Mullet on the Road

Long Term Test: 2004 Smart Roadster 80

2011-11-23T18:46:00.001Z

Ever wanted to find out what 18 months of living day-to-day with a tiny, plastic, effeminate, French-built car can do to a man? Head over to www.auto-journals.com. If you're considering a Smart Roadster as a daily means of transport then you might just find the latest journal update I've posted over there to be of some use. It's on the front page as of right now, but once it's gone you can click here to go direct to the article.

History Lesson: 1986 Peugeot 205 XS

2011-03-27T19:49:00.000+01:00

Quick Summary

Always in the shadow of its classic-status GTi brothers, it’s hard to enjoy because it just reminds you of what you haven’t got. Do it properly and get a 1.9.

The Story

My dad was old-school before old-school was cool. A fierce traditionalist, legend had it that he once punched a fellow historian to the ground for not pronouncing ‘Nazi’ with a Churchill-style soft 'z'. And whilst the truth probably involved a little less punching and a little more muttering of “Bloody German sympathiser bastard” under his breath, the fact remained that in almost every aspect of his life he was as straight-laced as they come. Every aspect, that is, except for cars.

See, whereas most men of his constitution would have been wafting round in a highly respectable and thoroughly British Jag XJ, he could instead be found throughout the 80s indulging a peculiarly juvenile weakness for those new-fangled contraptions known as hot hatches. By the end of that decade he’d hauled up the heady heights of the hot-hatch hierarchy and reached something of a pinnacle in the shape of a 205 1.9 GTi. It was by some margin the fastest thing he’d ever owned; significantly quicker than his previous rides, which had included arcane delights like an Alfasud Green Cloverleaf, Escort RS1600i and Renault 11 Turbo. The Pug was finished in proper 80s flat-white with the obligatory red bumper stripe and to my teenage mind it was, quite simply, the badger’s nadgers. Yes, it had low-speed driveline shunt so bad it felt like the engine was going to rip itself off the front of the car. Yes, the doors closed with a noise like a metal dustbin lid. Yes, it had all the forgiveness of Joseph Goebbels if you lifted a little mid-corner. But I still refused to talk to him for weeks after he chopped it in for a Nissan Sunny GTi two years later.

It was therefore somewhat predictable that I had aspirations for my first proper car to be a 205 GTi. It was also equally predictable that after wasting 3 years of my life as a workshy malingering student, driving only cars that belonged to other people, I had resolutely failed to accumulate any kind of no claims bonus. Insurance quotes for a 205, with this being the recession-blown early 90s, were coming out at roughly the price of a small house in Wales. Clearly, an alternative option was required. Initially, a Citroen Visa GTi was my preferred choice. Essentially a 205 1.6 GTi that had been beaten repeatedly and remorselessly with the ugly stick, it was probably the only car in history that even quad headlamps couldn’t save from aesthetic disaster. Girls turned away in disgust. Children pointed and laughed. Old men were quietly sick on their shoes. It was, truly, one of the most hideous-looking cars ever to have disgraced the 80s. But none of that mattered to me. It was a legitimate hot hatch that said GTi on the back. And because of its utter lack of desirability, it was dirt cheap to insure.

I went to see a few. The first one was finished in three different shades of white and about forty different shades of orange rust. The second one leaned to the left harder than Ken Livingstone, made a very strange smell when running and the front bumper fell off when I opened the bonnet. The third one actually caught fire on the test drive. Deciding to allow the gods of inauspiciousness to influence my decision, I returned to the drawing board. In those days before the distractions of the internet and Auto Trader online, it didn’t take long to drift back to thoughts of a 205. And when the local paper turned up an early-model 205 XS in flat white, with those cracking little factory-fit steel wheels, I was reaching for my overdraft immediately.

Being an early model, it had the 80hp twin-carb engine which was ditched after about a year of production for a superior single-carb model. With no internet forums around to dispense such nuggets of useful information, I remained blissfully ignorant of what exactly I was buying. In any case, on the test drive as an inexperienced youngster it felt ballistic, with the 80s-soft suspension letting the front rear up like a speedboat when I floored it in first or second. After purchase, the reality turned out to be somewhat different - it was only ever going to be a luke-warm cousin to its hot-hatch 1.6 and 1.9 relatives. Not helped by the fact that the twin-carbs went out of tune quicker than an X-Factor audition, my initial awe turned rapidly to disappointment in its straight-line ability.

Sadly, it never really made up for that with handling prowess either. It was fun, but felt a bit soft and curiously unwieldy. Perhaps it was because I’d spent 2 years bombing round in a little Mini. Maybe it was the still-fresh memories of Dad’s 1.9 GTi. It might even have been that my 205 had been more abused than its 36,000 miles and one lady owner would suggest, given that it had an uncharacteristic tendency to understeer wildly when pressing on. However, in the ignorance of youth, ideas like changing the rubber or checking the geometry were simply beyond my ken.

As a daily drive and weekend warrior, the 205 clocked up a fair few miles. It was a little rattly inside, although to my knowledge nothing actually fell off. The temp gauge developed a mind of its own and the interior illumination was apparently fitted with Christmas tree bulbs, given its tendency to twinkle on and off. Warm starting was temperamental and the rear hatch needed some persuasion to shut. However, in the general scheme of Gallic build ‘quality’ it was certainly the least worst of the French cars I owned.

Not that I had it for very long in the end. In a flash of delusional, narcissistic fuckwittery - and exhibiting the utter lack of resilience for which I now pour scorn on today’s useless Generation Y - I decided to opt out of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking daily grind that was ‘graduate training’ in the retail sector to pursue my teenage dreams of being a rock star. And therefore, with the dole queue beckoning, the 205 had to go. Of course these things never work out as planned and I ended up in a covers band playing soft rock. In my head, I sold my soul for rock’n’roll. The truth was rather more prosaic: I sold my car for AOR.

Ratings

|❺|A-Road Overtaking
|❻|B-Road Blasting
|❺|City Driving
|❹|Long Distance Comfort
|❻|Reliability
|❼|Stealth Factor
|❻|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Twin single-choke carbs needed two tuning services in the 6 months I owned the car just to keep them balanced. The revised XS that followed my version had a new engine with a big twin-choke single carb instead, which made 5bhp more.

● Early cars like mine were only made for a year between ’86 and ’87. They had a black XS decal on the side instead of the red one on later cars. There was an XT version also kicking around that was basically the same as mine with a less sporty interior, and a GT which was a 5-door with the same engine.

● Compared to its contemporary D-reg Fords and Vauxhalls, rust didn’t seem to be an issue for my 205.

● It sold within days to the first viewer, for the full asking price; the warm-hatch market had kicked off in earnest by 1994.

● I never really bothered to measure economy; with leaded petrol at 50-odd pence per litre it wasn’t that much of a concern. I probably averaged around 30mpg.

● Despite its lack of outright pace, it did manage to convey me from North London to South Leeds in under 2 hours, one deserted Christmas night in 1993. With the ultra-short gearing this was neither a quiet, economical nor refined experience.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? No. It was a decent enough car in its own way and despite my disappointment, in reality it probably wasn’t that far off the pace of the 1.6 GTi. But compromise cars like the XS just lead to bedevilment - they constantly remind you of what you're missing; stirring up malignant, green-eyed thoughts from the deep, dark recesses of your twisted inferiority complex... So, if I was to do it again, it would have to be the 1.9 or nothing.

Retrospective: 1997 Subaru Impreza Turbo 2000

2011-03-27T19:43:00.000+01:00

Quick Summary

A fantastic hand-holding induction into the world of real performance. Friendlier than a Labrador puppy on MDMA.

The Story

At the turn of the millennium two hundred horsepower was considered to be, well, quite a lot. Contemporary differential technology and pre-RevoKnuckle suspension know-how suggested that front-wheel-drive would simply nevercope with anything more than that figure without collapsing into an undriveable, torque-steering catastrophe. Hot hatches of the time therefore tended not to stray much above the 180bhp mark, making that magical 200bhp figure a kind of threshold above which you entered serious performance territory – strictly the preserve of the big boys where the power went at least partially to the rear wheels.

As such, ten years ago a UK-spec Impreza with 208bhp was still considered by most to be a seriously fast car. In fact it had already been trumped by the Germans, not to mention the Jap-import specials from Mitsubishi, Nissan and, indeed, Subaru themselves but boy, did I still believe the hype about the standard Impreza. I’d wanted one since its arrival in the early 90s when it had been the stealthy preserve of well-informed, mildly eccentric doctors who revelled in its ability to give colleagues’ contemporary Porsches and Ferraris a run for their B-road money. And whilst its rally-boosted appeal by the end of that decade was rather broader than its early avant-garde, left-field position; the 90s Impreza was still highly desirable and a long way from its latter-day status as a council-estate turbo shed with a fart-can exhaust and no insurance.

5-door shape less obvious than saloon.

So, nearing the end of my 20s and at last becoming solvent, the realisation that I might actually be able to fulfil my dream and own a genuine, honest-to-god, Premier League performance car was something of a thrill. It would be a leap in performance of such magnitude that it would surely catapult me straight into a world of instant respect, adulation and adoration from my peers. Men would want to be me. Ladies would want to be with me. After years of underachievement, I would finally have arrived. Jesus. Isn’t it funny the crap you believe when you’re young, stupid and a bit of a twat? Although to be honest I wasn’t even that young, so it must have just been stupidity and twattishness. Whatever. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about the prospect of car ownership, either before or since.

I bought mine from a Lincolnshire farmer, following a fabulously sphincter-clenching demonstration of its roadholding abilities around single-track fenland roads bordered by water-filled dykes. Every time I nearly put my foot through the passenger footwell in an instinctive braking reaction, he just planted the accelerator and let the AWD pull the car round. I remember glancing across and seeing 120 on one particular straight stretch shortly before he achieved lift-off over a hump. And all the while he was regaling me with tales of his B-road ‘kills’ and cheerily pointing out how much more robust the Scooby was than his Delta Integrale, as the Impreza was only on its second clutch and third set of disks in under 40,000miles… I didn’t care. All I could think was: If I survive the next 10 minutes, I simply must buy this car.

