Jeremy - The Times

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The Clarkson Review: Aston Martin DB11
Pay attention, 007, this one does work

Jeremy Clarkson
18 December 2016
The Sunday Times 
 


People like Aston Martins. And what’s more, people like people who drive them. They’re seen as cool and intelligent and refined. They know not to drink red wine with fish and are familiar with the Latin name for every single fish in the sea.

Astons are driven by people who find Ferraris and Porsches a bit tall-poppy vulgar, a bit Manchester United. A bit disgusting. I get that, but there’s always been a problem. Aston Martins have never been much good.

The DB5, trumpeted by many as the best, most iconic Aston Martin of them all, feels pretty much like a Seddon Atkinson dustbin lorry to drive. There’s a scene in the Bond film GoldenEye where Pierce Brosnan races his silver bin lorry through the Alpes-Maritimes against a Ferrari 355. It was supposed to be very exciting but for me it was just annoying because I was being asked to believe that if someone entered a cow into the Grand National it would be in with a shout of winning.

Later Aston Martin made a car called the Vantage. It had a supercharged V8 and excellent headrests. But to drive, it felt almost identical to Ford’s Raptor pick-up. I loved the Vantage, make no mistake, but it handled and braked and gripped like it was quite drunk.

To make matters worse, Astons back then were made by hand, which is another way of saying that nothing fitted or worked properly. And they were never really tested before they went on sale. There was a sense at the Newport Pagnell factory that early customers could find out what was wrong. That would save a lot of time, bother and expense.

This sort of thing was still going on when the company came up with the DB7. I forget now exactly what was still wrong with it when it went on sale but I’m pretty sure a tendency to fall to pieces was at the top of a long list.

The DB9 was far more sorted when it came along. You sensed it had been properly developed and well thought out. But you also sensed that behind the achingly pretty face beat a fairly ordinary heart. It was as groundbreaking as a loaf of bread. And that’s been the story ever since, really. Beautiful and fairly well-made cars that under the skin were just that: cars.

Ferrari and Porsche, with big money backing from wealthy parents, could afford to develop new technology and new ways of doing things. Aston Martin was stuck. It would change the styling and the names of the cars but underneath they were all broadly the same and they were using tech that was starting to look old-fashioned.



So I wasn’t really expecting all that much from the new DB11. I figured that it would be beautiful, which it is — achingly so — but that it would be no match dynamically for what the rest of the world could offer. I was wrong.

The old V12, which sounded magnificent — but which we always knew at the back of our minds had been made by nailing two Ford Mondeo engines together — is now gone. And in its stead the DB11 is powered by an all-new 5.2-litre V12 that is fitted with two turbochargers.

When I heard that Aston Martin had developed this engine itself, I thought: “With what? Some loose change they found down the back of the sofa?” I figured it would be a bit old-school with lag and a lot of “That’ll do, near enough” Brummie tech. It isn’t. It comes with cylinder deactivation and one turbo and intercooler per bank and all the latest tech. Also, the engine’s made in Germany.

Better still, there’s been a tie-up with Mercedes-Benz so the DB11 has a Mercedes sat nav (current Aston Martin owners will rejoice at that news). And Mercedes electronics. And the Mercedes Comand infotainment system.

As I said when I reviewed the car on the television recently, this is a very successful Anglo-German marriage. And soon it will produce a son; an Aston with Mercedes-AMG’s turbocharged V8. I’m dribbling at the thought of that.

But not as much as I’m dribbling at the memory of driving the DB11 round the Mugello racetrack in Tuscany. I’ve driven Astons on a track before and it’s always felt as if I’m trying to ballet dance in a pair of extremely good-looking Church’s brogues. You always got the sense that the car was saying: “Really?”



The DB11 is a completely different animal. The chassis was designed by a former Lotus chap who has tuned it for comfort, yes, but not — as I quickly discovered — at the expense of everything else. Ooh, that car gripped.

As you’re going along, air is funnelled into ducts behind the rear-side windows and it’s then shot out of a narrow vent on the boot lid. When I was told about this invisible air rear wing I thought, “Yeah, right” , and I still do to a certain extent. But something is keeping the rear end planted so maybe it does work. Maybe Aston really has thought of something new. That’d be a first.

The traction control system isn’t new. But it’s tuned beautifully so it’s gentle in its restraint and progressive when it feels you’re through the bend and the rear tyres are fully able to exploit the 600bhp and that mountain of torque. It’s even better than the system in the McLaren 675LT, and that’s saying something.

You imagine when you leave the track that something this grippy will not work on the road. But it really, really does. Put it in GT mode and it becomes quiet and smooth and very comfortable.

If you’re ever in Paris, at a party at 3am, and suddenly remember you are playing in a tennis tournament in Monte Carlo the next afternoon, this is the car for the job. You’d arrive feeling like you’d just got out of the bath.

The upshot of all this is that you feel, for the first time in an Aston Martin, that there’s some real engineering between you and the road. That it’s not just a pretty face. This is an extremely good car. Phenomenally good.

But there is a price to pay, I’m afraid. It has a horrible interior. The door linings in my test car looked like those polished marble kitchen tops that have got too many chintzy bits in them and the steering wheel was square. Who thought that was a good idea? Or did the supplier misread the name of the customer and think it was for “Austin Martin”?

Whatever, the cockpit is not a place that you will enjoy or savour. And that’s a shame because everything else about this car is absolutely delightful. It’s the best Aston yet. And by a very long way.



www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-aston-martin-db11-8hpkrqnk6
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2016-aston-martin-db11/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: I figure it’s a must for algebra fans
Mercedes E 220d

Jeremy Clarkson
8 January 2017



If you are an old person you will remember that in the 1970s mid-sized Mercedes-Benz saloons and estates were wilfully sensible. They were designed to never excite you, for a very long time. And that’s it.

You bought one because you’d done the maths. You’d calculated the rate of depreciation, and how much one breakdown a year would cost, and you’d realised that the premium price of the Benz made sense. Driving, to people such as you, was something that must be done, like ironing. The idea that it could be fun was ridiculous.

The mid-range Mercedes underwent a glacially slow development process right through the Eighties and Nineties. Each new model was a shuffle. Each incorporated fresh features, but only those that made sense and worked. Gimmickry? That was for other people. And oversteer was dangerous.

But then in 2009 something weird happened. The new mid-range Mercedes, sold as the E-class but known internally as the W212 model, arrived on the market with a curved crease in the rear wings. It served no purpose. It was a bit of pointless styling flimflam. This was like Prince Philip turning up to open a garden centre, aged 60, with a Wayne Rooney weave.

Elsewhere in the Mercedes range, pointless styling ran amok. The chintz-ometer was in the red zone. There were flashes of chrome and radiator grilles that looked like bachelor-pad cookers. There were models that no one needed, and it was as if someone at Mercedes had won the pools. You wanted Peter Jones when you bought a Mercedes (the shop, not the gangly Dragon) but what you were getting was the duty-free shopping arcade at Dubai airport.

This is probably because the people who bought cars after doing the maths had come to realise that if they wanted low running costs, and that’s it, they could buy a Hyundai.

Or it’s possibly because Chinese businessmen don’t want subtle and think restraint is something that belongs in either a police cell or a brothel. Whatever the cause, I was so horrified, I stopped buying Mercs and switched to Volkswagens.



But then, earlier this year, along came the new E-class mid-sized saloon (codenamed internally, and logically, W213) and, wait a minute: what’s this? The rear-wing crease is gone. The artistry of the fridge door is back. It’s just a car-shaped car.

Yes, the one I borrowed was fitted with AMG Line skirts and low-profile tyres, but peel away the jewellery and there’s no getting round the fact. Prince Philip is bald again. Peter Jones is back.

And it gets better, because the estate version I tried has a truly enormous boot. What am I saying? The sort of people who will buy this car do not understand what’s meant by “truly enormous”. They like numbers. So let me give you some. With the rear seats folded flat, you get 1,820 litres of space in which to put your things.

The Audi A6 gives you 1,680. The BMW 5-series 1,670 and the Volvo V90 a mere 1,526. So if you are an antiques dealer, or you often take luggage-laden families to the airport, the new E-class is a clear winner.

And there’s more. Next year Mercedes will offer the option of two foldaway child seats fitted into the boot. So it’ll work for those who practise Catholic birth control methods as well.

My car, weirdly, was fitted with a new 2-litre turbodiesel engine, which sounds as though it might be a bit too small and weedy for a vehicle this big and this heavy. But the performance figures are respectable. And the fuel economy outstanding. Thanks in part to a new nine-speed automatic gearbox, it’s entirely possible you’ll average 50mpg.

The downside of course is that the environmental lobby has recently decided that diesel — which it used to like — is now terrible and should be banned from city centres. I shouldn’t worry, though, because by the time it’s worked out how such a move would affect its beloved buses, it’ll have decided diesel’s a good thing again.

Is the new E-class fun to drive? No. Not really. And that’s OK, because it’s a tool, remember. Your iron isn’t fun to drive either. Or your lawnmower. If you want fun to drive, buy a beach buggy or a Beemer.

What it is, is quiet. Incredibly quiet. This is an engine that uses compression to force the fuel to explode (oh, OK, burn), and that normally results in a canal boat clatter. But the engine in my car just hummed. Softly, likeWinnie-the-Pooh when he was thinking about something.

It’s also very comfortable. Yes, the AMG wheels with thepainted-on tyres did their best to ruin everything, but you could tell that without them it’d be hovercraft smooth and beanbag pliant. Which brings me on to the speed hump ...

The road safety lobby, which is run by an offshoot of the polar bear preservation unit, used to say that these were vital tools in the fight against capitalism and McDonald’s. But, as is the way with the loony left, it has changed its mind on that too and now says they must all be removed.

I’m not sure I understand its thinking, but it has something to do with the way we all slow down and speed up again when we encounter them, which is bad for the ice caps. Or is it ambulances? I’m not sure.

Anyway, councils can’t afford to remove them, because they will be told that’d cost £20m per hump, and they’re all idiots so they’ll swallow it. Which means speed humps are here to stay.


Mostly they are located on so-called rat-run roads, which tend to be used by professional drivers in executive taxis who know their way round the jams. So here’s a tip. If you’re thinking of using such a service in future, make sure they send an E-class, because you’ll have a much more comfortable journey.

So far, then, the new E-class has not put a foot wrong. But now we get to the interior, which is light and spacious but fronted up with a dashboard that appears, when you first clap eyes on it, to have been lifted from one of those fluorescent-lit hi-fi shops on the outskirts of any town in the Middle East.

You get two television screens, one of which tells you what you need to know about the car, and how much fuel is in the tank and how fast you are going, and the other where you’re going and which of the 64 interior lighting settings you’re on. You think when you first climb aboard that it’s all too complicated for words and that you should get right back out again. But it isn’t. It works beautifully.

I was similarly worried about the dash itself. It appears to be made from some kind of weird grained wood that’s as black as ebony but matt rather than shiny. So you lean forwards for a feel and, whoa, it’s plastic disguised to look like wood — and that’s horrible.

Or is it? The upholstery in Mercs of old was made from plastic disguised to look like leather, and no one minded that.

So there we are. Mercedes is back, doing what it does best. Making tools for algebra enthusiasts. If that’s you, this is a very good car.




www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-mercedes-e-220d-gnzqhbmmk
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2016-mercedes-benz-e-class-estate/

[RedMoon11]

                                     Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: From A to bliss in the Rolls flotation tank

Rolls-Royce Wraith

January 22, 2017



I was pounced on by a gay man in a restaurant lavatory last night. He said his friend didn’t know which to buy, a Porsche 911 or a Jaguar F-type. Ordinarily, I would have fixed him with a steely-eyed stare and explained that I didn’t come to him for free advice on what sort of sunglasses are in this season, so why should he come to me for free advice on cars?

Instead, however, I decided to bore him to death, so I went into a lengthy spiel about how the GTS is probably the best of the standard Porsche 911s but the GT3 variants, and in particular the GT3 RS, are outstanding. I then took a perch on the sink as I explained in great detail that the F-type convertible is better-looking than the coupé and that the V6 S is by far the best bet when it comes to a combination of power, noise and handling...

His eyes began to glaze over at this point, so I put a comforting arm round his shoulders and said: “Look. Your friend. The best thing he can do is buy whichever of the two cars he likes more.”

I mean this. Telling a stranger what car to buy is like telling someone what film to go and see. You can explain that One Woman’s 30-Year Search for Her Hat is a brilliant biopic with a powerful and subtly hidden message, but if the person you are talking to turns out to be a northern bare-knuckle cage fighter, it’s likely he will prefer The Terminator 6.

“Experts” haven’t been useful in the car-buying process since Humber went west, although, with the new pure-electric cars and hybrids coming on stream, that may change in the near future. We are entering a new era, and the ghost of Raymond Baxter may be called upon.

That’s then, however, and this is now, and we are talking this morning about the Rolls-Royce Wraith. No one is going to accost me in a lavatory and ask if they should buy one of those, or a Bentley instead, because that’d be like asking if you should buy an ice cream or a shotgun. The two things are very different.

Rolls-Royce may say that the Wraith is tuned with the driver in mind, but I think we are talking here about degrees. It’s like saying that God tuned Mars to be more hospitable than Venus. You’re not going to have much fun on either, if we’re honest.

A friend of mine visited Los Angeles last month, and, because he is important, his hosts sent a chauffeured Wraith to pick him up from the airport. He was invited, as you’d expect, to sit in the back for the drive into town, but as the Wraith is a two-door coupé with limited rear space, he felt extremely silly.

And that raises a question. If the Wraith isn’t really tuned for driving pleasure and it doesn’t work as a limo, then what’s the point?


Rolls-Royce Wraith

It’s a question I found myself asking as I arrived at a very beautiful pheasant shoot in the north of England the other day. I had packed , as instructed, a smoking jacket for dinner and various bits of tweed for the next day. I also had my guns, my bullets, my wellies and all the other flotsam and jetsam necessary for wasting a few birds. And the boot lid wouldn’t open.

No amount of pressing or holding the remote button caused it to budge. Neither did any amount of rummaging around in the grime to try to locate an actual catch; nor did the remote switch in the cabin. It was locked shut. Dinner was due to start in 15 minutes. I was one of only two untitled people present. And I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

Eventually, after I’d been through the handbook, which is available on the sat nav screen, I discovered that if you disassemble the remote control locking device there’s a key inside that can be used to open the boot in the old-fashioned way. So I did that and made it to dinner properly dressed — in time to hear someone say: “Whose is that vulgar car outside?”

