennis at 5pm. “It’s a new thing. It hasn’t had an effect yet.” He slaps his stomach.

Clarkson is tall and misshapen with wire-wool hair and tobacco-stained teeth. With the possible exception of Wembley Fraggle, he looks like no one else. He likes to say he was made in God’s factory on a Friday evening, when all they had left was two good feet “and a pair of good buttocks. Look at these rubbish hands, this paunch, this hair.” Someone like Andrea Corr, he adds, was made on a Monday morning.

He claims to be utterly ham-fisted. “My first memory is peeling a hard-boiled egg. I was only about 18 months apparently, and it’s still the most practical thing I’ve ever done.

“As Hammond always says, I look like an orangutan when I’m presented with simple tasks, like opening a bottle of wine. He says, ‘You look perfectly happy, just baffled.’ I have no sense of how an engine works at all.”

He must be good at something? “I promise faithfully I can do nothing. I can’t hang a picture without knocking a wall down. When I play tennis I can hear people saying, ‘It is odd because that man is in tennis clothes and he’s on a court and he’s carrying a racquet, but what’s he doing?’

“Skiing is the same. I look like a bus driver having a crap. I can’t cook. I tried to make some soup the other day. My daughter was staggered that it could go that wrong. You know that footage of people in the London sewers with all the congealed fat? It looked like that.”

Top Gear was the only thing he’s done well, he claims. At one point in his 27-year association with the show, he left to pursue a “solo” career. “I thought, ‘I’m brilliant at this; I can do anything.’ So I did a range of not at all successful programmes: a chat show, a programme on the history of cars. They tanked. One was so bad that it never got shown at all. So I reinvented [Top Gear] with Andy [Wilman, the show’s producer] and went back.”

He’s known Wilman since he boarded at Repton School – “He was my fag.” Was Clarkson a fag, too? “Yes. We had to sweep the corridors – and then they’d come and empty their bins in them, so you’d have to start again. We’d clean the changing room, the bathrooms, make the beds.”

Was he bullied? “Yes. I got beaten every night with empty Globe-Trotter suitcases. There’s more give in a Globe-Trotter suitcase than there is in a skull. So you were fine. Head, back, shoulders, buttocks. Maybe you’d get the odd bruise from the corner. It was annoying and uncomfortable.

“In the morning, we were woken up and hurled into the plunge pool, which was freezing.” He pauses. “Does you a power of good. I was a cocky little s*** coming to a private school at 13. God, it knocks it out of you.”

He says the experience had “a profound effect because I can remember the day, the moment, that I thought: this isn’t working just being me. It doesn’t work. I’m going to have to make people laugh. Because once someone’s made you laugh, you can’t be cross with them. And it stopped from that day onwards. I was 14. It was a useful tool, making people laugh.” He tells me he’s also the world’s best liar – that he can fool anyone – but I think he underestimates his audiences.

At school, he continues, “I was simply unaware of any homosexuality. We were remarkably naive. I assume some of the teachers were gay but we didn’t notice.” What he did notice was the racism. “I’m sad to say it was the Seventies and Till Death Us Do Part was on the television and there was definitely racism. We had a few Asian kids, few blacks.” He’s “100 per certain I did not take part in racist bullying” and believes that the leap from his generation, “when racism was institutionalised”, to today is remarkable.

“Our generation needs the biggest pat on the back of any generation for the changes we’ve overseen. When I talk to my children I realise they are completely colour-blind.”

In other ways his childhood was perfect. He had a Blytonic middle-class upbringing in a 400-year-old farmhouse. “Prince Charles would get an erection if he thought about my childhood.”

His dad, Eddie, “cooked and cooked. And when he ran out of people to cook for, he made cake for the birds.” His mum, Shirley, sat at the kitchen table sewing Paddington Bears (they owned the toy company that made them). After school, Clarkson would help sew them before he was allowed to do his homework. “If you’ve got a Paddington Bear in your attic and it’s badly sewn up the back, then that’s one of mine.”

They holidayed in Padstow, Cornwall, and later in a campsite in Brittany. “And twice a year we went to the Berni Inn in Doncaster, where you could have choice of starters: either grapefruit, pineapple or orange juice. Then you could have steak or breaded plaice. I once saw Leonard Parkin, who was an ITV newsreader, in there. It was like the Ivy.”

His childhood hero was Alan Whicker and he even got to meet him. “But afterwards I heard him call me ‘an irritating little s***’.”