Enormous fog lights often fell victim to low-flying Norfolk tractor stones.

For the first few months I was on Cloud Nine, although of course in reality it was closer to Cloud Cuckoo. We all remember Hammond’s legendary Top Gear “I am a driving god” moment - well, that was me in my Impreza in the year 2000. Talk about believing your own hype. Still a slave to those magazine-published 0-60 times, I genuinely believed I was in one of the fastest cars on the planet. Of course actually achieving that ‘official’ time for the dash to 60 was a black art requiring perfect co-ordination and zero mechanical sympathy. I probably achieved it only once, and even then it was an accident involving an unfortunately-timed sneeze and an involuntary clutch-sidestep which led to me shooting onto a roundabout with the sort of neck-snap you get from a nasty rear-end shunt. Of course, in my strange little reality bubble it just built on the Impreza’s unassailable reputation in my head: “My car’s so fast it gave me whiplash”

As time went on I began to realise that, once past the initial launch stage, the straight-line performance was somewhat less than that AWD-skewed 0-60 figure intimated. In fact, I slowly began to discover that it was somewhat less than many other, depressingly ordinary vehicles. From a rolling start at dual-carriageway speeds it struggled to out-drag all manner of mundanities; shirt-and-tie monkeys would often look very pleased with themselves after keeping up in a Vectra V6. Of course, to console myself I fell back on the stock Scoobynet response of “Ah, but in the twisties…” which kept me going for a few more weeks, until I was comprehensively out-pointed on my own favourite Hethel B-Road by a chap in a 2-litre Mondeo estate. I persisted for a while with the feeble and unlikely excuse that as he had just pulled out of the Lotus factory he must have been one of their test-driving gods. But the fact was, I just got owned by someone who had a better understanding of their car’s limits than I did. And balls of steel.

1996 facelift interior a slight step up from agricultural original.

At this point the response of a sensible, mature driver would have been to seek some tuition to bring my own confidence and skill up to match the not inconsiderable abilities of my car. I was, of course, neither sensible nor mature; I was a twat. The idea of tuition sounded way too much like an admission of some kind of fault with my driving ability, which of course as a twenty-something male simply could not be countenanced. So I decided to blame the car and started saving for an Evo instead. My supercar-crushing Impreza fantasy was well and truly over. I had gone, almost overnight, from delusion to disillusion.

Of course, the truth about the Impreza was nowhere near either of my bipolar opinions. It wasn’t the invincible rally-bred hero that I initially worshipped but neither was it the slow, flaccid pretender that I thought it had become. In retrospect, I can see that the benign, sure-footed, friendly poise which I felt was limiting my progress was actually just the car soaking up my most inept efforts to misjudge entry speeds or get on the power too early. So whilst I may have thought towards the end of my ownership that I wanted a more tail-happy, adjustable stance, the reality was that if I’d had that from the start I'd have been upside-down in a ditch in the first week of ownership.

Looking back now, I can probably appreciate the car’s abilities better than I ever did at the time. Yes, the criticisms levelled at the Impreza from more ‘advanced’ drivers about its default position of understeer were accurate - hell, in 2001 I was probably bitching on about it myself. But now I think they (and I) missed the point. The truth is that Subaru got the specification spot-on for the Impreza’s target audience. They knew they were dealing with rank amateurs who would, like me, invariably be graduating from front-wheel drive. And, knowing this, they made the safe, forgiving Impreza perfect for its de facto training-pants role of My First Real Performance Car™.

Ratings

|❽|A-Road Overtaking
|❽|B-Road Blasting
|❻|City Driving
|❽|Long Distance Comfort
|❾|Reliability
|❸|Stealth Factor
|❽|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● In my brief pre-purchase research, I worked out that the post-96 facelift models, with their more aggressive nose treatment and proper sports seats, were rather more desirable than the original with its dull face and tweedily-agrarian interior.

● The ridiculous dinner-plate foglights were useless and, in Norfolk, fell victim to tractor debris on a tiresomely regular basis, at least before I invested in some plastic guards.

● In the strangely named but accurate Reddish Blue, I loved the 5-door shape. Many people thought it was a weird-looking thing but it was just more subtle than the 4-door. It had the optional 16” wheels as well, which beefed-up the looks considerably.

● It was the first time I’d owned a car which didn’t break down. This was truly a novel experience. Its hard-driven life in Lincolnshire had evidently prepared it nicely for whatever abuse it would suffer at my hands.

● Low to mid 20s mpg wasn’t great by today’s standards, but it wasn’t so bad back in the day. In any case, buying this type of car and worrying about fuel costs is a fool’s game.

● Other than routine servicing and the foglights already mentioned, it needed tyres, pads and two rear shocks. The clutch was on its last legs by the time I got rid of it too. Not bad for a car that had racked up over 90k miles.

● It had a cruising ‘sweet-spot’ of somewhere around 100mph, which exerted a strange magnetic pull towards that speed every time I was on the motorway. Cost me 6 points during my ownership; two 3-pointers that were both lucky escapes.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Yes, absolutely, if I could afford the fuel costs. For swift, safe, secure transport in tricky conditions there's nothing better.

An Emotional Rollerskate

2011-02-27T18:06:00.000Z

After 4 months and 5000 miles in the dinkily-feminine French-built fancy, nothing had broken or fallen off back in November which was a pleasant surprise. However, Smart ownership was taking its toll on my self-respect, with some serious questions being raised about my eligibility for true petrolhead status and, indeed, my eligibility for classification as, well, a man. The full, anally-fixated article is available on Auto Journals here.

History Lesson - Peugeot 104 SL

2011-02-27T17:04:00.002Z

Quick Summary

A shocking education in just how far car design and production has come since the 70s. Every journey left you either nearly dead or wishing that you were.

The Story

The 104 was the vehicle in which I learned to drive - back in the days when driving lessons consisted of your dad taking you round a deserted car park and shouting at you. Even back then, the 11-year old 104 was a relic from an earlier age. A car from a time when flat navy blue paint was considered quite stylish; when tan vinyl seats with cloth inserts were the height of small-car chic; when car manufacturers still did truly crazy stuff like converting the clock found in lesser 1.0 models into a tiny 2-inch tachometer for the SL, presumably to help owners tame the heady output of the 1.1’s fifty whole horsepower.

And it’s cars like the 104 which make all those supercilious journo-types bray on about how there’s no such thing as a truly crap modern car any more. Because when you think about it, they’re right. Remembering the 104 reminds you how, only a generation ago, it was acceptable to design and build a car which could achieve approximately 45 degrees of lateral body roll whilst keeping all four wheels on the ground. It reminds you that it was normal for speeds over 60mph to transmit levels of NVH that would today be classed as an industrial hazard. And of course it prompts you to recall that, not so very long ago, cars simply didn’t do the whole mollycoddling thing with airbags, ABS and electronic aids. No, back then, they really were dangerous things.

Our particular 104 illustrated this quite nicely, being fitted with the optional upgrade of a Schrödinger braking system. Owners of contemporary British Leyland motors from the 70s may recognise the functionality this system offered. Before initiating any pedal action, the entire braking system existed in a state of quantum superposition – it was simultaneously both working and not working at the same time. Only the act of braking itself would trigger the collapse of the quantum wave function necessary to determine whether or not, for any given instance of pedal operation, the brakes would actually be applied.

My father, not being much of a scientist, refused to believe this sort of claptrap and insisted instead that both my mother and I kept pressing the accelerator by mistake. Even after my mother had gently introduced the front of the 104 to the rear of a Cortina Estate and, on another occasion, introduced it rather less gently into the boot of an unfortunate Mini, good old dad stuck to his guns. In fact, he only relented after finally experiencing the terror of quantum decoherence himself when he took the infernal thing up the road to get some petrol and found himself unexpectedly bouncing over a roundabout with the middle pedal firmly pinned to the bulkhead.

Amazingly, perhaps taking inspiration from Philip Larkin, my parents seemed quite happy to allow me to continue driving around in this godforsaken deathtrap. After a cursory inspection by a local mechanic who - not being a quantum mechanic - was unable to find anything wrong, we just carried on. “Don’t panic, son, just pump the pedal a few times if it happens again.” Yes indeed; they fuck you up, your mum and dad. Although most usually stop short of allowing their offspring to die horribly in a burning fireball of tangled wreckage. Fortunately, before I got the chance to come to any real harm I discovered the 104’s hitherto unseen terminal illness whilst cleaning the inside one day. On lifting the driver’s thick rubber floor mat, I was greeted not by the expected sight of carpet, nor even of bare metal floorpan; instead, I was presented with an unfettered square-foot view of our driveway’s tarmac, scarily-framed in ragged orange metal.

I had visions of following in the famous footsteps of my Uncle David who, according to family legend, once pulled up at a set of lights and fell clean through the bottom of his rotten Austin 1100, seat and all. With this in mind, I finally managed to persuade my father to pass the perilous Pug on to a local scrappy where it was, presumably, cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. Sadly, despite the 104’s definition of driving enjoyment failing to extend any further than occasionally scaring me shitless, my time with it was insufficiently traumatic to prevent further dalliances with vehicles constructed by our cousins across the Channel. But that’s another story. Or two. Or three…

Ratings

|❶|A-Road Overtaking
|❶|B-Road Blasting
|❸|City Driving
|❶|Long Distance Comfort
|❷|Reliability
|❽|Stealth Factor
|❶|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Got nicknamed Herbie, as the interior had a most peculiar smell of chives which never diminished in all the time we had it. Seriously, chives. Only the French…

● Spare wheel was kept under the bonnet on top of the tiny engine.