So there we are. An unreliable and vulgar car that doesn’t work as a proper Rolls-Royce because it’s been tuned to be as sporty as a 1974 Volvo. Plus it isn’t very good-looking and it’s extremely expensive. They say it costs about £235,000. But by the time you’ve added a bit of garnish, it’ll be a lot more than that. Despite these not insignificant issues, though, I thought it was tremendous.

Underneath, it is fundamentally the same as the four-door Rolls-Royce Ghost, which means that, contrary to what James May told you on The Grand Tour recently, it is fundamentally the same as a BMW 7-series. The two cars have in essence the same platform and the same engine.

However, in the Rolls-Royce there are two bulkheads. This is important. They have not been fitted to improve structural rigidity so as to make the car corner more sweetly, and they certainly haven’t been fitted for lightness. They are there simply to distance the occupants from the noise and the fuss of the engine.



This is the key to the Wraith experience: the sense that you are just sitting there while it moves you about. There’s a faint hum to suggest that explosions are happening under the bonnet, and there’s a rustle of tyre noise. But even when you are travelling at 150mph, that’s about it.

Yes, there are 624 brake horsepowers on tap and, yes, there is roll-cancelling air suspension and a satellite-aided system that reads the road ahead and sets the gearbox up for the coming corner. But you aren’t aware of any of this as you waft along. What you are aware of is the weight. Especially when you are slowing down. You almost can’t believe that a light touch on the brake pedal is all that’s needed to impede the progress of the monster. It feels faintly amusing.

Autocar magazine tells us that if you go into the on-board menu and turn off the traction control, the car will drift nicely. And I’m sure it will, in the same way as you could, if you wanted to, ice-skate in a pair of army boots.

I can’t stress enough, though, that this is not a sports car or a driver’s car in the accepted sense. But it is tremendous to drive because it feels like nothing else. If you didn’t want a chauffeur, for some reason, and you therefore didn’t need a barn-like space in the back — just some lovely wood and soft leather, a few elegant controls and a little peace and quiet on your drive home at night — it’d be fabulous. Completely in a class of its own.

Aston Martins and Bentleys feel like cars. This feels as if you’re in the bath. It’s not for me, obviously; I still like to do the hairy-chested man thing when I’m driving, and I’d much rather have a two-thirds-of-the-price DB11 or Continental GT V8 S.

But that doesn’t mean you would.


www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-sunday-times-magazine/from-a-to-bliss-in-the-rolls-flotation-tank-6ctp5zrwh

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: Fire up DCI Hunt – the Quattro’s back

29 January 2017

Audi RS 7




Even if you are in a very good mood, and you are wearing a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, you have to accept that the original Audi quattro really wasn’t much good.

Yes, it thrashed all its rivals for many years on the world rally stages, and that gave it just about enough kudos to justify its fairly enormous price tag. But under the skin it was all a bit Radio Rentals.

Turbocharging wasn’t new when the quattro came along — Chevrolet, BMW and Saab had been at it for years — but neither was it the perfected art that it is today. When you stamped on the accelerator in an original quattro, it was like signalling to the engine room on an ocean liner. Oily men had to get out of their chairs, boilers had to be ramped up, big doors had to be closed, Victorian levers had to be pulled, coal had to be shovelled and only after that would there be a difference in the speed you were going.

And then there was the four-wheel-drive system. That wasn’t new either — Jensen had been there 14 years earlier — and neither was it perfect. But as the rallying proved, it definitely provided extra grip in snowy or gravelly conditions.

However, in reality the traction was only just about compensating for the fact that in a quattro the heavy five-cylinder engine was mounted ahead of the front axle. This meant that, no matter what Joe Normal did with the steering wheel and the throttle, he was going to plough at fairly high speed into a tree.

Later came the 20-valve version. This meant more power, so that when you hit the tree, you were going even faster.

Nevertheless, I absolutelyloved that car. It was the noise it made — an offbeat five-cylinder strum — and it was the flared wheelarches and it was the stance.

But most of all it was the idea of the thing that appealed. It may have been born in the muddy underbelly of west Wales and it may have proved its mettle in the dust of Africa and the ice of Finland but it didn’t feel like a crash-bang-wallop rally car. It felt sophisticated and grown up.

The girl the late Peter Sarstedt sang about, the one who sipped her Napoleon brandy and had a racehorse she kept just for fun, for a laugh a-ha-ha-ha; she would have had an Alfa Romeo Spider. But if she’d been born 10 years later, it’d have been a quattro.



This was the car that put Audi on our radar screens. Until it came along, the company had been making vehicles for German cement salesmen. But afterwards it was the giant-killing underdog, with a weapon that — in theory — could hang on to the coat-tails of a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.

And which — in theory again — could overtake even if it was raining at the time. In practice, of course, you’d hit a tree if you even tried, but we will gloss over that. Because everyone else did — me included.

What’s interesting is that after creating a forerunner to the Nissan GT-R, Audi decided not to replace it with something that was similar but better. It came up with the S2, but this was just a bulbous Audi 80 coupé. It had no flared wheelarches. Its strum was subdued. It never really went rallying. And then? And then nothing.

Audi continued to use the quattro name — to indicate that the car in question had four-wheel drive — but there’s never been a proper successor to that glorious, and gloriously flawed, original. Until now.

It’s called the RS 7, but picked out on a grille under the front bumper in very big letters is the quattro name. Because, really, that’s what this thing is.

It arrived at my office just before Christmas and sat in the car park for a couple of days until I realised that it would be mine for the whole Yuletide break and then a few more days afterwards. It’d be my companion for thousands of wet, soggy, damp and cold miles. We’d be going shooting together and to parties, and within half a mile I knew it would make me very miserable.



The suspension was absolutely intolerable. I thought the Nissan GT-R Track Edition was unforgiving, but this thing had all the give of granite. Every tiny bump was amplified and directed with pin-sharp accuracy directly into my coccyx. Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill — which is the bumpiest, most badly maintained road in the world — was completely unbearable.

But then I discovered, while weeping in pain, that the delivery driver who’d dropped the car off had — I presume for a joke — put the suspension in Dynamic mode. I switched it to Comfort, and in an instant my life was transformed.

This is not the best-looking car in the world — not by a long way — and it developed a terrible vibration as the weeks rolled by. Plus, whenever you employ full beam, there’s a theatrical sweep of light that is dramatic and clever but not instantaneous. Which is what you want.

And that’s it. That’s my list of things I didn’t like. Everything else is just brilliant. The acceleration is hilarious, the noise is a deep bellow, the fuel consumption is excellent, the seats are magnificently comfortable and you will not find a better-designed set of controls in any other car. It’ll also do almost 190mph.

I loved the way it just loped down motorways, often four up with a boot full of bullets and presents and all the other flotsam and jetsam that we need to survive life over Christmas. And then, later, how it would flick and dart its way along country roads like a sports car.

Does it understeer like its great-grandfather? No idea. All I can tell you is that if you are going fast enough to find out, then either you are the Finnish rally champion Kinki Wankonnen, or you have just signed up to Exit International. Or something catastrophic has gone wrong with the throttle linkage.

What I do know is that if you pull away smartly from a T-junction there is no wheelspin or torque steer. The car just sets off as if it’s been kicked by Jonny Wilkinson.

I’m never normally sad to see a test car taken away, because there’s always another one coming round the corner. But I was upset to see the RS 7 go, because it had wormed its way into my heart. In much the way the Audi TT did, not long ago.

Sadly, I could never actually buy a TT — fantastic though it is — because I’m not an air hostess. But I did find myself wondering if perhaps I could have an RS 7. And I kept on wondering right up to the point when I looked up the price. I had in my mind that it’d be about £70,000, but with a few extras it’s more than £100,000.

This car is very, very good. But it’s not that good.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-fire-up-dci-hunt-the-quattros-back-jqlqglh8m
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson-review-2016-audi-rs-7/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: Pretty, well dressed and too clever by half
Honda NSX

12 February 2017



Back in the days when you could walk from Calais to Dover and wattle was a popular building material, Honda decided it would like to build a supercar with a V10 engine. It would, the company said, be a replacement for the old NSX, and I was very excited.

Every so often I’d call Honda to see how it was coming along, and it’d say, “Very well”, but that there’d been a bit of a delay because of the ice age, or the eruption of Krakatoa or some other geological disturbance. I seem to recall at one point it said it’d had to change the interior because modern man was a different shape from his Neanderthal predecessor.

And then there was a wobble in the Japanese economy, and the V10 engine lost its Formula One halo, so Honda announced that the new car would be some kind of hybrid with electric motors and a turbocharged V6. That sounded pretty exciting too, especially when Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche were busy demonstrating just how biblical a combination such as this could be.

I kept calling Honda to ask when I could drive its new offering and was always told the same thing. “Soon.” It said the design and engineering team in California was “benchmarking” the Chevrolet Corvette, and when this was done it would be ready.

A year later it said the team had decamped to Germany to benchmark various Porsches. And then a year after that it was in Mauritius benchmarking cocktails. I began to think the new NSX was a machine that existed only in Honda’s dreams and that it would never see the light of day.

But then last year, after a quick trip to Sydney to benchmark some surfboards and a stopover in Bali to benchmark a couple of beaches, the tanned and relaxed designers and engineers announced the car was finished.

And I must say it looked good. It’s very low and very wide — wider than almost anything else on the road, in fact. It also appeared to be very clever, since its mid-mounted twin-turbo V6 was fitted with a 47bhp electric motor that would provide power while the turbos were drawing from the well of witchcraft but were not quite ready to deliver it.




Furthermore, each front wheel was fitted with its own 36bhp electric motor, which meant this fairly conventional-looking supercar was anything but, under the skin. Can you even begin to imagine, for instance, the computing power needed simply to keep all four wheels rotating at the same speed?

When you start to consider that, you can see why it’s taken so long to get the new NSX from the doodle, “Wouldn’t it be nice?” phase and into the showrooms. Especially when you step inside and realise that despite the behind-the-scenes complexity, it comes with a normal steering wheel, normal pedals, normal paddles for the nine-speed gearbox and a normal price. I’m not being flippant. At £143,950 it’s almost five times less expensive than Porsche’s hybrid alternative.

On paper, then, this car looks like a genuinely realistic alternative to Ferrari’s 488 GTB, Lamborghini’s Huracan and whatever car McLaren has just launched. However, it isn’t.

The first problem is that it’s not that quick off the mark. If you are driving in Quiet mode — which you will be most of the time, because the other settings make the car noisy, uneconomical and bumpy — and you put your foot down, there is a very noticeable moment when you just know the computing system is having a think. “Right. Hang on. What gear should I select? Fourth? Fifth? We’ll have a meeting about that, and in the meantime let’s see if we can work out which wheel needs what amount of power. Front left to start with ...” Meanwhile, the driver of the Vauxhall Vectra you were trying to overtake is at home watching Game of Thrones.

So all the clever-clever hybrid tech doesn’t give you the power you were expecting, which would be fine if it gave extra economy, but it doesn’t really do that either. Don’t reckon on getting much more than 20mpg.



Then there’s the handling. You’d imagine that with its weird four-wheel-drive system it’d have a ton of grip, and that’s probably so. But you are never inclined to find out for sure, because you are aware this is a heavy car and nearly a ton of the weight is located in the rear end. So if you went over the limit of grip, it’d be like wrestling a grandfather clock back into line.

What’s more, the steering is numb, and there’s a curious wobble when the car settles into a bend, as though the suspension is having a bit of a row with itself about what it should be doing.

As a car for petrolheads, then, this is no match for its rivals from McLaren, Lamborghini and Ferrari. And then things get worse.



The sun visors are the size of stamps and feel as though they’ve been lifted from a Soviet bread van, the horn sounds as if it’s from a Toys R Us pedal car and the sat nav is woeful.

I suspect it’s the same unit you get in a Honda Jazz or Civic, so on the upside it could probably find the nearest beetle drive or bingo hall, but on the downside it’s a touchscreen, which doesn’t work in any car, and the software appears to have been written by Alistair MacLean or some other author of fiction. Twice it told me the road ahead was closed. And it just bloody wasn’t.

Then there’s the stereo, which sounds like Radio Caroline did in the early 1970s, and I wouldn’t mind but the engine doesn’t compensate for this. In the old NSX there was an intoxicating induction roar when you accelerated; in the new one there’s just some gravelly noise. Which you aren’t really hearing, because you’re busy seeing if the carpet is stuck under the throttle pedal.

Worst of all is the fuel gauge. I don’t have OCD, as anyone who has seen my desk will testify, but the needle isn’t centred, so it always looks cock-eyed. And that drove me mad.

You are left, once you’ve lived with an NSX for a few days, with a sense that the engineers have beavered away at the difficulties of making a high-performance hybrid and then just garnished it with parts from the factory floor. Everything you touch and look at feels either low rent or annoying.

On a recent television programme my colleague James May said he liked the NSX because he found it interesting. Later he told me that the car’s lack of apparent acceleration has something to do with Newton metres per inch per inch and that the linear nature of electric motor delivery ... I’m afraid I nodded off at this point.

He is right, though. This car is interesting. And it is pretty. But that, I’m afraid, is the full extent of its repertoire.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-pretty-well-dressed-and-too-clever-by-half-722vj26fm
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-honda-nsx/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: Whatever you ask, this isn’t the answer
Seat Ateca

19 February 2017




WHENEVER someone leans across a dinner table and asks me what car they should buy, I always say “a Ferrari F40”.

Then they look a bit exasperated and explain they need something sensible, so I say “a 1986 Lada Riva shooting brake”. This normally does the trick and they go back to talking about something that is more interesting, such as accountancy or ornithology.

However, at dinner the other day, the man opposite really was quite insistent. He didn’t want a Ferrari F40 or a 1986 Lada Riva shooting brake and demanded that I came up with another alternative. “A Bugatti EB 110,” I said, hoping that would shut him up. But it didn’t.

“Come on,” he said, “I’m being serious.” So I told him to buy a Cadillac Escalade.
I hate being asked about cars as much as doctors hate being asked about ailments. They can’t possibly determine, when they’ve had two bottles of agreeable red, what’s wrong with someone who’s fully clothed and on the opposite side of the table, any more than I can tell someone what car to buy when I don’t know what they need it for and how much they have to spend and if they have any prejudice towards the French or the Japanese.