Most of the time he built dens with his sister – now a successful lawyer – and two girls “from up the way”. Were they honorary boys? “Nope. I was the honorary girl,” he says. “To this day 80 per cent of my closest friends are women.”

He says, “Of all the ‘ists’ I’ve been accused of, sexist is the most stupid. I’m not sexist. The idea that you can’t be pretty and have a brain makes me absolutely livid. Some of the girls were the fastest drivers – and why wouldn’t they be? Just because you have breasts doesn’t mean you can’t drive a car.

“There’s a standard thing in The Guardian that Top Gear was misogynistic. What people who’d never seen it assumed was that we used words like ‘lady garden’ to be misogynistic, but we didn’t. It was primary-school language. We also said ‘gentlemen’s sausages’.”

So who are his female heroes? He pauses. “Um. The Thatch? Although not massively so. She did do remarkable things in that time. Female heroes, um …”

In the nick of time he remembers Twenties Hearst reporter Grace Hay Drummond-Hay, the first woman to travel around the world in a Zeppelin. “The descriptions are brilliant: the one about crossing the Russian tundra under this remarkable moonlit sky, my God. Then someone else smuggled a record player on board, so they were able to play music and do the Charleston.”

Later he spoils all his enlightened feminist talk. In a bar surrounded by elderly men and women with sticks and hearing aids, he suddenly stops talking. “Sssh! Can you hear that rustling noise?” No, I say. What? “Listen. Can you hear it now? That is the sound of dried-out old girl va-gina.”

----------

Every five minutes or so we stand by the surf for a cigarette. A beach trader stops to ask if he can bum one. “You want any weed? Coke?” he asks after it’s lit. When we decline, he offers us paintings, plaited bracelets, sunglasses. Clarkson laughs. “You really are a mobile shop. Do you have any Weetabix or Alphabetti spaghetti?”

At 11.15am, Clarkson switches from espressos to beer. Boy, can he put it away. I ask him about reports that he was drinking too hard and rumours that Tony Hall had told him he could keep his job if he went to rehab. “I still can’t drink as much as James May,” he deflects. He relates a time at Heathrow when May “just looked at me and said, ‘Have you ever had red wine for breakfast?’ It was 7.30am. I said, ‘No, James. I haven’t.’ So off he toddled and he came back with two glasses. It was actually delicious. It’s an experiment I haven’t revisited, I’m relieved to tell you.”

Last summer he disappeared for a month (when I ask where he went, he says “somewhere that was like prison”), and subsequently gave up drinking for four or five months. Initially, he says this was to “stay sharp” while negotiating his Amazon Prime deal. “You can’t deal with Californian lawyers if you’ve had a couple of glasses of wine.” Later he clarifies that his stint away was not rehab, but helped him clear out his head and think straight. “I’m a lot calmer now. There’s the same s***, but I can deal with it.”

Over dinner we talk about exes. His first kiss was at the age of 13 (in a boiler room at Repton) with a sixth-former. One of his many flats in Fulham was nicknamed “the vomitorium”. “If you got a girl back there she stuck to the carpet and that was the end of it.”

He admits to a massive crush on Kristen Scott Thomas, the actress, and boils with inexplicable rage whenever anyone pronounces her name incorrectly. “Sadly, I am unable to string a sentence together in her presence.”

On marriage he is silent. His first wife, Alexandra Hall, left him after six months for one of his friends, and he’s currently in friendly divorce proceedings with his second wife, Frances Cain – also his manager – to whom he has been married for 26 years. (Although he does tell me their wedding was in the Fulham church used in The Omen in the scene where a priest gets skewered by a lightning rod.) His recent split with girlfriend Phillipa Sage is off-limits, too, because, he reasons, “It’s unfair on them – they didn’t ask to be dragged into this.”

It’s his view that women are far tougher than men in break-ups. “How are you all so cold?” he asks. “Are you really so deeply unmoved when you get that mixtape of romantic songs, and the really bad poetry?”

Did he have lots of girlfriends? “We’re not going there. Nobody’s interested.” So it’s not true that he was “a right shagger”? He looks absolutely mortified and says he’s been inaccurately linked with multiple women, among them Jemima Khan, a friend of many years. “Although I thought her denial of our affair was a little strong,” he says. “ ‘No, no! This is the most revolting, disgusting, worst thing that’s ever been said about me!’ A simple no, Jemima, would probably suffice.”