● Was perhaps stronger than it looked, given that it sustained only minor cosmetic damage in both encounters with the back ends of other vehicles.

● Acceleration and overtaking ability were minimal. In any case, you didn’t want to go too fast because then you’d have to try and slow down again.

● Number of roadside recoveries needed: Amazingly, none.

● Comically soft ride was probably quite comfortable by 1978 standards, at least in a straight line. However, introduce some lateral G and the lean angle would have you desperately trying not to slide sideways off your seat. Roundabouts were invariably taken like a special-school minibus; your passengers howling in terror with faces pressed up hard against the side windows.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? No. Although I seriously doubt if there are any left running in the UK, so the question is probably redundant.

History Lesson: 1978 Austin Mini 1275GT

2010-12-03T10:14:00.000Z

Quick Summary

The motoring equivalent of a 70s porn film: Low-budget, crudely chopped-together and very, very hairy.

The Story

My personal pinnacle of Mini-dom. A bored-out MED 1340 engine had all the right bits and after a bit of rolling-road carb-needle filing it fired out over 80 horsepower, which was quite enough to mix it with the hot-hatch brigade. Sure, it had its foibles. The steering was heavy, there was apparently no suspension and reverse gear was harder to find than Lord Lucan. It gave you tinnitus on the motorway, a herniated spine on a bumpy B-road and a coronary when braking from high speed. Naturally, it caught fire from time to time. But still... I couldn’t help but love it every time I lost a vastly more expensive machine around my favourite B-road twisties.

Crying out for a Capri quad-headlamp conversion?

I was going to sell it and embark on a sleeper project - a Clubman estate with the 2.0 16V Vauxhall engine conversion which used to be de rigeur for Mini-mentalists before the days of VTEC swaps and bike-power. But somewhere along the line I just got... old. There’s no doubt that really being able to enjoy a Mini is strictly the preserve of the under-25s. Once you start having real responsibilities, you need a mode of transport which will get you to your destination without making you stink of unburnt petrol. Or burnt carpet. You begin to tire of the weekend spanner work, and the Mr Bean jokes start to wear a little thin. Ultimately, you come to realise that whilst a young chap in an old Mini looks cool, funky and well-endowed, an old guy just looks he can’t afford a proper car.

Mini magic for mechanical muppets... even I could DIY.

I managed to find an enthusiastic young student-type to sell mine to – he even succeeded in haggling the price up in his excitement – but in the years since then it’s become clear that today’s youngsters just don’t seem to be interested in Minis like they once were. Cheap and cheeky motoring apparently isn’t enough for the goldfish generation, whose attention-span deficits can only be filled by chrome bling, multi-screen ICE installs and neon washer jets. I suspect it is this which has rather hastened the disappearance of a car which was, only a few years ago, quite a common sight on our roads. Without cash-strapped teenagers’ supply of creative energy and enthusiasm in keeping the ageing little beasties going, the classic Mini has already become the preserve of bearded men with large tool collections and David Vizard pin-ups in their garages. Which means the cars will be little more than tinker toys, brought out a couple of times a year to park in a field with lots of other beards to swap tales of filing carburettor needles and polishing rocker covers. It’s a shame. I can’t say I truly miss Mini ownership, but I do miss seeing them about. Our roads are a duller place without them.

Ratings

|❺|A-Road Overtaking
|❽|B-Road Blasting
|❺|City Driving
|❹|Long Distance Comfort
|❹|Reliability
|❺|Stealth Factor
|❽|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Additional ‘fireproof’ sound deadening material was fitted but had to be returned to the manufacturer after it caught fire under the bonnet. I got my money back, and just put up with the noise from then on.

● Fire extinguisher number 2 was needed when a badly-fitted fuel line popped off the pump, allowing fuel to squirt straight onto the hot manifold.

● Extra long 2.9 diff took the edge off acceleration but made it possible to keep up with 3rd lane traffic on the motorway.

● 12” Revolution alloys still the best-looking wheels on a Clubman.

● Quick-shift setup on gearbox massively reduced lever travel but didn’t make reverse any easier to get.

● Once managed to hit a massive pothole in Barnsley. All four plastic wheel arch extensions fell off. Later discovered that the impact also crushed both front rubber suspension cones.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Yes. If I'm ever in the financial position to have a multi-car garage, a high-performance Mini would almost certainly be in there somewhere. And yes, it would have a Clubman front.

History Lesson: 1982 Austin Mini Mayfair

2010-12-03T10:07:00.001Z

Quick Summary

Chronically unreliable, hopelessly slow, uncomfortable, noisy and rusted to buggery. Yet still curiously impossible to hate.

The Story

Clove Brown was a genius colour. I can only assume that back in the late 70s some British Leyland engineers were asked to address the issue of their cars rotting away but the development money had all gone on beer and sandwiches, so they had to make it cheap. Their solution was truly inspired – just paint the cars exactly the same colour as rust and nobody will notice. It was remarkably successful; up to about 6 feet away, a Clove Brown Mini could look absolutely mint despite the usual rotting A-panels, sills, doors and headlight surrounds.

My own example was 11 years old when I bought it. It could never be called a reliable car but with a comprehensive selection of tools and spares in the boot it was at least always possible to fix at the roadside. In damp conditions it had a tendency to backfire at amusingly inopportune moments, on one occasion sending a gaggle of ne’er do wells scuttling for cover outside one of Barnsley’s less salubrious drinking establishments, evidently fearing a drive-by was in progress. On another occasion, an electrical fire caused by the crepitated wiring loom completely gutted the original beige-velour interior. For most cars, this would have been the end of the road but for my Mini it was nothing a bit of spare lounge carpet, a home-made MDF dash and a second-hand bucket seat couldn’t fix. I never did get rid of the smell and the roof remained without headlining, but the burnt ash stains covering the rear windows were actually quite cool in a privacy-glass type of way.

Rust only visible during treatment, as seen here on the door.

The little brown beastie racked up a fair few miles, limping from one blown electric circuit to another until eventually catastrophic engine failure ended its days. After several weeks of pinking and popping that had evaded diagnosis, I found myself bunny-hopping down a hill accompanied by a soundtrack last heard at the O.K. Corral. I was also being followed by an impatient fellow in a shiny new Vectra. Clearly unfamiliar with the vagaries of BL-powered forward motion, he failed to understand that hazard warning lights on anything built in Longbridge indicated that an exclusion zone of several metres should be respected in view of the likelihood of components being ejected at some speed from the stricken vehicle.

As he followed a couple of feet from my rear, flashing his lights and gesticulating, I tried one final application of full-throttle to get things moving again. At this point, after 13 years of misery and toil, 998cc of cast-iron A-series finally let go and exited stage-left with a deafening but highly gratifying bang. Gratifying, because the explosive force of the engine’s expiry was sufficient to dislodge a frankly astonishing quantity of rust, swarf and debris from the inside of the exhaust, heating it until it glowed bright orange before finally making a spectacular firework-style exit from the pipe. All over Vectra-man’s beautifully polished bonnet.

The cheap, if temporary, alternative to Cooper bonnet stripes.

Strangely, despite the evident damage to his car, he didn’t bother stopping to exchange details but instead just gave me a good blast on the horn before roaring past to his next sales appointment. I guess his fleet manager had a few questions later about the Vectra’s serious case of paint-loss acne. Anyway, I was left to push the dead Mini downhill the rest of the way home, where it was collected a few days later by the local scrappie who stripped the usable parts off it (both of them) and left it to decompose peacefully in his field. I wasn’t overly upset – for £400 it had a good innings, and my new 1275GT was nearly ready to collect from its restoration…

Ratings

|❷|A-Road Overtaking
|❺|B-Road Blasting
|❼|City Driving
|❸|Long Distance Comfort
|❶|Reliability
|❾|Stealth Factor
|❽|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Originally bought from the dodgiest of dodgy car dealers in deepest Bradford, who looked and sounded exactly like Steve Coogan as Paul Calf. I think he may even have said “bag of shite” at some point in the transaction.

● Fitting a 12-inch three-spoke steering wheel to replace the bus-sized original transformed the driving experience. Sadly, the car was broken into by some utter spacktard who tried to pull the wheel off its hub without undoing the nut. It was bent completely out of shape, and after I’d tried hammering it back round it ended up looking more like the legendary Allegro ‘quartic’ wheel.

● Despite being desperately unsuited to long-distance travel, with the aid of some earplugs and extra cushions it conveyed my wife and I many thousands of miles around Northern England and Scotland.

● Strangely, it was the best car I have driven in snow. When caught out in the great Yorkshire Freeze of 1995, its narrow width allowed me to squeeze between lines of stranded traffic, with the tiny little tyres somehow finding enough traction to keep pulling me along.

● After accepting that I was losing a battle with rust that not even Clove Brown could obscure, I hand painted the entire car in textured black Hammerite. I then sprayed all the trim purple, for reasons which are sadly lost to me now. It looked like a gay Darth Vader.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? A Mini of some sort? Quite possibly. But, unless I really fall on hard times again, it's not likely to be a rust-ridden Mayfair.

History Lesson: 1975 Mini 1000

2010-12-03T09:55:00.002Z

Quick Summary

Satin black way before satin black was cool. Cheap, cheeky and ultimately expendable – perfect London transport.

The Story

My first Mini. Well, it was technically owned by a housemate but it was driven mostly by me. Living in London at the time, it was ideal for making rapid progress round the capital back in those pre-Gatso days when the Highway Code was open to interpretation and policemen were human beings instead of automated decision-tree engines. No, officer, I fear you are mistaken - the vehicle was most certainly not up on two wheels as I negotiated that mini-roundabout. Yes, officer, I accept that “attempting to win a bet that it is possible to get to Streatham from Camden in 10 minutes at 2am” would not be considered extenuating circumstances by any reasonable judge. No, officer, I will not do it again. Yes, officer, thank you kindly sir, your discretion is much appreciated on this occasion…

Originally bright orange, this particular Mini had been lovingly hand-sprayed in rattle-can black, with hubcap-free steel wheels and a replacement front grille made of a mesh usually used to restrain poultry. This combination successfully broadcast to other road users that I was not to be confused with someone who would give a shit about exchanging a bit of paintwork. Better still, unlike the average old banger, the Mini’s cheeky, non-threatening charm meant I could freely drive everywhere like a complete cock without getting verbally abused or shot at.