“Are you a racist?” I asked the man on the opposite side of the table. And, before he could answer, “Is your wife extremely fat?” These are the things that matter when it comes to choosing a car. There’s more too. If your children are prone to explosive car sickness, you don’t want cloth seats. And if you have only one arm, you don’t want a flappy paddle gearbox.

I went through a full range of weird questions with Mr Persistent, including, “Will you be having sex on the back seat with your secretary?” and then told him the best car he could possibly buy was a Vauxhall Astra van.

It turned out, however, that he actually wanted an Audi Q5. “Well, get one of those, then.”

“Are they any good?” he asked. “No,” I replied.

I don’t like the Audi Q5 or any car of that type because they seem too pointless. You get the same amount of interior space as you would in a normal hatchback but because of the extra weight and tallness, you get less performance and terrible fuel economy. It’s not swings and roundabouts here. It’s swings and falling off the roundabout into a pile of dog-dirt-encrusted broken glass.

I explained all this to my dinner companion but he was most insistent. He said he liked a car that gave him a commanding view of the road and didn’t have any truck with my argument that a hatchback and a cushion would do the trick. So I told him to buy the Q5 and started talking to the woman on my right.

“What car should I buy?” she asked . . . I then went to the lavatory and drank all the Domestos.




The trouble is that, these days, absolutely everyone wants a hatchback on stilts. They all want a commanding view of the road. And they don’t realise that soon it won’t be commanding at all, because everyone will be at the same height. Which means cars will have to keep on getting taller and taller until you need a ladder to get inside. And instead of airbags, you’ll have a parachute.

The other problem is that crossover mini SUVs, or whatever it is they’re called, are all extremely dreary to drive. And look at. And be near. I really genuinely hate them and, as a result, I was not looking forward to spending an entire week with something called a Seat Ateca.

I mean, quite apart from anything else, you just know Ateca is one of those names that’s been plucked by the marketing department from a bag of Scrabble tiles, because trademark infringement problems mean that every other actual word has been registered. This means you end up with a name that sounds like it could be an insurance company or an antifungal cream.

Everybody wanted a Cortina. It may have been named after a small cafe on the King’s Road, but it sounded exotic. Nobody wants an Ateca in their life. Unless they’ve got thrush.

Seat claims Ateca is a town in Spain and that it’s named it after that. But this doesn’t wash. Because if you’re going to name it after a town in Spain, why not pick one we’ve heard of? It’d be like Rolls-Royce launching a car called the Pontefract.

Anyway, it arrived, and in essence it’s a Volkswagen Tiguan, which means that when all is said and done, it’s a jacked-up Golf. Same basic platform. Similar range of engines. Only slower and less economical and more expensive and less fun to drive and no more practical.

Actually, because this is a Golf designed by Spaniards and built in the Czech Republic, it’s cheaper than its sister car, the Tiguan, which is a Golf that was designed by Germans and that is built in Germany, Russia or Mexico, depending on which model you choose. I don’t get that thinking either.

Whatever, it has doors so that you can get inside, and a boot lid that is operated by electricity so that you have to stand in the rain to make sure it closes properly.

Inside, there are some chairs so that you can sit down, but it should be noted that all of them seem to be fitted much lower than you’d expect. As you peer over the dashboard at the road ahead, it feels as if you’re moving around in a wheelie bin. And I don’t get the thinking here either. Because if you want a car with a commanding driving position, why would you buy one with seats that are so low?

Other things. Well, it’s quite quiet, which is nice. But then it was also a bit bumpy, which wasn’t. And the boot was big enough for a footstool I’d bought.

My test car had a 1.4-litre Golf engine, which provided no discernible performance at all. Put your foot down in sixth gear, at 70mph on the motorway, and absolutely nothing happens. My kitchen table is faster. Economy, however, is what you would expect — around 50mpg — and it produces 123 carbon dioxides. But these are Volkswagen figures, so they probably mean very little.

On the face of it, then, you’d struggle to think of a single reason why you’d buy this car rather than one of the many alternatives. But my car was fitted with orange wheels and matching door mirrors. And that’d clinch it for me.

On normal wheels, it’s just another way of wasting £24,440, but those snazzy rims, teamed with some plastic roo bars, give the Ateca a visual leg-up. And as a result it’d be my choice if I were being forced at gunpoint to buy a car like this. But I’m not, which is why I would buy a Ferrari F40.Which is much better.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-whatever-you-ask-this-isnt-the-answer-2l3g9kkkg
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-seat-ateca/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: Take a seat in Sarah Lund’s mood room
Volvo V90

26 February 2017




According to my television colleague James May, buying a Volvo is like going to the dentist’s. It’s something you have to do one day, so you might as well get it over with.

This was certainly the case in the olden days, where James lives, because back then Volvos were bought by people in hats, whose unpredictability was their only predictability. If they were indicating left, the only thing you knew for sure was that they were not about to turn left. Since then, though, much has happened. Volvo went motor racing with a brace of absurd but amusing estate cars in the British touring car championship. Then it came up with the XC90, which is still by far and away the most sensible family car of them all. And then there was a spot of financial bother that resulted in the company becoming the northern division of a giant Chinese corporation.

This higgledy-piggledy spell of unjoined-up thinking played havoc with the brand. Gone were the days when you were a bad driver so you bought a Volvo because at least you’d escape fairly unscathed from the accident you were going to have. Also gone was the motor racing. Even the estate favoured by antiques dealers went west. Which meant you bought a Volvo because . . . actually, there wasn’t a single reason.

But then, one day, Volvo decided to start sponsoring drama on what it calls “Sky Atlontic”. They made some gloomy, cool, blue-hued films, and sometimes they were better than the show that followed. The message was clear. Volvo was for people who wanted peace and quiet; people who preferred their television detectives to wear a jumper rather than a Swat outfit. And once this had been established, they had to set about making some cars to fit the image they’d created.

It’s an odd way of doing things, but no matter, because the first of the Sky Atlontic cars is now with us. It’s called the V90 and, ooh, it’s good-looking. Really, really good-looking.

Then you step inside and, frankly, you’re going to get straight back out again and sign on the dotted line. Because this side of a Rolls-Royce Phantom you will find no finer car interior. The combination of wood, aluminium and leather is sublime, and the way it all works is even better.

Just about everything is controlled by what is, to all intents and purposes, an upended iPad. This means there are very few buttons or knobs on the dash, which makes it a) cheaper to produce and b) more calm and relaxing. It’s like being inside Sarah Lund’s mood room.



My sister once asked why it always feels, in any car, as if you’re sitting inside a man’s wash bag, and she has a point. They’re normally black and dark and enlivened only by some red stripes. Well, the Volvo’s not like that at all. It’s light and airy, and as a result it’s a lovely and delightful place to sit.

However, at some point you’re going to stop sitting there, feeling at one with the world, and start the engine, and straight away things are going to unravel. There will be a petrol hybrid in the fullness of time, but for now you have a choice of a 2-litre diesel or another 2-litre diesel.

The 2-litre diesel in my test car was the more powerful of the two and it was fitted with two turbochargers along with a compressed air cylinder that shoots air into the engine when you demand more power. This sounds very clever and it certainly reduces turbo lag. But there’s no getting round the fact that this is a very big car and it’s being moved about by a 2-litre diesel.

An engine of this size works fine in a Golf or a small leaf blower. But it really doesn’t work at all in the V90. It clatters when it is cold and constantly sounds as though it’s working its arse off, even when you’re trundling down the motorway. Couple this to a dim-witted eight-speed automatic that occasionally suffers from dementia and can’t remember what it’s supposed to be doing, and you have a car that is not remotely exciting, or even pleasant to drive.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some people won’t notice the drone, or the gearbox taking five minutes to remember it’s not a carrot. And they will be delighted by the small engine’s mouse-like thirst for fuel and the tiny number of carbon dioxides coming out of the tailpipe.

They will also be delighted by the many and varied safety features that make the Volvo about as uncrashable as is technically possible these days.

And they are going to like the comfort as well. It’s not a soft-riding car, but the body movement is very well controlled. They’re also going to like the four-wheel-drive system, which is fitted as standard to the more powerful diesel version that I tried.

But they are going to be disappointed by the burglar alarm. My office backs onto a Volvo dealership staffed by trained Volvo technicians. And they set an alarm off at least 20 times a day. Which means that there must be a fault. Either that or the trained technicians are, in fact, morons.

They will be disappointed again when they try to put something big in the boot. Because there’s no getting round the fact that there’s a price to pay for those lovely lines, and the price is: even a Skoda Superb has more interior space. So do the equivalent offerings from Audi, Mercedes and BMW.

Though when I say “equivalent”, what I mean is “cheaper”. I was staggered to notice that the car I tested, with a few options fitted, cost £56,480. That, for a 2-litre diesel, is ridiculous.

And it will seem especially ridiculous when you wake one day to find that, because you bought a diesel-powered car, either you are banned from the town centre or you are being made to pay more for your parking space.

Draconian anti-diesel measures are in place or are being planned in cities such as Paris, Madrid and Athens, and you can be fairly sure the gullible lunatics who run Britain will be leaping onto the bandwagon as soon as they realise just how much money can be made from milking the motorists who did as they were told a few years ago and bought a diesel because they thought it would be kinder to the polar bear.

One day we will learn to ignore the messages of doom from climate “scientists”, but until that happens, I certainly wouldn’t buy a car powered by the dirty work of Dr Diesel. Which means I wouldn’t buy the Volvo. When the petrol hybrid comes along, it may be a different story, but if the 2-litre diesel is £56,000, the hybrid will probably cost more than a stealth bomber. Which means I probably wouldn’t buy that either.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/take-a-seat-in-sarah-lunds-mood-room-n3kblzcbt
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-volvo-v90-estate/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: The Renault Scénic would be a steal — but it’s plastic

Jeremy Clarkson
12 March 2017



In the olden days, cars were made from steel, and that’s only right and proper. Steel is as manly as Tarzan’s scrotum. Horny-handed sons of toil mine the iron ore using dynamite and huge excavators, and then this is turned into steel in giant foundries that are hot, dangerous and noisy. A steel foundry is the exact opposite of Jane Austen.

Today we live in different times. Cars can no longer be manly, because it is now offensive to be in possession of a p*nis. Or to let it do your thinking. This means cars must be kind to the environment and economical and cheap and safe, and that means they must be made from plastic.

There was a time when we laughed at plastic cars. The Reliant Robin was plastic, and so was its big sister, the Scimitar, which was driven by Princess Anne. It is obligatory to mention this, in the same way as when someone sees a swan, he must point out it can break a man’s arm.

The British firm TVR never really made it into the big league because, while its cars were fast and pretty and gruntsomely male, we all knew that behind the bellow and the leather the bodies were made from GRP. Which is plastic. Like a canoe. Or a lavatory seat.

Today, however, you will find plastic panels on almost every car made. And it’s easy to see why. It’s light, which means less fuel is needed to cart it around, and that means fewer emissions. What’s more, it’s cheaper than steel, which means greater profits for the car manufacturer, which means your pension fund is healthier. And on top of that, you never hear of plastics companies going on strike and throwing stuff at policemen, whereas steelworkers are always outside the plant, round a brazier, shouting. Which is bad for the just-in-time production techniques used at every car factory in the world.

The trouble is that you can always tell when a panel on a car is plastic. And I don’t mean when you tap it; I mean when you look at it. There’s something about the way it’s curved or creased, and there’s something too about the way it looks when painted. All of this stirs your limbic system, which says, “That’s crap.”

There was a white Toyota hybrid of some kind outside the office yesterday and its back end was a futuristic blend of shapes and creases that could never have been achieved if it had been made from steel. It put me in mind of a Star Wars Stormtrooper, and those Stormtrooper suits, you just know, are made from plastic and could therefore not withstand a pebble from David’s sling, let alone a blast of green from a space laser gun. And that’s Toyota’s problem. Your eyes tell you it looks great. But your soul is saying, “It’s rubbish.”

And that brings me on to the snappily named Renault Scénic Dynamique S Nav dCi 110. Pop into your dealership, and within about five minutes, no matter how gormless and cheaply suited the salesman might be, you are going to be slack-jawed in amazement and ready to sell your children for the chance to own such a thing.

It’s got a head-up display, for crying out loud. And I don’t mean a system like those you find in high-end BMWs and the F/A-18 Hornet, where the information you need is projected onto the windscreen. I mean a system where a panel rises electrically from the top of the dash. You’re going to be seriously excited when you first see this in operation.

Then there’s a massive glass sunroof with an electric blind, an 8.7in touchscreen, DAB radio, leather upholstery, cruise control and a system that wakes you up if you’re getting drowsy, along with more systems that keep you in the correct lane and ensure your lights dip automatically when a car is coming the other way. It can even recognise road signs.



You can change the colour of the interior lighting, and you get blacked-out windows in the back in case you need to give Puff Snoop a lift to a gig. And all this stuff is provided as standard for £25,445. Which, on the face of it, makes this car the bargain of the century.

Then you’re going to step out of the cabin to take in the exterior styling, and you’re going to like that too. As a general rule I loathe cars of this type and I’ve loathed the Scénic more than all the others. But this ... this is very, very attractive.

Obviously, it isn’t a racing car. Yes, it has racy 20in wheels, but there’s a perfectly ordinary 1.5-litre diesel engine that turns fuel into a dribble of performance; 0-62mph takes 12.4 seconds, which would have been considered woeful 30 years ago. But which today, in health-and-safety Britain, is par for the course.

Then the salesman is going to tell you it’s capable of 72.4mpg. I don’t doubt for a moment that this is true. In the same way as I’m capable of running the 100-metre sprint in roughly the same time as Usain Bolt. In normal use you won’t get anything like 70mpg out of it, but it’s still very economical.

And practical. The rear seats, I admit, are a bit of a squash if you are burly or long, but the boot’s huge and the floor moves about to make it versatile as well. You can even buy a longer version that has seven seats.

So here we have a good-looking, well-equipped, practical and economical car that is exceptional value for money. Lovely.

Except it isn’t. Because the more you look at it, the more you realise there’s something wrong. And what’s wrong is: a lot of this car is made from plastic. And somehow you know. Which means you know it’s crap.

And I’m sorry, but all that equipment provided as standard? For 25 grand? It sounds tremendous, but it does make you wonder about the quality of it all.

And the more you wonder, the more you start to think that maybe the new Scénic is like one of those Korean music centres you could buy for £25.99 in the 1980s. They had the flashing lights and twin tape decks and graphic equalisers. But they were in no way a substitute for the mix’n’match alternatives from Garrard, Marsden Hall, Akai, Teleton and so on.