Our argument is over whether it’s possible to change as a person. He is a fatalist who believes people can’t. For this reason, Clarkson doesn’t see the point in therapy. “I don’t believe in a human’s capacity to change,” he says. “We are who we were born and, bar some very early nurturing, that is set for the rest of our lives. Everything else is a mask.” (In the morning he says, “I had to really think about it after I said it yesterday. I thought last night, ‘Do I really think that?’ And I do. I stand by it.”)

What he talks a lot about are his kids (Emily, 21, a writer; Finlo, 19, who’s at Manchester University; Katya, 17, who’s at school). He shows me photos of them on his phone and reflects how much they’d like to be in Barbados now. “They practically grew up here.” One thing he breaks his work schedule for is the kids. “I’ve yet to miss one of Katya’s school plays,” he says.

His farm in Chipping Norton, he loves that, too. He has dogs, sheep and kunekune pigs (they are pets: Zeppelin and Walter). But he doesn’t mention his other properties – in the Isle of Man and London – and actually he’s oddly unmaterialistic as a person, carrying his “clean clothes” (denim shirt and jeans) in a black plastic bag, which, from time to time, he asks the reception desk to look after.

There are so many predictable things about Clarkson, such as his dislike of poetry, musicals – “I just want to shout: stop singing!” – and Uber. He’s only been in an Uber once (I took him in one in London and he grumbled all the way: “Oh, I see, a quick trip from the top of Notting Hill to the bottom, via Dewsbury. Oh, and a Magic Tree. Anyone who has anything hanging from their rear-view mirror can’t drive”).

But there are surprising things, too, like his love of ornithology (he’s constantly looking for a sugarbird to show me), and AA Milne (“Every character you’ll meet in life is a character from Winnie-the-Pooh: May is Wol [how Owl spells his name], Hammond is Piglet, I am Tigger”).

Also, he tells me that he has no pubic hair. “None. Never have. I’m bald down there.” How did you know when you were going through puberty? “My voice broke.” (Later he tells me this is not true and that he does have pubes.)

I’m astonished to hear he has a driver, a man called Andy, but he quickly corrects this to say he’s “a Man Friday” who does a little bit of everything. Like drive.

He’s doggedly loyal, saying without question that he’d rather go to prison than sneak on a friend, something ingrained since school. “Under any circumstances, you never, ever rat on a friend. That is for ever. I can think of a million other things I’d rather be than a sneak.”

I ask about his mother’s death last year from breast cancer that spread over five years. He’d just arrived in Moscow to do a live show when he was told over the phone by her nurse, “which was very sad”.

“We didn’t know how long she had. We didn’t know if it was going to be a day or a week or a month – you just didn’t know. But you have to be pragmatic. She’s lying in bed barely conscious. My sister and I effectively said goodbye in her last bits of consciousness. And then I thought, well, I can either continue to sit in her bedroom for what could be a month ... What do you do? It’s very difficult to know. We had Moscow planned and I had to go. I thought, ‘Well, I’m only going for four days. I’ll be back in four days.’ But she didn’t make it.”

Clarkson received the news shortly before he was supposed to be on stage in front of 15,000 people. He hesitated over what to do. “I thought, ‘Let’s just say I fly home, what would I do? Nothing. I may as well be here.’ So I did the show.

“But the BBC … No, I won’t say it.”

He looks sour. “Let’s say they were very unhelpful.” It was the time of the BBC inquiry into “the slope thing”. He was fielding calls. He mutters something about someone being “a s***”.

“I said, ‘My mother’s just died. Please leave me alone.’ But they wouldn’t. And it was bad. We were doing the TV show and the live shows, and three newspaper columns a week and endless investigations into whether or not we’d said this or done that or whether or not my hair was straight or my teeth were cleaned. It went on and on and on. It was very tricky. So there was quite a lot of pressure that year even for a jovial soul like me to handle. I was very close to my mum.”

He misses her. “Even now I think, ‘I must tell my mother about that.’ And then you think … Even just now at the Coral Reef, I thought, ‘Oh, mother likes it here.’ It just floats in. But” – he takes a deep breath and I can see his eyes are damp behind his sunglasses – “I just tend to think of her as a benign presence around.”

He sniffs. “Do you mind if I pop to the loo?”

And then he returns, and like all moments of pathos with Jeremy Clarkson, this one is har-thingyed. “By the way,” he says, “all the time I was talking about my mother, I could see your knickers.”


www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4713652.ece

Gallery

Clarkson in 1989


Shooting a Top Gear episode with Richard Hammond and James May, 2010


With Oisin Tymon during filming in Beijing, December 2011


With his second wife, Frances Cain
 

[RedMoon11]