It was a survivor. The starter solenoid often had to be bypassed by shorting the connections with a tyre iron, but the little A-series always started. The distributor, with a bit of help from the obligatory Mini accessory of a Marigold rubber glove, allowed travel in wet or dry conditions. It even got us home when the clutch slave cylinder popped on one of those random midnight jaunts that you do when you’re 20 and stupid. It made it back to South London from Tunbridge Wells with the aid of some crash-changing, a little creative interpretation of small-hours traffic lights and one spectacular running-bump start that may or may not have involved my housemate leaping through the passenger window of a moving car head first. Allegedly.

When the house share came to an end, the Mini reverted back to its legal owner who left it rotting on his father’s drive for a year before heartlessly scrapping it. I felt a sense of genuine loss at this – it was, to me, a tragic waste of a perfectly serviceable car. And I vowed there and then that my Mini days were not yet over…

Ratings

|❷|A-Road Overtaking
|❺|B-Road Blasting
|❾|City Driving
|❸|Long Distance Comfort
|❹|Reliability
|❿|Stealth Factor
|❽|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Rear light cluster from a later Mini had an integrated reversing light, operated manually by an interior switch. Lots of fun at traffic lights.

● With 30-something horsepower and drum brakes all round it was surprisingly capable when it came to transporting five people around urban environments, just so long as you left plenty of braking distance and avoided steep hills.

● After some inept thieving gobshite pinched the stereo, destroying both door-lock cylinders in the process, the car was left open at all times. With no steering lock and a broken barrel on the ignition, it didn’t need a key to start either. Despite being parked overnight in the red-light district of Streatham for most of its time with us, it was never actually stolen.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? If I had to live in London again, I still couldn't think of a better way to get around.

Retrospective: Honda Civic 1.8 Vti-S

2010-11-27T15:47:00.000Z

Quick Summary

A one trick pony. But an 8100rpm redline was a good trick.

The Story

Bought as a daily hack to keep some drudgery-miles off the Evo, my 5-door Civic was something of a strange beast. It looked just like grandad’s Rover 400 but would rev to over 8000 and could pull 70 in 2nd. Not your conventional hot hatch then. However, for what was to be an ostensibly ‘sensible’ second car which could also provide some occasional entertainment, it had a certain amount of Q-car appeal.

The Vti-S model was just a cosmetically-tweaked Vti. The S came in one colour only - the comically-named Pirate’s Black. This was an interesting colour, mainly because in most lights it wasn’t actually black at all. Perhaps aubergine, at a push, but still kind of hard to describe. My wife, being Northern and thus not afraid of censure for political incorrectness, got straight to the point and called it Robert Mugabe Brown. Offensive perhaps, but scarily accurate in bright sunlight... The other cosmetic differences of the S designation were negligible – a silly aluminium gearknob and an incongruously-aggressive front bumper treatment that didn’t really work. It was about as intimidating as your gran in a balaclava and with such a frumpy 5-door shape behind it, looked just about as wrong too.

Stare at the patterned fabric and you could see a 'magic eye' picture.

Of course, being a Honda, it was the engine which took centre-stage. Whilst it had more torque and a smoother cam changeover than the frenetic 1.6 found in the 2- and 3-door Civics, the 1.8 was still more schizo than Syd Barrett, if a little less psychedelic. In fact, in soundtrack terms it was emo-core long before emo-core was cool, singing sweet harmonies one minute and then bellowing like a raging goat the next; one of those engines that could simply make you laugh out loud, repeatedly, although you were never quite sure if you were laughing with it or at it. Still, every true petrolhead should experience the joy of “VTEC kicked in yo” at least once in their motoring career and doing it in a car which looked like a pensioner-perambulator only added to the entertainment.

Front splitter like broccoli down your spandex trousers - not fooling anyone.

If the truth be told, however, the entertainment was pretty one-dimensional. The Civic really was all about that engine, with everything else feeling a bit half-hearted by comparison. Yes, it handled tidily enough but the steering was still tuned for geriatrics, with a very slow rack lending an air of stodgy imprecision to the business of cornering. It did have the best gearchange of any manual car that I’d owned but then it needed to be good, as making rapid progress on a country road was a challenging, often frustrating experience that demanded constant downchanges to keep things spinning along. Despite the great shift action, the ratios themselves were spectacularly poorly-chosen, dropping you straight out of the VTEC zone if you slightly mistimed a change.

Inside, the half-hearted approach continued. The part-leather interior could have been quite classy had it not been ruined by crazily-patterned cloth inserts. The Rover-style plastic ‘walnut’ dash insert found in lesser models was replaced with a curious blue/black affair that would have been quite a stylish colour had it not inexplicably retained a wood-effect pattern. The multi-speaker stereo would probably have sounded quite good if it had been capable of playing anything other than cassettes. And the attention-seeking alloy gear lever served no purpose other than to wake you up when you inadvertently touched it without gloves on a cold winter morning.

Metallic Pirate's Black paint was strangely brown.

In fairness, none of the Civic’s many shortcomings as a driving machine really mattered that much to me, given the purpose for which it was bought. It was reliable, practical and entertaining enough in its own limited way. However, for a second car I was rather less enamoured with the exorbitant insurance costs, expensive servicing and poor fuel economy. I came to the inevitable conclusion that running a quite-expensive car to ‘protect’ a very-expensive one from mileage depreciation was just as idiotic as everyone else had already realised. So, in the end the Civic had to go.

Did I do the sensible thing and buy a proper cheap shitter? Well, I did try. Sort of. I did start looking for a practical, economical estate car. But somehow this search got kind of hijacked along the way, when I started thinking that maybe the best alternative strategy would simply be to run two very-expensive cars and protect both from depreciation by sharing the mileage between them. In the end, in what was a frankly stunning victory for man-maths and petrolhead-logic, the Civic was replaced with an Evo 7. Epic win.

Ratings

|❻|A-Road Overtaking
|❹|B-Road Blasting
|❼|City Driving
|❹|Long Distance Comfort
|❽|Reliability
|❼|Stealth Factor
|❻|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Insurance was inexplicably expensive. Thinking it might have been something to do with its limited-run S designation, I queried the cost of a normal Vti, but it came out the same. Others reported similar stories across the whole Civic Vti range.

● 25mpg was really not good enough given the performance on tap. Even staying out of the VTEC zone failed to bring real benefits.

● In terms of reliability, of course it never broke down or failed to start. However, I do wonder whether it was possibly slightly contaminated by Rover shitness. It needed an exhaust somewhat prematurely and both front wheel bearings had gone in just over 50,000miles. The air-con compressor also packed up.

● It was not a car for motorway cruising. Although the gears were spaced too widely to keep you in the VTEC zone on the way up, 5th was still far too short for cruising quietly and economically.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Nah. I did genuinely enjoy it for what it was, but the running costs just don’t stack up for what you actually get out of it.

An Ordinary Allstar

2010-09-26T19:31:00.003+01:00

Corolla 5-Year Update

How many times do you see a car and feel a burning need to ask the owner: What in the name of Satan’s flaming scrotum possessed you to buy one of them?

Did you do it for a bet? Are you registered disabled? Were you very, very drunk? As a proud advocate of unfounded prejudice and irrational judgementalism when it comes to cars, it happens to me all the time. Dodge Nitro. Ford Fusion. BMW X1. Chrysler Neon. Golf Plus. Vauxhall Corsa. And of course the oxymoron to end them all: The Kia Soul. Just a few examples of cars which are utterly beyond my comprehension; which I just don’t get; which I simply can’t understand.

And to be fair, I’m sure many of you motoring enthusiasts would ask similar questions of my Toyota Corolla 1.6 T3 Auto. In neither-fish-nor-fowl petrol auto spec it’s something of an anomaly in modern motoring terms. It ain’t quick. It ain’t economical. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t cheap. It’s neither luxurious nor spartan; neither large nor small. On paper it falls between two stools more spectacularly than a one-legged drunkard, whilst in the flesh it projects an image so anonymous that its only possible hope of being a conversation piece would be as a prompt for discussion about how many more entertaining, efficient or aesthetic alternatives the owner could have bought for the same money.

Yet, bizarrely, it is the Corolla which has by a considerable margin achieved the status of being the car I have owned and loved for the longest time. How can this be? Even in the earliest days of my motoring life I managed to limp between a succession of unreliable but interesting sheddery. How could such a notionally boring car have found a place in my life for so long?

Hello. My name's Clive. I work in accounts. Do you like my cardigan?

I honestly don’t know, but something was there right from the beginning. Having driven to the Toyota dealer in an R34 GTR, within a few minutes of the test drive I was blown away by the Corolla. Is that the ultimate motoring non-sequitur? Maybe, but it’s true. Everything just felt right. The salesman thought I was nuts, turning up in a bright blue turbo monster and then babbling on about how great this family hatchback was. But I just couldn’t believe a shopping-trip car could feel so together.

Even now I still can’t quite put my finger on what it is that makes me like this car so much. After five years, the closest I can get is putting it down to the fact that everything just feels… easy. The super-smooth VVti engine pulls with a cleanliness that is, truly, next to Godliness. The fabulous proper torque-convertor box manages seamless changes yet still locks up to provide throttle response. The steering remains light but connected. The brakes are easy to modulate. The ride is more forgiving than Natascha Kampusch. It’s all just effortless.