There’s another problem too. Look up now and say to your family, “I’m thinking of buying a Renault Scénic Dynamique S Nav dCi 110”, and see if anyone is the slightest bit interested . . .

Thought not.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-it-would-be-a-steal-but-its-plastic-78pqn653p

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson

Not so much wild horse as mild pony
The Clarkson Review: Ford Mustang 2.3 EcoBoost

2 April 2017




The right-hand-drive Ford Mustang has been on sale in Britain for a little while now, but I’m still always a bit surprised when I see one bumbling down the street. However, I’m even more surprised when I don’t.

Every day, thousands of people take delivery of a new BMW or Audi or what have you, and I don’t doubt they’re very pleased. But the fact is that for a great deal less money they could have driven away in a Mustang. The American icon. Steve McQueen with numberplates.

The figures are remarkable because the Mustang costs less than two-thirds of what BMW charges for an M4. And it’s not like the Ford is equipped like a cave. It has rain-sensing this and dark-sensing that and electric everything and a system that lets you spin the rear wheels and make smoke while the front brakes are locked. And spin they will, because under the bonnet is a big, American 5-litre V8. It’s not the most sophisticated engine; often it feels as though it’s made from rock and powered by gravel, but it delivers the goods well enough.

When you drive the Mustang, you are left scratching your head and wondering: what’s going on here? Is BMW being a profiteering bastard, or is Ford paying its workers in beads? Because how can it possibly sell a 5-litre sports coupé for £36,000 when Jaguar — as another example — charges £90,000 for almost exactly the same thing?

Well, now we have the answer. Europe’s independent safety testing body recently gave the Mustang a two-star rating out of five, the lowest rating for any mainstream car it’s tested for nearly 10 years.

It found that people in the rear would slide under their seatbelts in a frontal impact, that the airbags inflated insufficiently and that it lacked the sort of sophisticated braking system fitted to even the Fiesta these days. What’s more, it noted that safety equipment available to American customers is not offered on this side of the pond. That, then, is why the all-singing, all-dancing, bells-and-whistles V8 Mustang costs so much less than any rival: it’s just not as safe. So I guess you got to ask yourself one question, punk. What do you want? A system that lets you do burnouts at the lights? Or a head?

On the face of it, the answer is simple. You want a head. You want the safest car you can buy. But do you?

I smoke and drink and jaywalk. I try to mend electrical equipment myself. I jump off cliffs without testing the depth of the water. I fire firework rockets horizontally across lakes, and at work I put myself in tricky spots to get a laugh out of the audience.

And I’m not unusual. Kids go to all sorts of stupid places on their gap years and do all sorts of stupid things. YouTube is full of people falling over on ski slopes and tripping over next to swimming pools. And have you met anyone who says, “No, let’s not build a swing over that river. Let’s go to the library instead because it’s safer”?

Coming back to cars, the Ferrari F40 is not even on nodding terms with the concept of safety. It doesn’t have antilock braking or airbags. And it was designed at a time when any sort of accident was simply the starting point for your journey through the Pearly Gates. So obviously you’d rather have a Volvo V70. Except of course you wouldn’t.

Which brings me back to the Mustang. Yes, it’s not going to look after you very well if you crash into a tree. So here’s an idea. Don’t crash into a tree.

There are two ways this could be achieved with the Mustang. Either you could concentrate the mind by replacing its airbag with an enormous spike, or you could buy the version I’ve been testing.

It’s the £35,845 Mustang EcoBoost convertible, so called because, instead of a stone-age V8, it has a bang-up-to-date 2.3-litre turbocharged four-pot. Yes, that’s right. A four-cylinder Ford Focus engine ... in a Mustang.

The figures aren’t as bad as you might expect. There are 313 horsepowers, for instance, and 319 torques. This means a top speed of 145mph and reasonably brisk acceleration. But not so brisk that you risk finding out first-hand what a two-star safety rating actually means.

What’s more, you get a rear-view camera as standard, dual-zone air-conditioning, the burnout facility, keyless entry, DAB radio, USB and Bluetooth connectivity, selectable driving modes and every other whizz-bang you can think of, all for £35,845. Or £3,500 less than that if you go for the coupé.

To drive, it feels like a Mustang. Obviously, you don’t have the Steve McQueen offbeat burble, but, if I’m honest, you don’t really get that in the V8 either. You do get, however, a deep bassy engine sound that suits the car well.

You also get several acres of bodywork. In America this is fine, but here, especially in a city, it can be annoying. Especially as the turning circle is woeful. After a short while, you start to look enviously at bus drivers as they zip about in their far more manoeuvrable vehicles.

But then you get out of the city and the Mustang does what it does best. It lopes along, eating up the miles without any fuss. And,of course, because there are only four cylinders, you should do twice as many miles to the gallon as you would had you gone for the V8.

Best of all, though, are the admiring glances. People like Mustangs. They smile at you and let you out of junctions. And that’s because we all know that behind the shouty noises, and bigness, it’s a gentle giant. A pussycat that thinks it’s a wild horse.

It really isn’t an out-and-out racer. It leans and it wobbles and it gets awfully wayward if you ask it to behave like a Porsche. But minding this is like buying a burger and then minding that it’s not a quail’s egg dipped in a pinch of celery salt. If you want a quail’s egg, you’ll need to spend twice as much.

The only real problem, as far as I can tell, is that while there’s not much in the way of exterior badging to say this is a 2.3-litre car, you always know. And a Mustang without a V8 is like a chicken korma.

Yes, it’s less likely to crash, and, yes, it’s cheaper and more economical, which means it’s the more sensible option. But who buys a Mustang to be sensible? It’s a fun car, so you absolutely have to have it with the most fun engine.




www.thetimes.co.uk/article/not-so-much-wild-horse-as-mild-pony-t803b6gbr
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-ford-mustang-2-3-ecoboost/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson  9 April 2017

The Clarkson Review:
 Maserati Levante
Gulp! Frankenstein’s been at the parts bin


Herd instinct: from bottom up, Maserati joins Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo and Jaguar in coming late to the SUV party



As I’m sure you will have noticed, people have started wearing trousers that are deliberately torn across both knees. Does this mean that the Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes has jumped on the bandwagon and is selling suits with raggedy holes in the legs?

No. It won’t have even crossed the tailors’ minds. They have spent hundreds of years developing and nurturing their reputation and they know it would be unwise to throw it all away in the pursuit of a fast buck.

People should stick to what they know. You don’t find Mary Berry making programmes about motorcycle maintenance or Vin Diesel playing Hamlet. But in the world of car manufacturing, things are different.

There’s a fad at the moment for SUVs, and, rather than sit around saying, “That’s not what we do”, Aston Martin, Porsche, Bentley, Jaguar, Alfa Romeo and Lamborghini have all taken leave of their senses and thought, “We’ll have some of that, thank you very much.”

Lamborghini, I admit, has dabbled in this area before, with the fearsome LM002. Powered by the V12 from a Countach, it was a gigantic and hilarious monster. I tried to drive one once and it didn’t go well because the gearbox was jammed in second. I sat in the back seat pushing the lever with my legs, while a burly chap sat on the dash using all his strength to pull it. Eventually, it gave in with an almighty crack and the burly man’s arse shot through the windscreen. I laughed about that for six years.

I suspect the LM002 wasn’t really built as a serious attempt to move in on the pre-Hummer military, and was just a gift from the network of Italian power to Colonel Gadaffi, who, it’s said, loved it.

Lamborghini can probably get away with an SUV today. Because we know it started out as a tractor maker and all its cars have always had a certain He-Man appeal. They’re built for doing 9mph in Knightsbridge, not 90 round the Nürburgring.



But Aston? Jaguar? Alfa Romeo? Bentley? Companies such as these making SUVs really is as odd as McDonald’s launching a watercress and kale smoothie. And that’s before we get to Maserati.

Maserati made its name in the 1950s on the grand prix circuit, and then nailed its colours to the mast in the 1960s with an impossibly beautiful succession of exotic cars that were named after the world’s winds. This is a company, then, that has no place making a jumped-up Land Rover. But that’s exactly what it has done.

The car in question is called the Levante, which sounds as though it ought to be some kind of soap for the sort of man who enjoys personal grooming.

Now. Had Maserati called a meeting to decide what this car should be like and decided it would go all-out to emphasise the “S” in SUV, then it might have stood a chance. Alternatively, it could have decided to make it the last word in luxury, a car that would make the Bentley Bentayga look like a toddler’s pushchair. And that might have worked too.

But instead it called a meeting and very obviously said, “Right. Let’s do this for as little as possible.”

I’ll start with its clock. For as long as I can remember, Maseratis have been fitted with an elegant, oval timepiece, the sort of thing you would expect to see David Beckham advertising at Heathrow’s terminal 5. Even when Maserati was basically bankrupt and making the Biturbo, it never stooped so low as to go down the Casio digital route.

In the Levante, however, you get an ordinary circular plastic clock mounted in a plastic oval. You look at it and think, “Well, if they’ve cut corners there, where else have the accountants been making merry with the sandpaper?”

An answer becomes obvious when you fire up the engine. In time there will be a V6 that runs on petrol, but your only option in the UK now is a diesel. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it were a modern diesel fitted with all the latest whizzbangs and gizmos to make it quiet and refined and torquey. But instead Maserati has fitted a single-turbo engine that happened to be available. And it’s just not good enough in any area. It’s not particularly quiet or powerful or economical or clean. It’s just a tool that does a job, and in a 50-grand Maserati, that’s nowhere near good enough.

Then you move off, and immediately the whole car has hysterics. It’s so big and so wide, its impact warning sensors are constantly convinced you’re going to have a crash. Even when you are in slow-moving traffic on the A4 coming into London, it’s screeching and squealing about the proximity of the barrier to your right and the bus to your left.

When you’re parking, it goes berserk, insisting you stop reversing when there’s enough space between you and the car behind to build a £7m house.

There’s another problem with the Levante’s size. It doesn’t translate into actual interior space. The boot isn’t that big, the back isn’t really big enough for three adults and in the front you feel hemmed in and claustrophobic. And deaf, because it’s just seen a tree that you are definitely going to hit.

You may imagine, of course, that all these quibbles melt away when you leave the city and find yourself a nice piece of open road.

Nope. Like all purists, I was delighted when I heard the Levante wouldn’t just be a leather-lined Jeep — Chrysler, which makes Jeeps, and Maserati both belong to Fiat — but instead would be a Ghibli on air-sprung stilts. But this isn’t much better, really, because the Ghibli is actually based on the old Chrysler 300C. Which in turn was based on the Mercedes E-class taxi from about 30 years ago. So the Levante is basically a taxi with a crap clock.

You see evidence of the parts-bin mentality all over the interior. Yes, there’s a lot of leather, and that’s nice, but many of the buttons are lifted straight from the old Yank tank.

There are many, many people of my age who would dearly love to own a Maserati. Lying in bed at night, knowing that you had one in your garage, would make you all warm and gooey. But not the Levante. It doesn’t look or feel or drive like the image you have in your head.

And, to make things worse, it doesn’t even feel or look or drive as well as its rivals. To put it simply, BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Land Rover can offer you something better. Much better.

I’m willing to bet that the new Alfa Romeo Stelvio is better as well. Even though that’s another car from the Fiat stable that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-gulp-frankensteins-been-at-the-parts-bin-jh03gzlv5
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson-review-maserati-levante/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: BMW 530d M Sport
This nanny tucks you in, then hugs everyone outside too
16 April 2017




If a piece of technology remains fundamentally unchanged for more than a century, it’s inevitable that one day it will be as perfect as it’s going to get. And so it was with the most recent BMW 530d.

Every tiny lesson and shuffle forward since Karl Benz took his invention for a spin round Germany in 1888 had been incorporated. And as a consequence, the world had arrived at what might fairly be described as “peak car”.

That thing offered an incredible blend of economy, refinement and power. It was comfortable, it handled beautifully, it was well made and easy to use and its astonishing good looks were tainted only by a deserved familiarity.

If I’d been in charge at BMW when that car was launched, I’d have asked everyone in the research and development department to go on holiday for ever because their work was done. The car, as an entity, had been perfected. And there were no more worlds to conquer.

However, the world doesn’t work like that. The world demands change. So BMW was forced to come up with a new model that would, somehow, have to be even better . To try to achieve this, in a car that’s still propelled down the road by the age old principle of suck, squeeze, bang, blow, BMW turned to its laptop department, instructing it to fit the new model with all the electronic whizz bangs that had been invented since the previous model was on the drawing board. Sounds good, yes?

But perhaps it isn’t. Many new cars — even my Golf — are capable of reading the road ahead and, for a few seconds, steering themselves. That’s great, unless you want to change lanes on the motorway. If you indicate first, then the system knows you’re doing it on purpose and shuts down, but if you don’t, and frankly there’s little point if traffic is light and you’re moving into the middle lane to overtake a lorry, then the system tries to stop you. In some cars, you get a gentle tug at the wheel, but in the 5-series, you get a wrench. And then you end up fighting your own car, which is undignified and annoying.



Turning this facility off means plunging into the car’s computer, which means you need to take your eyes off the road all the way from London to Swindon. But eventually you find the right sub-menu and then you’re free to change lanes without letting the car know first.

But this puts it in a bad mood, so when you cross the white lines, it shudders and shakes, and to do something about this, you have to put on your reading glasses and go back into the menus, which is dangerous because now the car won’t steer itself while you’re otherwise engaged.

Mind you, it also won’t crash into anything. Sensors are on hand to prevent you from getting within about 400 yards of the car in front, and if you break the speed limit, you are reminded on both the speedometer and the head-up display that you are on the wrong side of the law.

It’s weird. You are driving along, with the engine ticking over at about 1500rpm. You are well within the capabilities of the car and you are a sentient being. But the electronic systems are behaving like you’re armed with a sub-machinegun and you’ve just entered a shopping centre with a murderous look on your face.

It takes a while to turn all this stuff off and then you are left with a car that feels pretty much identical to the old 530d. The only way you can tell that the engine has diesel coursing through its veins is by driving halfway round the world and then noticing there’s still enough juice in the tank to get you home.

Every single thing in the cabin works as well as is possible and there’s so much space in the boot and the back that you’d have to be very fat indeed to need the bigger 7-series. Honestly, as a car — four wheels and a seat — it is impossible to fault. It’s lovely when you are going quickly, and quiet and relaxing when you aren’t. And it even has a party piece when you get to journey’s end because you can get out, push a button on the (enormous) key fob and the car will park itself.