There is even fun, of sorts, to be had. Planting your foot and letting the engine zing its way up to the redline is a joyful, lusty riposte to the agricultural pound-feet tractorage of a diesel rival. And rolling your way around country bends is more entertaining than it has any right to be, with a solidity and confidence in the way it tracks round corners that belies the initial layer of softness.

Is it the last word in driving enjoyment? Of course not. But it’s nowhere near as bland or boring as you probably think it is. And the very fact that it lacks the sporty pretensions of its competitors is a strength: It’s not oversprung in a pitifully misguided attempt to pass off harshness as handling. It’s not undergeared in a cynical sleight-of-hand designed to amplify the accelerative urge of an unwilling powerplant. And it’s utterly bereft of those tragic plastic appendages that so often adorn mid-range family motors in an inexcusably ineffectual attempt to give them personality.

Dirty as hell, but you'd never know to look at it. Like all the best things in life...

Of course, the Corolla was never a fashionable choice. And in this respect, the passage of time has done it few favours. Does anybody even buy 1.6 petrol-engined cars any more? Everyone wants ultra-frugal turbo 1.2s or diesels these days. And who actively desires an old-school torque-convertor slushmatic in today’s market? Those enlightened few who are prepared to sidestep the de-facto-spackto choice of a manual are increasingly likely to forego those buttery-smooth, stroke-victim-slurred gearchanges in favour of the new-found clinical efficiency of DSG or MMT or SMT.

Even the very concept of a standard family hatchback is under threat from those pesky postmodern designers with their ever-increasing diversification of tarded-up lifestyle concepts. Nissan Juke? Citroen C-Crosser? Fiat Qubo? Knobtastically cockmongerish they may be to me, but it seems like there are no end of play-hard, daddy-cool types out there ready to fill them with theirlifestyle-choice wakeboards, mountain bikes and children.

The Corolla’s response to such concerns about style is, of course, to simply outlive all the trends, fads and vogues, thus transcending the whole notion of fashion entirely. It’s built to do a job, and to carry on doing that job for a very long time. And the joy of being able to trust such a car; to really trust it, is impossible to overstate. In most cars there are niggles, rattles, little hiccups, misfires that keep you alert to the fact that you are riding in a massively complicated, interdependent set of components. But in the Corolla those reminders are just not there.

At 8 years old and after 60,000 miles, they’re still absent. The sense of robustness has not diminished. Nothing has broken. Nothing has fallen off. Everything still works. Yes, the bonnet cable has stretched a bit and now needs to be tugged harder than it used to be in order to get it to pop up. But then, isn’t that true of all of us as we get older? OK, the windscreen washer does occasionally find its flow briefly reduced to a sputtering trickle. But then, isn’t that true of...

Design by ED2. Assembly by Burnaston. Paint matching by Stevie Wonder.

Really, honestly, that’s it; the only faults. Even routine maintenance is minimal. Disks, pads and tyres all round. A couple of bulbs and an ABS sensor. An annual wash, service and MOT. Add it all up and this means that, for the first time ever, I am contemplating the notion that I might actually replace a car with another from the same manufacturer. And that really is an alien concept for me - the whole idea of brand loyalty has always been anathema. I am a man. The process of ‘researching’ my purchases for months on end is a necessity, and a highly pleasurable one at that. Artificially restricting my choices to a single manufacturer would deny me the joy of doing endless AutoTrader filter-shuffles – shuffles like the one which led directly to my recent purchase of a Smart Roadster.

But in this case there is no doubt. The Corolla will be replaced with another Toyota. Maybe an Avensis, given that its main role seems to have become longer weekend trips. Perhaps a Yaris, to keep costs down. Or maybe an Auris, just to give me the unalloyed pleasure of pronouncing it like Father Jack used to say ‘arse’.

Whatever. In the meantime I will continue to love the Corolla for its devotion to competence in a world which so often can’t be bothered. For its over-engineering in a time where we are increasingly expected to accept good enough. For its ability to make me smile unexpectedly at the most ordinary of things. And most of all; for its ability to impart the untrammelled joy of smooth, dependable, anonymous, unobtrusive motoring. I’d say we all need a bit of that in our lives. It’s good for the soul. Not that I expect you to understand…

Review: 2004 Smart Roadster - Ceci N'est Pas Une Sportscar

2010-08-04T18:11:00.000+01:00

This car is not what it looks like. And yet, after one month and one thousand miles, the love that dare not speak its name continues to flourish. The full article is now here on AutoJournals.

California Driving Part 1: The Grief of Getting Gas

2010-07-04T19:27:00.001+01:00

Having returned from another trip to California earlier this year, I soon found myself merging onto the M25 from Heathrow, reacquainting myself in a very short distance with the ultra-competitive, passive-aggressive, pig-headed bristling animosity that characterises UK motorway travel. And I pondered the fact that over the years I have clocked up a mileage around south-western USA that's well into five figures, and that generally speaking there had probably been less stress over all that considerable distance than in the 3 miles since I left the long-term airport car park. A couple of hours and several miles later, as I once again parked illegally on the hard shoulder of the M25 and sprinted up the embankment for a piss, I also pondered the fact that after all these years there are still no fucking services on the M25 between Clacket Lane and South Mimms. Life in Britain, eh? It’ll kill you in the end, but first it’ll prevent you from getting what you want…

This year, however, I was perhaps a little more positively disposed to our quaint old ways of doing things than I usually am on returning from the USA. And the reason for this can be attributed to one simple thing; in the last couple of years filling up with gas in California has become a very stressful experience. In fact, what was until recently a simple, efficient process has descended into a retarded comedy of mistrust and frustration, where success often depends more on luck than judgement or experience.

See, most filling stations in California are ‘pay at pump’ which, until a few years ago, worked very well for foreigners and locals alike. Once you’d understood that the US process was to pay before fuelling rather than afterwards like we do here, you’d simply drive up to the pump, swipe your card, fill up, get your receipt and drive off. The only gotcha for ignorant Brits was failing to realise that on some older pumps you had to pull down the lever after lifting the nozzle off. On my first trip, this led me to believe that the build-quality of American petrol pumps left something to be desired, until a kindly Bay Area local overheard me directing a stream of military language at the third pump in a row which had failed to dispense any fuel, and showed me how to pull the lever.

However, those days of innocent confusion are sadly now gone. In fact, those cumbersome levers seem to have been phased out as I hardly encountered any this year. However, a new and far more pernicious obstacle has been introduced – integrated card authorisation. Whilst ‘Chip and PIN’ hasn’t taken off out there, they are finally cottoning on to the concept of card fraud. And pumps with integrated authorisation require you to enter your Zip postal code before accepting the card. In the overall rankings of “security measures least likely to achieve their desired outcome”, this fetches up somewhere alongside employing a halibut as a guard dog. However, it’s no great shakes if you actually live in the good ol’ US of A and have a Zip code to which your card is registered – it’s a minor inconvenience at most. But if you’re one of those filthy, untrustworthy non-residents like me, it means you can no longer use your card to pay at these sorts of pumps at all. Period.

And seeing as you can’t be trusted to fill up until you’ve actually handed over your money, you now have to go in to the shop, queue up behind all the locals buying crates of Budweiser, wait for the inevitable debate with the cashier about whether the Giants will beat the Dodgers tonight, get the attendant to charge your card for the amount you intend to use i.e. “$50 on Pump 2, please” then go back out and fill up. Except if the station’s busy, you’ll have been queuing a long time and will, if you’re numerically dyslexic like me, have forgotten what number pump you’re on… no problem, just look out of the window, right? Except you’ll find that you won’t be able to see the pump number from the cashier’s window because American trucks are so bloody huge they block everything from view, so you’ll need to go back out, find what number pump you’re parked at, go back in, queue up again… then you’ll get to the cashier and they’ll say ‘Credit or Debit’ and you’ll say ‘Credit’ and they’ll tell you that they don’t accept Credit cards. At all. Despite the big Visa label on every pump. At which point you have to forcibly remind yourself that there is probably a handgun of some description under the counter, and that in any case suffocating the cashier to death with the empty 20oz bag of Cheetos that you’ve eaten in the time it’s taken you to get served is, ultimately, going to land you with a long stay in San Quentin and a rectum like a wizard’s sleeve. And yes, a family bag of Cheetos will go over a human head. I did it once for a bet.

Now the whole ‘no credit cards’ thing is, I have to admit, something which I’ve only experienced recently, along with stations which advertise two sets of prices – one for debit/cash and another higher one for credit cards. Maybe it’s always been that way and I just got lucky in never encountering one before. Maybe it’s because of the recession. Maybe this time I just ended up in the less salubrious parts of California where such behaviour has always been commonplace. Who knows. It seems to be a bit random as to which stations take credit and which don’t, although I did gain some useful information from a group of heavily-tattooed, hirsute, one-percenter-type gentlemen whom I unexpectedly encountered loitering behind the counter in a San Diego filling station. They were very helpful as it happened. They even laughed politely at my old “I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle” gag. And I walked out of the door with the useful information that, apparently, ARCO stations never take credit cards. Which, on balance, was a better outcome than my initial expectation of leaving through the window with a broken pool cue up my arse. Never judge a book by its cover, eh? Even if it's got "Honk if you've never seen a gun fired from a moving Harley" on the back...

Anyway, assuming you can find a station that is actually prepared to accept your business, you then have to guess how much fuel you need. What happens when you authorise for $50 and can only get $40 in your tank? I must admit I haven’t quite worked this one out yet. In some places, it seems that they’ll only actually take the amount you’ve used, whereas in others you seem to get stung for the full $50 for being a stupid tourist who doesn’t know the size of his fuel tank. So, to ensure you don’t overpay you end up guessing low, which annoyingly reduces the range you can travel before having to repeat the whole sorry process again. If you are determined to brim your tank, there does appear to be an alternative on offer in some stations, although certainly not all. This is to go in to the shifty-looking Hispanic cashier, get him to ‘authorise’ your card and then leave your card with him whilst you go and fill up, giving him just enough time to clone it before you come back inside to pay. So, sure, you finally get a full tank, but you also return home to a credit card statement peppered with charges for massively-oversized sportswear, moustache-trimming sets, home-tattooing kits, 20” chrome spinners (1988 Chevy Beretta fitment) and other assorted items that may or may not be associated with Chicano subculture in east LA.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the filling-station farce has ruined the joy of Californian driving because it hasn’t. But the pointlessness of it all does grate somewhat. And don’t bother trying to be clever and phoning your ‘international’ bank before you go, so they can assign a Zip code to your card and allow you to avoid all the nonsense. Because you will just end up wasting ten minutes of your life trying to explain what you want to a well-meaning but, sadly, Welsh call-centre operative who has trouble understanding the demands of life 50 miles away across the Severn, let alone 5000 miles away across the Atlantic. Probably the same script-reading bankmonkey who keeps declining to lend start-up money to budding entrepreneurs wanting to build a Welcome Break franchise on the M25 somewhere around Gerrards Cross…

Adventure Without Risk is Disneyland

2010-06-28T19:42:00.003+01:00

This post about my recent acquisition of a Smart Roadster has been moved to Auto Journals, and can now be found there along with full details of my new range of hair-care and grooming services.

Enviromiserablism: It’s time to try the bus!

2010-01-31T18:59:00.002Z

“The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis.” Yeah, I know, it’s Baudrillard again. But let’s be fair – he did speak a lot of sense. For a Frenchman, anyway. And for petrolheads, his words seem particularly apt in the midst of the war currently raging between us and the planet-savers who seek to impose their ever-more punitive restrictions on the things we hold most dear. Having been caught napping when the environmental agenda seemed to snap overnight from a minority cause to the default position, we’ve been struggling to shake off the image handed to us by the greenist media of being a rag-tag band of irresponsible speed-freaks, conspiracy-theorists, flat-earthers and oil-company funded propagandists. Indeed, it’s only in recent weeks that we seem to have regained some footing and retaken a few elements of the mainstream voice. But these are small victories in a war that we seem to have almost lost already.

But who the hell is it that we’re fighting? Did the militant car-hating lentilistas really come from out of nowhere? Perhaps not. A closer examination suggests old enemies reborn - those whom we might once have recognised as socialists, but who cast off the fail-veil of red-leftist ideology to hitch a ride on the great green gravy train. Caring little for the true tenets of Gaia, they have latched onto the environmentalist cause simply because it’s a more effective conduit for bringing guilt and shame into every aspect of modern existence than selling Socialist Worker on street corners could ever be. We should have seen it coming. Fed by bitterness and disillusionment, driven by jealous rage at the capitalist machine which so nonchalantly chewed up and spat out the Marxist spanner which they attempted to insert into its works, the left-leaning loons were always going to be desperate for a new angle to start grinding down free enterprise again. For a while they splintered off into other single-agenda causes but, lacking sufficient imagination for them to permanently shake off the tired grey shackles of communitarian ideology, their natural state remained coalescence. So when the opportunity arose to regroup under a new banner of saving the entire planet as opposed to just the poor, they fell back together. And now they will not rest until we are all so wracked with guilt at our potential for harm that we are driven into a lock-state where infinite energy is required to make the smallest decision; where our economy is so completely paralysed that it collapses back into a pre-industrial state of subsistence where we all toil mindlessly in the dirt for the greater good. Yes, this is the new take on an old revolution. And we can call it enviromiserablism.

And if there’s one single campaign which epitomises the enviromiserablist mindset then it’s that pitiful paean to self-flagellation that is “It’s time to try the bus!” Yes, the bus. That ultimate weapon of mass soul-destruction. That unparalleled badge of epic failure for any person of working age. That infernal, evil contraption whose devilry can turn a simple shopping trip into a pissily-malodorous, bone-rattling descent into the heart of darkness; a journey with the power to suck out any last vestiges of hope or joy that might still be clinging to the sides of your downward-spiralling life and flush them down the gaping maw of despair along with the tattered shreds of your self-respect, leaving you as an empty, broken husk clinging to the handrail and mumbling to strangers, “The horror, the horror...”

I mean, however despicably sanctimonious the lycra-clad pedalphiles may be as they arrive breathless and sweat-sodden on their moral high ground with a streak of mud up their back, at least cycling remains an individual, independent, personal mode of transport. At least with a chain-driven contraption you can savour that life-affirming adrenaline rush brought on by the constant imminence of your own death. At least there is the chance of some genuine joy to be had in freewheeling downhill with the wind tousling your hair. Or whistling round your inexplicably-phallic polystyrene head protector. But the bus? It has no redeeming features. It’s a relic predating Henry Ford’s four-wheeled emancipation; an anachronism which has survived purely as a means of last-resort transportation, and even then one which would have long since withered into disuse had it not been artificially propped up by subsidies, Swedes and... socialists.

The thing is, the bus doesn’t even make sense from a true environmentalist’s point of view. You can put aside the fact that many buses are old, inefficient, filthy, stinking diesels which do far more local damage to the environment with their carcinogenic particulates than a whole century of ‘climate change’ is ever likely to achieve. You can ignore the inconvenient truth that many bus journeys actually only carry a couple of piss-stinking pensioners, a mumbling care-in-the-community and a man who last bathed in 1983. By all means, pretend that all buses really are clean. Pretend they’re all full-to-capacity on every journey. It really doesn’t matter. Because you’re still left with the fact that a large, slow-moving vehicle which has to stop regularly creates huge amounts of congestion. Stop-start acceleration. Fewer mpg. More CO2. And it’s not just the string of cars stuck directly behind the bus - we all know how quickly congestion multiplies, especially when magnified by bus lanes and traffic-light priorities. Sure, the passengers might be saving a few kilograms-per-kilometre whilst they suffer, but what about the extra tonnage of emissions from all those queues?

So even if you’re daft enough to buy the whole idea that CO2 from personal transport actually makes a difference to the world’s climate, the bus only makes environmental sense in isolation. Once you take account of its impact on other traffic, it becomes a nonsense. Which is why “It’s time to try the bus” is truly an enviromiserablist message, designed only to provoke guilt and uncertainty in the mind of the car driver. And as the enviromiserablists flex their media muscles, we’ll start to see the same intentions repeated in other, equally nonsensical contexts. Don’t get a cheap flight to Spain; get a coach to Skegness instead. Don’t take your car to the supermarket; walk in the pissing rain to your local, overpriced, understocked corner shop. Don’t drive at the speed limit to get home and spend time with your family; go slower and save fuel. Or, my personal favourite: Simply drive 5 miles less per week! Yes, these are ridiculous notions, but when they become so pervasive, they are able to generate real pressure on peoples’ decision-making ability. The doubt creeps in. Which is probably why you now see a worryingly high number of guilt-tripping Park’n’Riders struggling with their bags, having paid twice as much as a city-centre car park fee for the privilege of waiting in the rain for twenty minutes at either end.

But really, it doesn’t matter too much to the enviromiserablist whether you do actually swap your nice, private, air-conditioned cocoon for the filth, noise and fetid air of public transportation, just as long as you feel a bit guilty when you’re driving. It’s not really about the environment; for them, it never was. Which is why they’re diversifying into everything from health’n’safety to planning permission; from medical ‘research’ to food ‘science’; anything and everything which can be used to squeeze the enjoyment out of life and replace it with fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s a long-term game they’re playing. Maybe a couple of decades, maybe half a century. Picking away at all the little pleasures which the free market provides; nagging at our consciences every time we spend our hard-earned; slowly but inexorably sapping the strength of the capitalist ideal which has its roots in the exchange of our labour for the pleasure-giving power of money. Because once that pleasure-giving power is overcome by guilt and fear of consequences, they can bring the whole system crashing down.

Over-dramatic hyperbole? Well, yes, of course it is. For all its desperate ambition, enviromiserablism is ultimately doomed to failure because its proponents can’t erase the fatal flaws of their socialist heritage; they still seek dull, conformist commonality instead of the diversity which is the natural state of humanity. People eventually come to resent being hectored, lectured and told to do things they don’t really want to do. We can already see some resistance starting to form naturally, as even the moron majority start to tire of the climate change con. But, let’s be in no doubt, the enviromiserablists aren’t out of ideas yet and they can do a lot more damage as they slither their way down the page into the footnotes of history. Just look at all the ground we, as motoring enthusiasts, have already lost to them; freedoms and privileges that we will never regain. So let’s remain alert to their threat even if we may ridicule and laugh at it. Let’s not forget that there can be no reconciliation or synthesis with a philosophy so diametrically opposed to our own. Let’s always remember which side we’re on. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that, for a true petrolhead, it will never be time to try the bus.

Review: 2006 Mitsubishi Colt 1.5 Di-D CZ2

2010-01-01T19:07:00.004Z

Quick Summary

All the fun of a frostbitten tadger: Cold, grey, lifeless, utterly incapable of delivering pleasure and not something you enjoy talking about afterwards.

The Story

How much longer will Mitsubishi be around in the UK? They’ve been peddling a range of mind-numbingly lacklustre also-rans for years, propped up only by the halo-model Evo and the apparent popularity of the L200 with Bob the Angry Builder. But the bottom has fallen out of the pickup market thanks to the recession, and when it recovers the newly-feminised curvy L200 will struggle to regain the top sales spot it recently lost to the straight-and-manly Ford Ranger. And of course the Evo has fallen from grace quite spectacularly, with its tenth iteration falling victim not just to changing fashions but to a deeply misguided softening of a product whose sole virtue had always been its raw, hardcore edginess.

So, you look at the Mitsi range and think, how much longer can they survive selling those nasty-looking wheeled turds? You note that even Kia outsell Mitsi by over 2 to 1 in the UK, and spot that they were 27th out of 28 in the JD Power survey, second only to Fiat in providing the least customer satisfaction. Surely, the writing must be on the wall. I mean, who the hell would buy one? Yes, well... you know what’s coming. Go on then, I’ll admit it. I did. I bought a Colt, in December 2007. I suppose an explanation is in order...