You’d never actually do this, of course. In the same way that you wouldn’t board a plane with no pilot. You’d assume that while the electronics are capable of doing the task they’d been given, they’d go wrong, and then a human would need to be on hand to rescue the situation.

And that raises another interesting point. It’s a far nicer and more relaxing car to drive with all the electronic nannies turned off, but what if I were momentarily distracted by something Jeremy Corbyn had said on the radio? Or if I’d dropped my lighter down the side of the seat? And the car crashed. And killed someone.

It’s a moral maze. Do you put up with the constant interference and nagging just in case? Or do you disconnect everything and have a nicer time while hoping for the best? And does having the choice make this an even better car than its predecessor?

Or is it morally reckless to turn off all the systems that could save a child’s life? Surely, you should leave them on. In which case, why would you need a car that handles so sweetly and can do 155mph? When you think about it for a while, your head starts to hurt.

So let’s move on. It’s not as masculine to look at as the old model. It looks less solid, less robust, more feminine. That’s probably a good thing.

I don’t doubt that it will be easier and therefore cheaper to make than its predecessor. And that’s definitely a good thing because savings on the production line mean greater profits for BMW, which is good for the German economy. And what’s good for the German economy is good for the economies of Greece, Italy and Portugal as well. Put simply, big profits on a 5-series mean fewer riots in Athens.

And of course, if more people buy a car like this — a car that forces you to indicate before moving, and obey the speed limits and not tailgate; well, that has to mean fewer fatalities.

So this is a car that hasn’t moved the car itself along one jot. But it has raised the bar nevertheless because it’s something you buy for the benefit of other people. That’s an idea that’s never really been tried before.


www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-sunday-times-magazine/the-clarkson-review-bmw-530d-m-sport-jht39w50c
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/the-clarkson-review-2017-bmw-530d/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson
The Clarkson Review: Renault Twingo GT
So hot, you can cook breakfast in the boot

23 April 2017



WHEN RENAULT introduced its latest Twingo, many motoring journalists scoffed. They said it was slow, and that if you pushed it hard through the corners, it would understeer instead of settling into a nice, smoky drift.

Well, I’m sorry for gaping in astonishment like a wounded fish, but what were they expecting? It’s a city car with a rear engine that would be dismissed by coffee lovers as too weak to grind their beans. So of course it wasn’t going to be fast, and of course its tail wouldn’t swing wide in the corners, because it would mostly be driven by the sort of people who’d crap themselves if it did.

Criticising the baby Renault for not being an out-and-out racer is like buying a record player and criticising it for not being any good at unblocking the sink.

The problem is that Renault put the engine at the back. So everyone thought, “Well, if it’s there, as it is in a Porsche 911, then it must feel like a Porsche 911.” Er, no. The engine in a small Peugeot is at the front, as it is in a Ferrari California, but the two cars feel alike only in the sense that you must sit down to drive them.
And speaking of Peugeot: a friend of mine recently bought a horrible 108 for his daughter. “Why have you done that?” I wailed. “You must hate her. It’s a terrible car.” He listened as I droned on about how tinny it was, and how everything inside felt cheap, and then he said, “Yes. But she gets three years’ free insurance, which saves me six grand.”

This is what we tend to forget in this business. While we are looking for handling anomalies as we drift through Stowe corner at 120mph, it doesn’t occur to us that most people care about safety and running costs and don’t care about tread shuffle or an ability to deal smoothly with mid-corner bumps when you’re at the limit.

Which brings me back to the Twingo. I didn’t like it either, really, because I can’t see the point of a “city car”. Yes, it costs about 75p, but that is hardly good value if you have to leave it at home every time you want to travel more than 30 miles.



You may sneer at this. You may say that if it has an engine, it’s perfectly capable of motorway travel. And who cares if it’s a bit bouncy and noisy and strained? Hmmm. This argument doesn’t wash, because, actually, a very small car with a very small engine is not really capable of handling a motorway.

You put your foot down on the slip road and accelerate so hard that the valves start to make dents in the bonnet, but you’ll barely be doing 55mph by the time you’re ready to join the motorway. Which is a problem, because your path to the inside lane is blocked by a lorry doing 56mph.

What do you do? You can’t pull out, because you’ll be squidged. You can’t accelerate, because the engine is giving all it’s got to give. And you can’t slow down, because it would take too long to get back up to a reasonable speed again.

Then there’s the issue of hills. In my daughter’s old Fiesta, which had a 0.00001-litre engine, you’d have to start thinking about the M40 incline over the Chilterns when you were still several miles north of Banbury. And even then you’d reach the summit huffing and puffing like me when I walk to the top of the stairs.

Off the motorway things are no better, because in a small-engined small car you are forced to drive at the speed of the driver in front. If he’s on a tractor, this is very annoying. It is so annoying that eventually you will attempt to overtake, and this will result in your death because you simply do not have the grunt to get past in much less than four hours.

Make no mistake, then. Cars designed to work only in the city are silly, because in the city you have Ubers and proper cabs and Tubes and buses and bicycle lanes. It’s the one place you don’t need a car. And in the place where you do — which is everywhere else — city cars are noisy and dangerous.

And that brings me to the Renault Twingo GT. It started in life as a city car, but it has been breathed on to give it some real-world poke. It still has a tiny, 0.9-litre three-cylinder engine, but it’s turbocharged, so it produces a thrummy, off-beat 108 brake horsepower. This is a car that sounds like one of those very small dogs that growl the growl of a Great Dane. I liked it. It was amusing.

And I liked the speed too. I know 108bhp doesn’t sound much, but it’s what you used to get from the original Golf GTI. And no one said that was too slow for motorways.

The power delivery is a bit weird — it comes in lumps — but it’s a hoot to out-accelerate most family saloons and then bomb along in a car that really belongs in a Hot Wheels set.

The way it handles is less impressive. The steering is done by guesswork — there’s no feel at all — and you never have any clue that the engine’s at the back. Sporty it is not. And that’s fine, because this, after all, is a car designed for the city that happens to have the poke to deal with everywhere else as well.

And it looks tremendous. It’s pretty anyway, and with a dinky rear air scoop to feed the turbo, and twin exhausts, it’s brilliant. Mine was fitted with the optional stripes, which made it feel like a soap-box racer and me feel I was nine. It made me smile.

And that’s before we get to the really impressive stuff. I went out one night with another grown-up in the front and three teenagers in the back. There was quite a lot of complaining, I admit, but the fact is that we fitted. And if I accelerated hard, the whizzy little engine drowned out the moaning.

The only problem with doing this is that the engine gets hot, which means anything you have in the boot gets hot too. This is a car that can turn your weekly shop into a delicious, piping-hot omelette before you get home.
Oh, and then there’s the turning circle: it seems to be able to turn in its own length. It makes a black cab look cumbersome.

So there we are: a nifty, practical car that looks good, goes well and makes you happy. And all for £14,000. It hasn’t won many fans with writers in the specialist press, because they still think it should go and handle like a 911. But I liked it a lot, because the comparison never entered my head.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-renault-twingo-gt-vw88blm7r
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/the-clarkson-review-renault-twingo-gt/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson  30 April 2017

The Clarkson Review: Skoda Kodiaq
Something for the grizzled fur traders of Woking



MOST PEOPLE think that despite Russia and America’s wildly different political viewpoints, they have never been engaged in an actual fighty war. But that’s not accurate. In the early 19th century Alaska was Russian and there were a lot of bouts of fisticuffs between the locals and their masters.

Today, in these troubled times, lessons can be learnt from how the dispute was solved: America simply bought the entire territory, lock, stock and no smoking barrels.

This meant that the main settlement on Kodiak Island became a thriving fishing port where people would catch salmons and halibuts, and tourists from Texas could come to shoot bears.

Kodiak means, in the local language, “island”. So technically it’s called “Island Island”. In the 1960s it made the news because a bit of geological jiggery-pokery meant that the ground nearby suddenly rose by 30ft . This tectonic boing and subsequent tsunami wiped out much of the fishing fleet and almost all the industry that supported it and now it exists mainly as a rugged outpost for people in checked shirts and Wrangler jeans, who I’m sure will not be best pleased that the name of their island has been nailed to the back of a Skoda people carrier.
Actually, I’ll be accurate. To avoid any legal unpleasantness, Skoda has changed the final “k” to a “q”, but the message is clear. This is a car for the great outdoors. It’s for the people who know, when they’re confronted by a bear, what to do. Not like you and me, who would stand there thinking, “I know I should run if it’s a grizzly and stand my ground if it isn’t . . . Or is it the other way round? And what sort of bear is that anyway? And how does this gun work?”

Of course, a name on its own is not enough. You can call your son Astroflash Butch, but it’s going to be no good if he grows up to have a concave chest and arms like pipe cleaners.

This is a problem for Skoda, because we all know that behind the He Man name, this car is just a stretched Volkswagen Golf on stilts. We know it’s a seven-seat school-run special. We know it’s as suburban as pampas grass and prosecco. It’s a Volvo XC90 for women whose second-hand clothes business is not going quite as well as they’d hoped.

To try to fool us, Skoda has fitted a little button on the centre console that says “off road”. That sits there, serving as a constant reminder that you are a person who knows how to gut a rabbit and live on a diet of nothing but your own urine. It lets your passengers know that you may have been in the special forces. You have a Kodiaq. And it’s not just a glorified Golf. That little button says it can go over the Andes.

First of all, though, you have to pull away from the lights, and that’s not easy in the diesel version I was driving because to make sure the engine doesn’t kill any sea otters, and that it sits well inside the post-Dieselgate EU parameters of what is acceptable, the computer has been given a set of algorithms, and power is only ever a last resort.

Sensors take note of the air pressure, the incline of the road, the outside temperature, the gear that has been selected and the throttle position, and then the computer decides that, no, continuing to sit there is by far the best option for the planet.



So you put your foot down a bit more and the sensors get busy once again before deciding that moving off would cause someone to have bronchitis. So you mash your foot into the firewall, which causes the sensors to think, “OK. He really wants to move, so I’ll select seventh gear, which means it’s all done nice and slowly and with minimal damage to Mother Nature.”

Happily, the EU has now changed its mind on diesels and has decided they are the work of Satan, which means taxes and parking charges for such cars will rocket. Which means in turn that if you choose to buy a Kodiaq, you’ll buy one with a petrol engine. Good idea. At least that’ll move occasionally.

Unless your foot slips off the throttle. I’m not quite sure how, or why, this has been achieved, but you drive a Kodiaq while sitting in the same position you adopt at a piano. And unless you have very long feet, your toes won’t quite reach the throttle.

Apart from that, all is well on the inside. Well, nearly all is well. My test car had been fitted with an optional glass sunroof, which would be ideal for someone who wanted to waste £1,150. I thought sunshine roofs had been consigned to the history books, and this one serves as a reminder of why that should be so. Because when you open it, you get no air, and no sense of being outside; just a lot of extra noise.

Apart from that, though, the wood on the dash was fun, the Volkswagen infotainment sat nav control module worked brilliantly and the comfort at slow speed around town was nice. This is not a car that’s fazed by speed bumps.

At higher speed? I’m not sure, because every time I tried to put my foot down, the computer did some maths and reckoned acceleration wasn’t climatically wise. What I can tell you is that if your foot doesn’t fall off the throttle pedal and you accelerate very gently, it will reach 70mph on the motorway, where all is extremely quiet.

Handling? It’s no good, but that’s OK. If you wanted a car that went round corners well, you’d buy a Golf. Not a Golf on stilts.

The reason you buy this is because tucked away into the boot floor are two seats that can be used to carry very small people over very short distances. But not, at the same time, a dog.

At the weekend I went to my farm with it, as I had a number of manly jobs to do, such as padlocking the gates to stop local ruffians riding around the fields on their hateful motorcycles. The weather was extremely fine, the ground was rock hard and Chipping Norton in no way resembled the permanently wet and often icy conditions of Kodiak Island. But after just a few yards the Skoda was stuck.

And that’s OK too, because if you want a farm car, you’re going to buy a quad bike.

I like the idea of Skoda. It’s a way of buying a new Volkswagen for less. And there is no question it makes some good cars. The Yeti is fabulous, and the Kodiaq’s not bad either. It’s pretending to be something it isn’t, of course, with its “Off road” button and its diamond prospector name, but when you look at it as a sensible, seven-seat school-run car, it makes a deal of sense. Especially as it costs only £35,210 — and that’s the top-of-the-range model.
Just don’t buy the stupid diesel. Partly because climate scientists have decided this month that diesel is bad, and partly because the only reason it gives good economy is because it’s programmed not to work at all.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-skoda-kodiaq-0jpqlqlqh
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-skoda-kodiaq/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson

The Clarkson Review: Volvo S90
Death it can stop. Taxes are a problem

21/22 May 2017


Diesel only: the S90 comes in six trims, including the R-Design, with optional large wheels, above, but Volvo is not offering a petrol version



Ever since I began to write about cars, people of a Jeremy Corbyn persuasion have wondered, out loud and with a lot of spittle, why on earth anyone would want to buy one capable of speeds in excess of 70mph.

This is the main reason Mrs Thatcher was able to defeat the miners. Secondary flying pickets were so consumed by the fact that speed was the preserve of the rich, they deliberately drove Citroën 2CVs, which meant they’d arrive at the pitched battle just as the last police van was closing its doors and heading back to London.

Back then, ordinary people could do whatever speed took their fancy, because there were no cameras and the police could never catch them as most of them were too busy arresting Arthur Scargill.

Today, though, things are different. The police are still too busy — with minors, mostly, and those who may have abused them back in the day when people thought miners were the real problem — but there are electronic deterrents everywhere.

If I drive from my London flat to Luton airport — not something I do a lot, if I’m honest — I am monitored by average-speed cameras on every single inch of the journey.

I could choose, if we lived in a sensible country, to break the limit and pay a sort of speeder’s tax. But for some reason the government has got it into its head that speeding is somehow a crime, and as a result I get points on my licence and the threat of actual prison time.

It’s not just Britain either. It’s everywhere. In Switzerland they can take away your car and put you in jail. In France they can strand young mothers at the side of the road. As a result of this idiotic, continent-wide war on speed, I’m afraid that nowadays when I’m asked why someone might want to buy a car that can do more than 70mph, I have to concede that probably there isn’t much point at all.

Which brings me on to the large cars made by BMW and Mercedes and Jaguar and so on. All of them are set up to be perfectly balanced as you sweep through a lovely set of sweeping S-bends on a delightful sunlit A-road at 125mph.

Which means you are paying thousands of pounds for something that you can only do if you’re prepared to spend the next six months playing mummies and daddies in a cell with Big Vern.

And that brings me neatly to the car you see pictured this morning, the S90 from Volvo Sponsors Sky Atlontic.

Volvo Sponsors Sky Atlontic — which I think is its actual name these days — announced that by 2020 no one need die while driving one of its products.



Yup. If you have cancer or cerebral malaria or meningitis, simply climb into a Volvo and you’ll live for ever.

And don’t worry if you are driving it around and have acrash, because the other big announcement is that no Volvo engine will in future have more than four cylinders. So you’ll never be going fast enough to get an injury that is remotely life-threatening.

To hammer the point home still further, the S90 you see here is not even available in the UK with a petrol engine. You can only have it as a diesel, which of course is a terrible mistake, because these days the government has got it into its head that people who drive diesel cars are mass murderers and must pay £500 a minute every time they want to pop to the shops for a pint of milk.

It’s not as if it’s a very good diesel engine. It clatters like a canal boat at tickover, and it’s even less powerful than the Liberal Democrats.

Volvo will naturally have to reverse its “diesel only” decision very soon. There’s a petrol-electric hybrid in the pipeline, which will make the S90 worth considering, because, ooh, it’s a nice car to use in these speed-conscious days.

Handling? No idea. Doesn’t matter. Steering feel? Irrelevant. All I can tell you is that when you turn the wheel, the car goes round the corner. Is front-wheel drive a handicap? At the sort of speed you’ll be going, you’ll never notice.

What I can tell you is that it rides nicely. It’s very comfortable. And it’s big on the outside. Nearly too big. But that’s OK, because the size translates into acres of space on the inside. And it’s space full of light and air, thanks to cleverly chosen materials.

Sitting in a Beemer or a Merc is like being in a well-groomed man’s washbag. It’s all leather and stripes and secret pockets for condoms and what-have-you. Sitting in an S90 is like sitting in a field. It’s probably the best interior of any mainstream car on sale today.

One of the reasons is that just about everything is controlled from a generous iPad-type screen on the dash. Often I’m baffled by tech of this nature, but after just two days I was skipping round it without even having to take my eyes off the road for more than a couple of minutes.

And that’s OK, because the S90 is fitted with all sorts of radar-guided this and satellite-guided that to ensure you can’t veer out of your lane and you can’t crash into the car in front. And even if all of that breaks and you have climbed into the back for a snooze, it’s still no bother, because the woeful diesel will have ensured you were going at only 2mph when you hit the bridge parapet. You’ll probably just grunt a bit, turn over and go back to sleep.



The other good thing about driving the S90 is that it makes you feel more grown-up than the BMW Lynx and the Mercedes Brut. It’s a car for the man or woman who’s confident about themselves, their age and whatever physical deformities have been visited upon them by the passage of time.

No one who buys a car such as this — saloon or estate — will have had a teeth-whitening trip to the dentist or a tummy tuck or a breast enlargement.

Obviously you cannot buy one now. Its diesel engine is nasty, and because of various government taxation proposals on what it has labelled the fuel of Satan, the S90 will have a resale value, after two days, of about £0.

But it’s worth waiting for Volvo Sponsors Sky Atlontic to launch the hybrid and start offering petrol-powered options. Because this a good-looking, comfortable and pleasant car that’s just waiting for a heart transplant.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-review-volvo-s90-3x6jwwf6b
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-volvo-s90/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson reviews the 2017 Mercedes E-Class Coupé  
Fat and silent, like a biscuit-loving ninja

Published 04 June 2017

By Jeremy Clarkson




AT AROUND this time of year my colleagues and I sit down in our television production company and try to work out which cars will be subjected to a sideways, smoking-tyres track test in the next series. Normally this begins with Richard Hammond saying: “Well, there’s a new 911 …”

That is followed by my shoulders sagging to a point just below my navel, because what can you say about a Porsche 911 that hasn’t been said a billion times already? “The engine’s in the wrong place. It drives well. No one will let you out of side turnings. The end.”

Oh, sure, Porsche will explain in great detail that the new model is 4.5% stiffer than the previous one and 5.8 grams lighter because it has titanium wheel nuts, but those are not the sorts of fact that work well when you are competing for viewers with House of Cards and Billions and a lot of grunting sex on Sky Atlantic.

I’m afraid it’s the same story with any AMG Mercedes. It may be a tiny bit quicker from zero to 62mph than the previous model, and the Comand system may allow you to check how economically you’ve driven over the past 30.8 miles. But all of this is overshadowed by the thunderous noise and the massive wiggly back end. Points you’ve made several thousand times. Honestly, reviewing a car such as this is like being in Groundhog Day.

And so it was with some despair that I looked on the wall chart the other day and noted that a new Mercedes would be arriving for me to write about. Oh no, I thought. It’ll be an AMG and I’ll have to think of another long-winded simile to describe the noise it makes. “God gargling with gravel.” Done that. “Thor treading on a bit of Lego.” Done that. “Tom Jones bending over to pick up the soap in a Strangeways shower.” AA Gill did that. And it’ll never be beaten. Apart from when he described the wet V8 burble of a TVR as sounding like two lesbians in a bucket.

As it turned out I needn’t have worried, because the car that turned up was not a thundering AMG (don’t be fooled by the “AMG Line” trim, which denotes sporty seats and floor mats with “AMG” on them, not a snorting engine souped up by Mercedes’ skunkworks department). It was something called an E 400 4Matic coupé. Which in English means that it’s a four-wheel-drive, two-door version of your luxury Uber driver’s E-class saloon.

Mercedes has gone down this route because it fancied having a pop at BMW’s fabulous 6-series coupé. It explains, with a serious face, that its car has 14mm more rear legroom than you get in the Beemer and that it’s also available with a four-cylinder engine. And then it sits back like a smug lawyer who’s delivered his killer point. But, I’m sorry, Mercedes is missing the point.



Nobody cares two hoots about rear legroom in a coupé. If they did, they’d buy the four-door saloon. The whole point of a coupé is its looks, and on that front BMW has the market covered because, ooh, that’s a handsome car. And the E 400 isn’t. It looks as if it used to be good-looking before it found the biscuit tin. It looks, and there’s no kind way of saying this, a bit fat. And was it beyond the wit of man to do away with that funny-looking rear quarterlight?

Inside, things are much better. You get air vents that resemble the plasma drive systems from a spaceship and, in the version I tested, a giant council-house flatscreen TV that tells you where you are, where you’re going and how quickly you’ll get there. As well as how much fuel there is in the tank and everything else in between.



And, yes, it does allow you to choose the colour of the interior lighting. I went for purple. Even though it clashed badly with the exterior, which was the exact same colour as a placenta.

To drive? Well, the friend who was using it to pick me up from the airport had a few choice words to say about that. As I landed, I noticed on my Find My Friends app that she was still in Chelsea, so I called to ask why. There was a lot of swearing, but the gist of it went: “How do I make the engine begin?”

And then, after I’d explained there was a button hidden away behind the steering wheel, another call to say: “Where’s the effing gearlever?” I had to explain that it sticks out of the steering column and looks like the stalk that would operate the wipers on a normal car.

So it doesn’t begin or get going like a normal car, and this, it turns out, is the E-class coupé’s party piece. Because it doesn’t feel normal when you’re driving along either. You have a nine-speed gearbox, but you’d never know that it’s constantly swapping cogs and that the power from the engine is being sent to whichever of the four wheels is best able to handle it.

Ah, yes, the engine. It’s a 3-litre V6 that produces hundreds of horsepower and a mountain of torque. And yet somehow it makes no noise at all. Unusually for a Mercedes, then, I’m having to think of a whole new simile. It’s like a Trappist monk who’s dead in a room made entirely from kapok. Only quieter.

The drawback is that when you look down at the council-house flatscreen, you’ll note you are doing 130mph. Which is against the law.

You’re not even being jiggled around that much. Well, not by the suspension, at least. You could drive this thing through the broken streets of Palmyra and it’d feel as if you were in Austria at the end of a national competition to find the country’s best roadworker

However, there are many electrical systems on hand to stop you crashing, and they are a bit panicky. Time and time again, the car’s on-board brain decided I was definitely on the verge of a huge accident and took control of the brakes and the steering.

This is a heart-stopping surprise, and I was tempted to turn the systems off. But if you do that and you get a text and crash, and you have to spend the rest of your life communicating with a head wand, you’re going to feel a right Charlie.

Mercedes needs to turn the intervention down a bit. To make it gentler and less alarming. Because, as it stands, it’s a good-enough reason not to buy this car. So is the styling.

I know BMW’s 6-series is more expensive and has 14mm less legroom in the back and can’t be ordered with four-wheel drive. But turning that down and buying the Mercedes instead is like turning down Uma Thurman for the woman at the post office. Because she’s so good at ironing.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-jeremy-clarkson-review-mercedes-e-class-coup-hphq67t7c
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-mercedes-e-class-coupe/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: Volkswagen Golf GTI
They say it’s new, but thank heavens it’s not

By Jeremy Clarkson
11 June 2017




One of the problems with running a car company is that no department actually finishes what it’s working on. Which makes launching a new car extremely difficult.

Think about it. You’re the boss and you call the styling department. You ask if it has completed the way the new car will look and it says: “Give us two more weeks.” So you give it two more weeks and then you call the engine department, which says it wants another week. So you agree to that, which causes the styling department to embark on the set of changes that somehow takes three weeks to implement. And when that’s done, the suspension people call to say: “Look, give us 24 hours.”

And so it goes on until eventually you, as the boss, have to turn on the factory PA system and say: “All of you. Step away from the Cad-Cam equipment. Give us what you have now and we will build that.” Which means the car you and I buy is invariably made up completely of parts that aren’t quite as good as they could have been if only there’d been a bit more time.

The problem for Volkswagen is doubly difficult because of Dieselgate. So much money has been put aside to compensate customers who were sold a better car than would have been the case if it had complied with the regulations, that there is only £2.75 left in the petty cash tin for research and development.



Which brings us on to the new Golf GTI. Well, VW says it’s new — in reality it’s a facelift of the current Mk 7 — in the hope that existing owners will feel compelled to sell their old model and sign on the dotted line of whatever nonsensical finance arrangement the beancounters have come up with this time.

I am one of these existing owners. The Golf GTI is what I use as my daily driver. It is an extremely good car, apart from the fact it’s permanently convinced it has a puncture when it hasn’t. I get in it in the morning, start it up and it says: “You have a puncture.” So I push the button saying: “No, I haven’t.” And then, when I get back into it to go home from work it says: “You have a puncture.” And I start to foam at the mouth.

I’ve taken it to a dealership, which reset the computer. And ensured all the tyres contained exactly the same amount of air. And the next morning it says: “You have a puncture.”

Today I have solved the problem by sticking duct tape to the dash so I can no longer see the message. Oh, and a flannel between the passenger seat and centre console to solve the rattle it somehow doesn’t seem to know it’s got.

Apart from these things, it’s a wonderful car. It’s equipped like a Bentley, it goes like a Ferrari and in traffic, because it’s just a Golf and it’s grey, no one takes my picture. Which is what happens, constantly, when I’m in anything more flash. Which is everything.

Anyway, my car has done only 15,000 miles so it’d take quite a lot to convince me I should take the resale hit and buy the new model. But I’m open to suggestion so VW dropped one off at the office.

I looked at it for a very long time. Then I looked at my car. And then I looked at the new one again and after a lot of doing this I realised that while my car was a sort of gunmetal grey the new one was definitely white. I also noticed after a lot more looking that the new model had slightly different trim in the headlights and some styling tweaks to the wheels. I then stepped inside and straight away saw that the ratherattractive speedometer and rev counter in the old model had been replaced by some less attractive instruments in the new one.



Also, instead of a button to start the car, I had to put the key in a slot and twist it. I haven’t had to do that since someone worked out that in an accident an ignition key protruding from the steering column can play havoc with a driver’s kneecaps.

And then I noticed the gearlever. And the clutch pedal. And I thought: “No. I’m sorry. It’s pouring with rain. The traffic is going to be dreadful and life is too short to be using my left leg every time I want to set off.” So I climbed out of the new car and into my own, which has a flappy paddle system. “You have a puncture,” it said from behind the duct tape.

It’s strange. Not that long ago, I was very much in the manuals-are-for-men camp. I saw the automatic and the double-clutch alternatives as a sign of weakness. In my mind they were a way of saying that you were a functionary, that you were willing to relinquish control to an algorithm. “Alexander the Great would never have ordered a car with an automatic gearbox,”I would thunder at people who had.

Now, though, I reckon buying a manual is like buying a television that has no remote control. Who says: “I like getting out of my chair to change the channel”?

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. But more likely it’s because the modern flappy paddle can change cogs far more quickly than any human being. And your left leg is free to tap along to the radio.

Much later in the week, of course, I had to park my prejudice and my bone idleness and take the new car for a drive. I’d been told its 2-litre turbocharged engine had 10bhp more than the old model and that this equated to a top speed that’s 2mph higher. Which sounded great. But actually all VW has done is fitted the old performance pack as standard. Which means that the updated car has exactly the same amount of power and performance as mine.

Everything else. The steering. The suspension. And even the option of a clever limited-slip front differential is the same as well. And that’s a good thing, if I’m honest. Because the old Golf GTI was the world’s best hot hatch. And the new one is as well. Partly because it isn’t new at all. But mainly it doesn’t think it has a puncture.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-volkswagen-golf-gti-rjc35xkbz
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-volkswagen-golf-gti/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2017 ALFA ROMEO STELVIO
An SUV poster boy at last. Yes, it’s Italian

Published 18 June 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson


ILLUSTRATION BY MICHELLE THOMPSON


I HAVE driven the latest Audi Q5 and can think of absolutely nothing interesting to say about it. It’s a well-made box that costs some money and produces some emissions and, frankly, I’d rather use Uber.

No, really. Who’s going to wake up in the morning, sweating like a dyslexic in a spelling test, because their new Q5 is arriving that day? What child is going to stick a poster of a car such as this on its bedroom wall? Who’s going to think how hard they’ll have to work to pay for the damn thing and reckon it’s worth the sweat? No one is. You buy a car like this in the way you buy washing-up liquid. And who wants to read 1,200 words about a mildly updated bottle of Fairy Liquid?