The starting point was my requirement of a cheap, small, reliable, super-frugal car with an automatic box. Those last two points were the sticky ones. Because, this being backward Britain, we have yet to follow the rest of the civilised world in escaping the evil clutches of the manual transmission and remain very much afflicted by the bizarre notion that we should demand nothing less than full control over the gearboxes in our crappy stop-start shopping cars. So, this lack of consumer demand meant that my search yielded a grand total of two cars which met my requirements: The Toyota Yaris D4-D and the Mitsubishi Colt Di-D. And, looking at year-old models, the equivalent Yaris was £2k more expensive, so really that left no choice but the Colt.

What a great start to ownership: A car bought simply because there was no other choice. Just to rub my nose in it, I couldn’t even get the Colt I would actually have wanted: The man from Mitsi, he say “No”. Thanks to the truly bizarre world of marketing-driven choice restrictions, I could have a diesel manual 3-door, a petrol MMT 3-door, or a diesel MMT 5-door. But a diesel MMT 3-door? No, sir, we don’t do one of them. So, 5 doors it had to be. Which was a shame, as whilst the 3-door design was never going to set your underpants alight, it did arguably have a certain amount of cheeky charm to it. Whereas the 5-door looks about as exciting as a geography teacher.

Yes, that's a diesel. The horror! The horror!

Still, looks were never a part of the original equation; of more importance was the fact that the Colt was cheap, small, reliable and automatic. Although, to be honest the MMT’s not really an automatic as such - it’s a ‘multi-mode manual’ with a robotised clutch. Which is great for economy, but rather less useful for making smooth progress. I presume that the MMT’s auto mode was designed to make the target market of the disabled feel at home, as it does a fabulous emulation of how a one-legged man would drive a manual. Smooth it ain’t. You have to anticipate the changes and ease off the throttle, or else you and your passengers will knock the dash with your forehead every time it goes from 1st to 2nd. Except it doesn’t always change quite when you expect, so sometimes you come off the accelerator early and your forehead hits the dash anyway. It also wilfully holds on to gears, probably because it was programmed for a torqueless petrol 1.3 and nobody bothered to reprogram it for a diesel. So 6th only gets engaged at borderline-illegal speeds and it’s embarrassing around town when it will have you screaming along at 30 in 3rd sounding like a learner. Or one of those tits who are always a gear below where they should be because they think they might need to accelerate out of danger.

Fortunately, there is a tiptronic-style mode where you can tap the gearstick up and down yourself. Yes, I know that I’ve previously said that buying an automatic and changing gear yourself is like paying a lady of ill repute for a full service and then spending the evening with Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters instead. But, questions of value-for-money aside, when it comes to gearchanges the manual relief option in the Colt remains vastly preferable to leaving it entirely to the computer, as at least you can time most of the throttle-lifts right. I say most, because you’re still at the mercy of the machine when you’re in stop-start traffic. No amount of banging the stick forward will get you out of 1st unless you are doing at least 17mph, and no amount of throttle finesse will prevent you from being forced back down again if you drop below 13mph. Nanny knows best. Indeed, it can seem like Nan’s actually driving, as the computer throws in an occasional pensioner-style savage-deceleration clutch-dump when going down through the box.

The good thing is that once you get to a more reasonable speed, the interfering old bag in the CPU does back off a bit and resorts to flashing the ‘change down’ indicator instead of doing the change herself, at least until you’re on the verge of stalling. And it’s whilst you’re rumbling and clattering around the 1000rpm zone in 6th that the single saving grace of this car is to be found: an average of 80mpg in the right conditions. Okay, so ‘right conditions’ is a warm, dry, windless day with few other road users and a healthy dose of traffic-light luck. So 80mpg is not a figure you’ll achieve every day unless you’re on a real open road. But on my 35-mile route into work, covering a good mix of roads, I can consistently average over 70mpg from May to September, dropping to mid 60s in the cold, dark winter months. Now, admittedly you can’t afford to be in much of a hurry, as you really need to be below 45mph to get the highest figures. If you want the real savings a diesel brings, you must be prepared to sacrifice more than a few minutes of journey time and leave your self-respect behind in National Speed Limits.

So on the way home, when I'm in more of a hurry, the mpg drops right back down to low 50s. Driving style makes ALL the difference with a diesel. And whilst I’m sure there are plenty of internet know-it-alls who will argue that tickling a car along just above the stall point is not the most efficient way of driving, frankly they are the sort of people who can’t see something working in practice without asking whether it will work in theory. Trust me, I’ve had two years of experimenting with every different speed/gear combination you could think of, so regardless of what their hypermiling theories might suggest to the contrary, I know what works best in this car.

So it’s cheap and economical. What isn’t it? Well, it’s not a quiet car. But then, that’s hardly unexpected given that there’s a 3-pot diesel rattler bolted into a small car made of cheap materials. Even so, it does push the boundaries of acceptable noise, vibration and harshness. Think of a John Zorn album being played through a cement mixer. Tuneful and sonorous it ain’t, and after a long journey you’ll feel like Pete Townshend. The ringing ears that is, not the proclivity for dubious internet research. It’s not an exciting car either, unless your idea of fun is lurching and crashing across the road surface as the weight of the diesel lump overcomes the wholly inadequate damping. Or unless you’re the type to gain pleasure from wondering why the turn-in has been made so artificially sharp when the cornering process can only ever be lumpen and unresolved. No, this is not a car to be ‘driven’ in any real sense of the word. It is a mere conveyance, not to be confused with a vehicle which can be, in any way, enjoyed.

A concrete pillar hurled itself at the car and did this.

It’s not a well-equipped car. I mean, obviously you get what you pay for, but manually-operated door mirrors is surely stretching that paradigm in this day and age. In fact, the whole interior does raise significant questions about a number of important issues. Like, for example, the entire future of humanity. I mean, if it really is possible that anyone could actually fall for the idea of marking the air-con knob with temperature measurements in the world’s lamest attempt to rebrand a heater as ‘semi-automatic climate control’, then, frankly we are all doomed. And if there really is someone, somewhere out there right now, going “Wow, coooool” when they see the ‘glow in the dark’ effect on the central dash pillar, then our fate is surely sealed. Even the basics are comically wrong. They’ve managed to make the dash and door covering look exactly like nasty, shiny, hard plastic. In fact it’s actually soft-touch, but the only way you’d find out is to accidentally bang your elbow on it and find it didn’t hurt as much as you expected. There is no ashtray. No driver’s sunglasses compartment. Nowhere to put rubbish at all, in fact. There’s a hole underneath the stereo for things to rattle round in annoyingly until they fall out under acceleration. And, in some kind of perverse homage to the gods of complete futility, there are little shelves (yes, shelves) either side of the central console strut. Now I know that geriatric Gerald and the rest of the target market for this car are likely to corner somewhat sedately, but even they would struggle to keep their tins of Werther’s Originals from sliding off at the first bend. Utterly, utterly pointless.

Of course, the sound system also fails epically on every level. Radio reception is weak. There is no aux input. It has no more understanding of the concept of mp3 than my twin-deck Sanyo cassette player had in 1985. Should you manage to find one of those antique devices that were once known as “Music Compact Discs” to insert, you will discover that the system utterly sucks the life out of any musical content, rendering a drab, grey soundscape occasionally enlivened only by the unexpected flatulence of an apparently dubious speaker connection. And, finally, there’s the subtle discomfort felt after 30 minutes or so behind the wheel, which rapidly moves through ache into pain and gets progressively worse, until you are forced to stop after an hour or so because everything just hurts. To start with, the jiggly ride and complete lack of any lateral seat support will sap your strength. And then you’ll find the steering is nonsensically heavy - with such high initial resistance to inputs that merely guiding the car in a straight line requires continual arm effort.

As the wheel is not reach-adjustable, you’ll find you can counter the burning triceps by opting for a closer seat position, but you’ll soon discover that this gives you knee cramp instead. Of course, it’s laughably easy to find an adjustment that gives you both cramp and tired arms, but one which will give you neither remains elusive. And to cap it all off, the whole driving position is slightly canted to the left, as if you’re leaning in to the centre of the car. It’s subtle enough for you not to notice on your 15 minute test drive, but after an hour your left shoulder will be numb...

Can I draw all that together? I guess ‘nasty but cheap’ is as good a description as any. Ownership is a joyless experience, but it won’t cost much, either in purchase price or running costs. And, crap as the MMT box might be, it still remains far superior to the tedium of using a clutch in traffic. It's also reliable - nothing but normal servicing for 2 years and 40,000 miles. So I suppose there is some justification for an alleged car 'enthusiast' to own a Colt which could perhaps be summarised as "The less I spend on commuting now, the more money can go into doing up the house, the quicker it will get done and the sooner I can get back into a proper car."

And that, I think, neatly sums up Mitsubishi’s problem: I suspect that, like me, nobody really chooses to buy a Colt, or anything else in the mainstream Mitsubishi range for that matter. They just arrive at the dealership after their circumstances have forced them through a process of elimination, invariably based on cost. Meanwhile, everyone else in the market for a non-premium car is going elsewhere. Want safety-in-numbers? Ford or Vauxhall. Fancy trying to be style-conscious? Go for something French or Italian. Value build quality? Skoda or Toyota, thanks. Require 4-wheel drive for your supermarket run? Subaru can do that. Need a long-life warranty? One of the Korean contingent will oblige. Think you’re a bit sporty? Seat, Mazda, or Suzuki will fit the bill. And all these people are doubtless pointing and laughing at those few withspecial needs who’ve fallen through the remaining tiny gaps in that nearly-all-encompassing net and landed in a Mitsubishi.