What I can tell you before I move on is that I hated its engine. Volkswagen’s post-Dieselgate 2-litre turbo is possibly the most boring power unit fitted to any car at any time. It’s about as exciting as the motor in your washing machine. By which I mean, you only really notice it if it goes wrong. Which you hope it will in the Audi, because then you can call an Uber. At least that’ll smell interesting. And come with some unusual opinions.

I’ll be honest with you. I loathe all the current crop of so-called SUVs, except those I dislike intensely. I cannot see the point of driving around in a car that’s slower, more expensive and thirstier than a normal saloon or estate. It just seems idiotic.
But then I had to make a brief trip to Tuscany recently, and once I’d negotiated a path through Alan Yentob and Polly Toynbee and Melvyn Bragg and emerged into Pisa airport’s car park, I found a man offering me the keys to Alfa Romeo’s new Stelvio.

Named after a remote Alpine pass in northern Italy, this is a direct rival of the Q5 and all the other mid-range jacked-up estates whose names I can’t be bothered to remember. In short, it’s a Giulia saloon on stilts, and I was determined to hate every bit of it.

The man was very keen to have his photograph taken with me and to say how much he enjoyed a programme called Top Gear, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking: “What in the name of all that’s holy was Alfa Romeo thinking of?”

If you have a heritage as glamorous and as achingly cool as Alfa’s, why would you want to make a bloody school-run car? That is like Armani deciding to make carrier bags.

Alfa’s engineers are at pains to explain that, while it may look like an SUV, it doesn’t feel like one to drive. They say all the power from the engine is sent to the rear wheels, but then, if traction is lost, up to half the power is sent instantly to the front. They also speak about carbon-fibre prop shafts and much lightweight aluminium in the body, and I stood there thinking: “Yes, but it’s still a bloody carrier bag.”

I had much the same sense of teeth-gnashing rage when I first encountered Maserati’s Levante, and that turned out to be just as bad as I’d feared. But as the man brought over more friends for more selfies, I started to gaze more carefully at the Stelvio, and there was no getting round the fact that, actually, it’s quite good-looking.

Eventually, after I’d posed with all the police force, everyone in border security and 3,000 taxi drivers, all of whom loved Top Gear, it was time to step into the Stelvio, and there was also no getting round the fact it was a nice place to sit. Way, way nicer than the Audi.



There’s some genuine sculpture in there. You get the impression in a Q5 that the dash was built with all the care of a kitchen worktop. It’s just a housing for the dials and the switches. Alfa has made its one something worth looking at. I suppose it’s an Italian thing. It’s why Siena is a better place to sit and people-watch than Dortmund.

Setting the sat nav, however, was a challenge. This is because every town in Italy has 5,000 letters in its name, and then, when you finally manage to type it in, the sat nav asks which Santa Lucia del Menolata di Christoponte you would like to set as the destination. And it turns out there are 5,000 towns with that name.

Eventually, though, as Alan and Melvyn and Polly were returning to the airport from their week of brainstorming, I had the right town and fired up the engine. The diesel engine. Oh, dear Lord. A diesel Alfa Romeo SUV.

The funny thing is, though, that because everyone in Italy has a diesel-powered car, it didn’t feel all that weird to be clattering out of the car park. And then it felt fine, because soon I was on the racetrack known as an autostrada, where it felt very powerful. The figures say it’ll go from 0 to 62mph in 6.6 seconds, which is good, but it’s the mid-range surge that impresses most of all. It’s a surge you just don’t get from Audi’s Q5. And it means you can always break free from the walnut-faced peasant who has affixed his aged Fiat Ritmo to your back bumper at 100mph.

And it’s not as if you’re leaving a trail of death in your wake because, despite the power and the torque, this engine is considerably cleaner than the diesel Porsche puts in its Macan. And Alfa says it’ll do almost 60mpg.

So it’s as fast as the badge would suggest, but does it handle as well as Alfa promises? Well, obviously, as it’s more than 7in higher than the saloon and has longer springs, it’s squidgier, which would be fine if Alfa hadn’t given it the same superfast steering setup.

The tiniest movement of the wheel causes a big change of direction, which is great when you are on a track in a low-riding “car”, but when you are on the autostrada, on stilts, with a Ritmo up your chuff and a lorry up front that has suddenly decided to wander into your lane because the driver is watching pornography on his phone rather than the road ahead, it can be a bit alarming.
It takes time to learn to think your way round corners, but when you get there, I must say this is a genuinely exciting car to drive. It doesn’t feel as cumbersome as all the other SUVs, and you get the impression it was engineered by people who were involved because they wanted to be. Not because they’d done something wrong.

And because of that — because it’s a big, practical car with a huge boot and folding seats and lots of cubbyholes that’s also an Alfa Romeo — it’s the only SUV that’s quite tempting. It may even be irresistible when Alfa launches the version with the 500-horsepower petrol engine.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-review-alfa-romeo-stelvio-m6jmpb08x
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson-review-2017-alfa-romeo-stelvio/

[RedMoon11]

Jeremy Clarkson: Well, we did tell Richard Hammond to fire it up
Clarkson on the Hamster’s crash . . . and the new Range Rover

Jeremy Clarkson
25 June 2017


Flaming lucky: the charred remains of Richard Hammond’s Rimac Concept One after he crashed in Switzerland
AP

A few years ago Richard Hammond was asked to drive a car down a runway, and somehow he ended up on his head and then in a coma for a few weeks.

And now, having established he can’t drive in a straight line, he has proved he can’t drive round corners either. All he had to do was drive a small electric car up a Swiss hill, which he managed, but then somehow, on a left-hand bend after the finish line, he lost control, rolled down a bank and ended up in a hospital. Again.

At this rate he will get to the point where he forgets how to get undressed at night. He’ll put his clothes on in the morning and then assume they will be cut off by paramedics at some point later in the day.

Seriously, I’m struggling to think of any racetrack in the world that Hammond hasn’t crashed on at some point. At Imola he binned a Noble, at Virginia International Raceway in America it was a Porsche, at Mugello he bent a Jaguar and at Silverstone, in a 24-hour race, he doomed our efforts in the middle of the night by stuffing a BMW into pretty much everything that was solid. Maybe it’s because he can’t see over the steering wheel. Who knows?


Richard Hammond shows the x-ray of his pinned knee
GETTY IMAGES

What troubles me most of all, now that we know he will be OK, is the charred mess he left at the bottom of the hill in Switzerland. It had started out that morning as something called the Rimac Concept One. And, frankly, it was amazing.

There are a few very rich people in the world who will talk sagely about the work Tesla is doing with electric propulsion, and a handful of fanatics who insist on telling us how their G-Wiz is ideal for the city centre, but most normal people think of electricity as something that powers a toaster or a washing machine. The idea of buying an electrical vehicle, unless you’re a milkman, is just as daft as buying a petrol-powered food blender.

The Rimac could change all that. I had only a brief time behind the wheel and simply could not believe how fast it accelerated. We are not talking here about a car that’s as fast as a Lamborghini Aventador. It’s massively faster than that. It’s faster than anything else I’ve driven, by a huge, huge margin.



It has four electric motors, one at each wheel, which together produce a simply staggering 1,200 horsepower. In the time it takes you to work out how fast it accelerates from 0 to 60, it’s doing 120. And there’s still a hundred miles an hour to go.

You might imagine that, with power like this, its battery pack would go flat every 3½ seconds. But, as Hammond proved on that fateful day in Switzerland, this isn’t the case. Even if you drive as though you are mad, you’ll get 120 miles between charges.

I’ve never been a fan of electric cars. Comparing them to those with a normal engine has always been a bit like comparing microwaved food to stuff that’s been in the Aga for a few hours. But that Rimac changed my mind. It was — there’s no other word — brilliant.

Hammond loved it. He will probably love it even more now he knows you can roll it down a hill at 120mph and still get out before some kind of electrical issue causes it to become an inferno. And doubtless we will hear more when he talks about it in the next series of The Grand Tour. Unless James May and I have kicked him to death by then.

The Rimac Concept One intact


In the meantime I’ve been having a bit of a pen-sucking, leaning-back-in-the-chair moment about what will power our cars in a few years’ time.

As you may remember, the world’s environmentalists declared several years ago that petrol engines were extremely bad for the planet and that we must all buy diesels instead. They scoffed and rolled their eyes at people like me who said this was nonsense. They called us climate change “deniers” and said we could not argue with cold, hard facts.

As a result, the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, changed all the rules to make buying diesel cars cheaper, and millions of people took advantage. Only to be told earlier this year that the cold, hard facts may not have been entirely accurate and that petrol is a much cleaner fuel after all.


Richard Hammond’s Rimac Concept One ablaze at the bottom of the hill

So now all of the people who have diesel cars are being told that they must in future pay £700 to refuel them and £9m to park them and £5000m if they wish to drive them into central London. Which means they are all trying to sell. And what they’re getting is 5p. If you’re in that boat, I’d send a bill for the losses to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Maybe it’d make them think twice next time they have some cold, hard facts they’d like to share.

I run a diesel. It’s an old Range Rover. The first of the TDV8s. And it works well. After I’ve filled the tank, the trip computer tells me I have a range of 500 miles before I need to fill up again. Which is good if you like shooting. You can get to Yorkshire and back without having to face the ridicule of walking into Leicester Forest East services in a pair of tweed shorts.

All sensible Range Rover owners have diesels. But, thanks to our friends in the Green Party, you’ll think twice about that next time round. And so, for the first time in years, I spent last week tootling about in a petrol-powered SVAutobiography.

There’s nothing I can say about this car that hasn’t been said a million times already. It’s in a class of its own. It has no rivals. And, with the SV engine under the bonnet, it’s ludicrously fast. Hilariously fast. It’s like being in the British Museum while falling down a cliff, and yet, incredibly, you still have control over where you’re going. Only Richard Hammond could crash this thing.

The problem was that after 150 miles the petrol gauge was into the red zone. It’s not the money: if you can afford a car like this, the cost of refuelling isn’t important. No, it’s the fact that, unless you are very good at fuel-light bingo, you can’t get from London to Leeds on one tank.

So what’s to be done? Well, there’s now a hybrid Range Rover, but that’s part electrical and part diesel, so it doesn’t really get round the anti-derv nonsense.

The only solution, really, is to use pure electrical power. It’d work too. Near-silent cruising when you’re on the road and immense torque when you aren’t.

I’d like to suggest Land Rover consult the boffins at Rimac about how such technology could be employed. But I fear that, thanks to Hammond, they’re going to be a bit busy for the next few weeks building a replacement car.

Hammond’s greatest hits


Elvington, UK, 2006

Elvington, UK, 2006: While filming Top Gear, Richard Hammond is flipped through the air after a blowout in a Vampire jet car



Silverstone, UK, 2007 

Silverstone, UK, 2007: A year later Hammond prangs a BMW during a 24-hour endurance race after skidding off the track

Mugello, Italy, 2014: While chasing Clarkson on an Italian circuit, Hammond manages to crash a Jaguar F-type R into a wall


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-richard-hammond-s-crash-and-the-new-range-rover-qrsbdwlft

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: BUGATTI CHIRON
I’ve done fast and silly fast, but this is flaming ridiculous

Published 12 July 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson



www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-bugatti-chiron/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2017 AUDI RS 5 COUPÉ
Big roar, waggly tail: that’s my kind of lion

Published 30 July / 02 August 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-audi-rs5-27v67nwr0
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-audi-rs-5/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: Mercedes-AMG GT C roadster
Better hold on really tight, queasy rider

Published 6 August 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson


Because I’m extremely middle class, my children’s prep school organised exchange trips with pupils at a school in Tokyo. This meant that my kids got to spend a couple of weeks eating fish that were still alive and later they got to host little Japanese people who had no clue what todo with a sthingy.

I picked one of these kids up from Heathrow and it quickly became obvious the poor little thing spoke no English at all. So she wandered into the arrivals hall after an 11-hour flight, jet-lagged all to hell, and she was met by a man who was bigger and fatter than anyone she’d seen in her whole life. And he communicated in what to her must have sounded like the grunts of a farmyard animal. Bewildering didn’t begin to cover it.

I loaded her luggage into the boot of the family Volvo — I said I was middle class — and she climbed into the back clutching what at the time was a completely amazing translation machine. The idea was that she spoke into it and it then spoke to me in English.

Shortly after we joined the M25 I could see in the rear-view mirror that my microscopic guest was trying to turn the machine on. And by the time we joined the M40 she was starting to get desperate because plainly she was having some difficulty.

Much later, on the twisting and lovely A44, I heard the telltale beep to say she’d been successful and quickly she garbled something in Japanese into the electronic wonder box. She then held it next to my ear while it said with an electronic Stephen Hawking lilt: “Car sick.”

During her two-week stay she was sick after eating tinned tuna, mashed potato, ice cream and pretty much everything that was dead.



But I bet that if you ask her now to define the low point of her stay she’d say it was that moment on the A44, being hugged by a6ft 5in monster as she vomited the contents of her stomach into the roadside undergrowth.

Motion sickness is hideous. You really do want to die. I saw a man once lying on the floor in a cross-Channel ferry’s lavatory. The voyage had been as rough as any I can remember and everyone had been sick so violently it was a lake of vomit in there. And it was swilling over the poor man who, as I entered, opened one eye and said simply: “Kill me.”

I felt his pain. I’d been on a boat in the south of France once when the gentle rocking brought about a malaise so intense that I invited my friends to murder me. I meant it. I even told them where the knives were kept and where on my rib cage they should stab.

All of which brings me conveniently to the Mercedes-AMG GT. I thought when I first saw this car that it was a toned- down, more realistic version of the mad old SLS AMG with its bonkers soundtrack and its gullwing doors. I assumed therefore that it too would be a headline-grabbing one-off.

But no. Mercedes has turned it into an entire range that’s now so complex you are able to choose how many brake horsepower you’d like and what shade you’d prefer for the seats. Naturally you can also decide whether you’d like a roof or not. And what colour you’d like that to be.

Well, as I’ve already driven the super-hard and bellowy GT R coupé, which I’m not sure about, I thought — it being summer and all — I should try out the slightly less powerful but still pretty nuts GT C roadster.



Like the “I’m a racing car, I am” GT R, it’s fitted with four-wheel steering. And that, if you aregoing for a record round the Nürburgring — something the GT R holds for rear-wheel-drive production cars, incidentally — is tremendous. When you drive a car that steers with all four wheels you are always amazed by just how readily it changes direction.

However, I was not on the Nürburgring. I was in Oxfordshire and I was not driving particularly quickly when my passenger invited me to stop. Because she felt car sick. And the last time this happened was when I was driving her in a Porsche 911. Which also had four-wheel steering.

The problem is that when you move the steering wheel even a tiny bit, the car darts. It’s very sudden and if you’re a passenger you have no time to brace or send a signal to your stomach to hold on. You, the driver, may like this sensation a lot. But I think it may be a deal breaker for whoever’s in the passenger seat.

Pity, because there’s a lot to like in this car. It looks like a traditional AMG product. Big, lairy and heavy. But, actually, it’s lighter than you might think, thanks to a chassis that’s made from helium and a boot lid made from witchcraft. There’s even some magnesium in there as well.

All of which means that the big turbocharged V8, which responds as quickly as the steering, has much less to lug around than you might think. Which means this car is properly fast. Knocking-on-the- door-of-200mph fast. It also does a fabulous bonnet-up, squatted-back-end lunge when you stamp on the throttle.

I’d like to say this speed is surprising but you know from the moment you fire up the engine and the exhausts wake everyone in a 12-mile radius that it’s going to be mental. What is surprising, however, is that you can enjoy quite a lot of the speed with the roof down. It really is calm and unruffled in there.

And it’s a nice place to sit. Sure, the gearlever is mounted nearer to the boot than your hand and, yes, there are a lot of buttons to confuse you. I once turned off what I thought was the stop-start feature and then spent the whole day in third because I’d actually changed the seven-speed automatic box into a manual.

My only real gripe is the bumpiness of the ride. It really is firm — too firm — and that’s unnecessary because this isn’t a track-day car. It’s a handsome, look-at-me boulevard cruiser. Or a devourer of motorways and interstates. It should be softer. And it really could do without that four-wheel steering.

Mercedes shouldn’t try tomake sports cars. That’s Porsche’s job. What it should do instead is take this vehicle back to the drawing board and turn what’s very nearly there back into an AMG Mercedes. Then it wouldbe absolutely brilliant.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-review-mercedes-amg-gt-c-roadster-jmqrtdcc0

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: Porsche Panamera Turbo
My hop to the beach became a cliffhanger

13 August 2017
Jeremy Clarkson



Jeremy Clarkson is away. That’s what it should say at the bottom of the page this week. Because I am away. I’m in Mallorca, sitting in the darkened confines of the villa’s dining room, looking at the sunshine streaming through the windows and listening to the children playing in the pool, wondering how on earth I came to be writing a column, and hitting the keys on my laptop slightly more viciously than usual.

I love my summer holidays. Sitting at the breakfast table with my children, who’ve been reduced to green-faced wrecks by whatever it was they did the night before. And trying to amuse them by dreaming up new and interesting ways of killing the wasps.

Everyone has their own technique, all of them learnt from some pool boy in Corfu or Crete. “They don’t like cigarette smoke.” “Burn coffee grounds; that keeps them away.” My idea is better. Attract them with a plate of bacon and then squirt them with a jet of fire from a catering-sized tin of wasp killer.

http://instagram.com/p/BXC0LhqHgF9

“Look, children,” I shriek excitedly. But it’s no good. They’re too green and too right-on to be impressed by animal cruelty, even in Spain. And anyway they’re not paying attention because they’re adhering to standard operating procedure for all teenagers around a dining table: looking at Michael McIntyre clips on YouTube.

Later, when I’ve seen Michael’s take on wasps, which is very funny, and after I’ve smeared myself in cream, except the bit under my stomach which will burn later, I lower myself onto a bed by the pool and immediately the people in the next villa start to play, loudly, whatever’s doing the rounds on the Europop scene this summer. It seems to be something called Despacito. Which is better than Who Let the Dogs Out?, but not much.

Then you have the strimmers. And then the gardener turns up with his leaf blower. Even though it’s August and there are no leaves to blow, just huge clouds of dust.

Later you go for lunch with people you’d never dream of seeing at home, but who are suddenly your besties because they happen to be renting a villa a few miles away. And you smile as they tell you in great detail exactly where it is, as though that makes any difference. In Mallorca, it’s all based on how far you are from the restaurant where they filmed The Night Manager.

This is all standard holiday stuff. The chats with friends about who’s had the worst budget airline experience, and who’s got the best cure for mosquito bites, and endless calls to taxi companies who say their driver is as near to the house as he can get, which turns out to be two miles away in the car park of a tapas restaurant where he’s sitting in the sun, hoping to God we don’t find him.

Transport is always a tricky holiday issue. You rent a car, which means you have to spend the first six days of your holiday at the airport, waiting as the girl at the counter writes War and Peace on her computer. And then you are given the keys to something that you can never drive because you’re always too drunk.



This year I was given a seven-seat, two-wheel-drive Nissan X-Trail, which, fully loaded and then loaded a bit more, simply would not climb the road to the villa. I had a choice from the driver’s seat. I could either spin the front wheels, which made a terrible noise, or spin the clutch, which made a terrible smell.

This explains why I’m stabbing at this laptop and not having a holiday, even though I’m away. The editor of the Sunday Times Driving section had called and he doesn’t take no for an answer. “I’m on holiday,” I said, firmly. “Yes,” he replied, as though I hadn’t spoken, “but would you write a column if I got you a car?”

I peered over the hedge at the ruined X-Trail and thought: “Oh what the hell.” So, two days later, a man turned up with a Porsche Panamera Turbo that he’d driven from Stuttgart. It was exactly the same car I drove at home a couple of months ago. Back then, I thought it was tremendous, powerful and smooth and fitted with an interior that’s sublime. It remains a car I would happily use on a day-to-day basis in the UK.

However, it’s not what I’d call a first-choice machine here on the sun-kissed island of Mallorca. First of all, it’s quite wide. It’s so wide in fact that it goes up the road to our villa with, in places, just half an inch of clearance on either side. That requires immense concentration, and that’s hard because its parking sensors and collision warning system are in meltdown and the interior sounds like that nuclear plant in The China Syndrome. All of this stuff can be turned off, of course, but not when one wheel is dangling over a cliff, one door mirror is half an inch from a stone post and you have two teenagers in the back saying they feel sick. I’ve had the car for four days now and the fastest I’ve been is 6mph.

Yesterday, we went to the beach where they filmed The Night Manager, which, and I know this is showing off, is at the bottom of our drive. And it took nearly two hours. I arrived a nervous wreck and couldn’t have a refreshing drink because later in the day I’d have to drive back.

That was even harder because we got stuck behind some Spanish Doobie Brothers in a Ford who, when they met something coming the other way, were consumed with the need for some peace and love and reversed. Which meant I and about 200 other cars had to do the same thing.

After a while, I resorted to the horn and some rude gestures, and they responded in kind, emerging from the smoky interior to let me know that it was hard enough to drive a car on that road at the best of times, but it was especially difficult when all of them thought they were being attacked by a Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

It was at this point that I realised the Porsche was fitted with the single most important thing that could be fitted to any hire car, anywhere in the world: German plates. It meant as we finally got past the erratic Ford, using a dribble of smooth turbo power, we could hear the passenger muttering to his mates: “Malditos Alemanes!”

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-porsche-panamera-turbo-qvd3wp203

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2017 BMW 5‑SERIES (530D XDRIVE) TOURING
From second fiddle to rock guitar god

20 August 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson



www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-bmw-5-series-touring-0v3pbqvs8
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson-review-2017-bmw-5%E2%80%91series-530d-xdrive-touring/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: SEAT LEON ST CUPRA 300 4DRIVE

Hey, Hans, Miguel’s done better than you

Published 24/26 September 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson



www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-seat-leon-st-cupra-300-4drive-2vkghcjxp
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-seat-leon-st-cupra-300-4drive/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: BMW M760LI XDRIVE V12 (7-SERIES)
Dreaming to screaming in an instant

Published 01/03 October 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson



www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-bmw-m760li-xdrive-v12-j9v7htb78
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson-review-bmw-m760li-xdrive-v12-7-series/

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2017 VAUXHALL INSIGNIA GRAND SPORT
All mod cons, but 50 years too late

Published 8/9 October 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson



www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-vauxhall-insignia-grand-sport-q8zfd9kmm
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-vauxhall-insignia-grand-sport/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: Audi RS 3 saloon
Oh what a hoot to be Britain’s worst driver

Jeremy Clarkson
22 October 2017



I saw a dead man recently, and it made me sad. He’d obviously got up as usual and had breakfast with his wife. They’d have talked casually about what they were doing that night, whether the kids would be home and maybe made some plans for the weekend. Then he’d gone out, climbed onto his motorcycle and set off for work. Except he never got there because at a busy junction, he and a Toyota Prius had a coming-together. And that was that.

Two days later I saw a stupid man cycling along the Earls Court Road in London. You could tell from his corduroy jacket and huge beard he was an ecomentalist, a point he was determined to prove by pedalling along with his three children in a flimsy, virtually invisible trailer behind his bike. I presume they were his children; it’d be worse if they weren’t.

Then an hour later I saw a stupid woman who’d gone one step further. She only had one child but it was in a basket contraption mounted on the front wheel of her bicycle. Yup. She was actually using her baby as a human crumple zone. Simply to make a political point. And that is insane.

There was a time when this might have been fine. London’s roads felt safe, partly because the speeds were so low but mostly because everyone sort of knew what they were doing. That certainly isn’t the case any more.

The motorcyclist had been hit by a minicab. And it was a minicab that bloody nearly wiped me out last week when I went to buy the newspapers. He was on completely the wrong side of the road.

Uber, as we know, has been told that it can’t operate in London any more because it doesn’t take its responsibilities seriously. I don’t doubt that the company will clean up its act before the case reaches appeal. But I wonder whether the driving will get any better, because at the moment it beggars belief.

The problem is this. There’s much globalisation these days. The Big Mac you buy in Los Angeles is the same as the Big Mac you buy in Moscow. Coca- Cola is the same. Sunglasses are the same. Phones are the same. Cars are the same too, but the way they are driven definitely is not.

If you’ve been to Rome you’ll know what I mean. The driving there is completely different from the driving you find in, say, Houston, or Bournemouth. Then you have Vietnam, where everyone gets into fifth gear as soon as the car is doing 3mph, which is in direct contrast to Syria, where no one drives anywhere unless the engine is turning at 6500rpm. Eastern Europe is naked aggression, Paris is belligerence and India is dithering.

And people who’ve learnt the skills needed to get by in their own country are now in London, in a Prius, and it doesn’t work at all. Any more than it would work if you put chefs from all over the world in a single kitchen and told them to make supper. You’ve got the chap from India hesitating nervously, not sure what lane he should be in, behind the chap from Poland who reckons that the traffic lights signal the start of the grand prix, and both are being deafened by Johnny Syrian, who’s sitting there with one foot hard down on the clutch and the other hard down on the throttle, which is actually a blessed relief because it means that no one can hear what Reg Crikey the black-cab driver is actually saying.



When the lights go green, everyone crashes into one another, except the southeast Asian man, because he’s going at 4mph, in fifth, the wrong way down a one-way street, wondering what the bump he just felt was. And then is alarmed to find it was a bearded cyclist that he’s just run over.

And the problem is you can’t lump all minicab drivers into one pot. They all do different things all the time. The only thing you know for sure is if the Prius is in the left lane, indicating left, it doesn’t mean it’s going to turn left.

The upshot is that the Prius is now the worst-driven car in Britain. Or, rather, it was until I borrowed an Audi RS 3 recently. You probably heard me, because every time I started it up, the exhaust system made machinegun noises at the sort of volume that scared birds five miles away. It was fun the first time but a bit wearing after six days. No matter. It has the same 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo engine you get in the Audi TT RS, and that’s a car I love very much.

It produces nearly 400bhp and in a car the size of the RS 3 — think Hot Wheels — that means 0 to 62mph is dealt with in about no time at all. The potential top speed is 174mph unless you want it to be 155mph. I’m not sure why the former is an option, but it is. Of course for many years there have been Audis that could travel quickly in a straight line, but in the recent past we’ve started to see Audis that can go round corners quickly as well. This is another. With sensors and algorithms on hand to decide which of the four wheels gets the power, the RS 3 is a car that just flies down a country lane. It’s a joy.

It also feels beautifully made and, provided you leave it in Comfort mode, it’s firm but not hideously bumpy. However, there are two reasons why I could not and would not buy this car. Well, three, if you include the £45,250 price tag. That is a lot for a car of this size, no matter how much grip’n’go it’s got.

But worse is the sat nav system. Even when you’re used to it — and I am — it’s a fiddle to use. You have to take two steps backwards all the time to move one step forwards. It needs to be simplified.

And then there are the brakes, which screeched every time I went near the pedal. You may say this is a one-off and that the car cannot be dismissed because of a scratched pad or an errant pedal. True enough, but this is the third Audi RS on the trot that’s come to me with the same problem.

To try to drive round it, I found myself coasting in neutral up to red lights, but this is tricky in London because a Prius usually arrives on the scene from nowhere and you have to brake to miss it. So then I adopted a last-of-the-late-brakers attitude, cruising up to the stop sign and then jamming on the brakes at the last moment.

This rarely stopped the screeching, but at least when you do a sudden emergency stop, you don’t have to put up with the racket for long. It did, however, alarm quite a few other road users and I’d like to take this moment to apologise for being, for one week only, the worst driver in the country.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-jeremy-clarkson-review-audi-rs-3-saloon-0sw86x8gq

[RedMoon11]

THE CLARKSON REVIEW: 2017 PORSCHE PANAMERA TURBO
An absolute must if you're all out of lust

Published 29/30 October 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson




www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-porsche-panamera-turbo-6w3kcfzq8
www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-porsche-panamera-turbo-2/

[RedMoon11]

THE GRAND TOUR’S RICHARD PORTER REVIEWS THE 2017 MERCEDES-AMG GLE 63 S COUPÉ
Mr Big in pumps, a 2-ton twinkletoes

Published 10 November 2017
By Richard Porter



www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/grand-tours-richard-porter-reviews-2017-mercedes-amg-gle-63-s-coupe/

[RedMoon11]

The Clarkson Review: Ferrari GTC4Lusso
Beastly beauty needs a handsome plinth

Published 12/ 28 November 2017
By Jeremy Clarkson




www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/clarkson/clarkson-review-2017-ferrari-gtc4lusso/

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-clarkson-review-ferrari-gtc4lusso-s03l6qffr