Now I’m no business expert, and I could well be missing something that’s blindingly obvious to whomever is bankrolling the current Mitsi operation. But I can’t help but question whether that sort of low-volume bottom-feeding is really viable as a long-term business proposition for any car company, let alone one which has effectively lost its halo model along with a big chunk of its commercial volume sales. And with the near-demise of Saab fresh in our minds, there’s the stark realisation that they were selling more cars than Mitsubishi in the UK. As an ex-Evo owner and fan, I sort of hope I’m wrong. But I can’t help wondering how long the 3-diamond badge will survive.

Ratings

|❹|A-Road Overtaking
|❷|B-Road Blasting
|❼|City Driving
|❷|Long Distance Comfort
|❾|Reliability
|❾|Stealth Factor
|❶|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● After a lifetime of prejudice against oil-burners, I made the mistake of finally giving in and believing the diesel hype when I bought the Colt. And I found that yes, you can get fantastic mpg from a derv but only if you are prepared to slave yourself to a driving style that leaves no room whatsoever for speed or entertainment. Driving normally yields such marginal benefits over a petrol that you’d struggle to ever make back the inflated diesel purchase price.

● I replaced the Colt with a Smart Roadster that costs the same to tax, about £50 more to insure and, at 55+ mpg, merely a couple of quid more a week to fuel. I don’t have to drive it like a coffin-dodger to get the mpg; it’s a fabulously entertaining drive and, best of all, I no longer have to suffer the agriculturally-utilitarian, lethargic-throttled, bone-shaking, stinky-pump-handled, death-rattling, soul-crushing, abject horror that is diesel power.

● Nothing went wrong, at all, until the very end when the air-con started making funny noises and got less effective. In a most uncharacteristic failure of my hitherto unimpeachable commitment to fair play, I omitted to point this out to the dealer I was trading it into. And thus, on the way to do the trade-in, I smashed the Colt's rear wheelarch in a car park, necessitating my first at-fault insurance claim in nearly half a million miles of driving. Karma in action is a beautiful thing.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? No. I will never own a diesel again. With the latest turbo-charged, high-pressure petrol technologies pushing real-world economy up to and beyond diesel capability, I just can’t see the need to suffer.

Death of a Salesman

2009-12-06T16:42:00.004Z

Car ads. Seriously, these days, what’s the point? Since the dawn of the internet, marketeers in all areas have been fighting a battle with increasingly well-informed punters whose views are now shaped far more easily by their vast array of online interactions and social networks than they ever could be by a mere advertisement. And this is surely none more true than in the world of motoring, where online communities spread their brand-prejudices in a never-ending maelstrom of forum-flaming and fanboy flagellation. I’d love to say I wasn’t caught up in it all myself, but the truth is that I am influenced far more by the online posturing of middle-aged men who really should know better than I am by the concerted attempts of Peugeot’s marketing department to woo me by book-ending films on the telly with sad little miniclips of their sad little cars.

I guess I’ve always had a problem with image. In my teenage years I studiously cultivated the notion that I was impervious to the views of others, that I was above such a puerile concept as fashion. Yeah, I was boldly forging a life less ordinary, free from the constraints which bound the ignorant masses to their trends and vogues. Hell, they could think what they liked about me, they could mock and scorn, but it didn’t matter because I was following my own path and I just... didn’t... care. Of course, at the time I was blithely oblivious to the irony of just how much effort ‘not caring’ actually took, with my carefully-preened mullet, meticulously torn stonewashed jeans, precisely-oversized Hi-Tops and denim jacket with Iron Maiden patches lovingly ironed-on. And whilst it did eventually dawn on me that my anti-fashion statement had no more integrity than the brand devotion of those from whom I was attempting to distance myself, I didn’t really change. I just came to accept that image was actually important to me in my own way after all.

The thing is, I always expected to care less about all that sort of nonsense as I got older. I thought I would reach a state where self respect became an entirely optional wardrobe accessory, even if it might only happen when I was, like, really old. Like 28 or something. And there was certainly part of me that actively looked forward to the time when I would be free of the tiresome need to ‘say something’ via my purchases of clothes, cars or consumer goods. But thanks to the internet, I have remained exposed to the views, critiques and prejudices of my peers well into that time of life when I might traditionally have retreated into the fashionless dead zone of ‘family life’. And, as a result, my apparent need to make statements through possessions continues unabated. I wear a Casio just to say “fuck you” to the watch watchers with pics of their Seamasters in their profiles. I bought an LCD TV as an “up yours” to all those plasma-promotionalists who enjoy nothing more than knocking one out to a screen-calibration DVD. And I would rather stick my cock in a cheesegrater than own anything made by Apple, simply because I despise Apple people and couldn’t bear to be associated with their endless supercilious, self-congratulatory proselytising .

Pathetic? Undoubtedly. Vacuous? Sure. But these minor little twitches of nose-to-spite-face pale into insignificance under the shadow cast by that mother of all statement-making purchasing decisions, namely which car should I drive? And regrettably for me, car choice long ago transcended the logical, rational world of price/performance ratios and specification charts; even consideration of aesthetics, form and colour have fallen by the wayside. In fact, over the years, a twisting blade of prejudice-riddled self-consciousness has carved all the branches off my decision tree until only one, crippling question is left: What would having this car in my profile say about me?

You’d think that would make me a marketing man’s dream. But if I start to examine where exactly I get my perceptions of a car’s image from, it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, of course, I’m afflicted by the usual clichés, the stereotypes, the universal truths that have wormed their way insidiously into the collective psyche of the online motoring world and long since evicted any carefully-crafted advertising imagery that might once have held sway. So the Boxster is a hairdresser’s car. The Nissan Micra is strictly for girls. The Rover 75 is for pensioners. An S-Class Merc is for old company directors. Ferraris are for show-offs. Audis are for over-ambitious cocks. Ha. That’s a good one, that, when you remember their now comically ironic attempt at brand positioning in the 90s.

I just can’t seem to fight this stuff. Of course, the logical side of me knows that there are genuine, true enthusiasts out there who have bought a Cayman or M3 or F430 because they are superbly-engineered, engaging and exciting to drive. Indeed, if that’s you then fair play, and respect to you. But I can’t help it, the social pressure of what I read on the forums is too great. So I will always think it’s because you couldn’t afford a 911, or wanted bragging rights at the squash club, or wished to attract a certain type of fake-tanned female companionship. And it doesn’t matter how many beautifully-shot photo-ads the advertising consultancies place in front of me; I know that if I ever owned one of these great, immensely capable cars myself, I would forever be taunted by the sound of someone shouting “Waaannnkkkarrrrr” as I drove past, even if, more often than not, that sound came from within my own head.

But it goes a lot further than that. My warped imagination, fuelled by continual consumption of online car forum banter, has gone way beyond the artfully-contrived populism of influences like the Top Gear Cool Wall and conjured up a whole hierarchy of ‘acceptableness’ with a complexity that even I find hard to comprehend. Within this, of course marques play their part. So a Ruf logo on a 911 shape implies that I am a connoisseur of Germanic performance, whilst a Porsche badge indicates that I spend my days merchant banking. A 4-door saloon with a Honda badge suggests that I value engineering whilst rejecting Teutonic dominance, but a similar-looking Hyundai merely tells everyone that I know nothing about cars and care even less. Yet, it’s much more granular than just broad brand brushstrokes. So whilst it’s somehow OK to look prematurely old and self-satisfied in a 7-series, to be seen as young and hungry in a 3-series would be unimaginable. I find it acceptable to have chosen the bland invisible luxury of a Lexus GS, yet I could not countenance the business-park competitiveness put forth by an IS. I see a Golf as an horrific expression of the middle-class, What Car?-driven obsession with perceived quality, yet I would hold up a Phaeton as a paragon of beautifully understated opulence.

I guess within that mess it’s possible to pin down some common themes. Evidently for me, there’s simple mindless stuff like Japan > Germany, which is why I ended up with a Skyline GTR instead of something infinitely more enjoyable to drive from Stuttgart or Munich. Clearly, anything to do with being aspirational makes me want to be sick on my shoes. I’d rather be dead, I’d rather be face down in the dirt with a bullet through my head, than be seen in a car like an Audi TT which says “I’m on my way” instead of “I’m already there”. And, despite being one of the least manly men ever to have sported a pair, and indeed having been confused for a homosexual on more occasions than I am entirely comfortable with, I remain mortally horrified at the thought of driving a gayer’s car like an MX5. You may agree with such ignorant prickery, or you may not. But what’s certain is that none of your views, or mine, come from the marketing men and their million-dollar budgets.

Alongside all this, I’m very much a product of my time, which automatically reduces my interest in whatever brand-new wizardry is currently being promoted. Whilst anything before the 70s is strictly for beards and collectors, anything from the 70s and 80s is inextricably tied to the innocence of youth. So I’d be perversely happy to be seen in an Austin Allegro, an XJS or even a Renault Fuego, even if the driving experience itself may be execrably bad. And thanks to the wonders of Google Images and Auto Trader online I can maintain such thoughts long after they might otherwise have slipped from my conscious mind. Hell, I still entertain real fantasies of owning a Series 1 Granada coupé, with the echoes of pre-pubescent lust for a neighbour’s 3.0litre in 1978 being recently fired-up by the classifieds on Pistonheads. Indeed, this individual cultural heritage can even trump my inverted snobbery: In general, I find Ferraris distasteful in the extreme. The modern ones are inevitably associated with genital inferiority complexes, conspicuous consumption and fanboism of the worst sort, whilst the old classic ones just scream ‘rich collector’. Yet there is a peculiar exception; thanks to a childhood spent watching Magnum PI and a recent spate of forum-posted images, I could now actually see myself tooling round in an über-ironic mintily-restored 308GTS if I won the lottery, whilst blowing a wad on a brand-new Fezza, even a thing of beauty like the 458, remains inconceivable. Strange but true. And nothing the Maranello marketeers can do about it.

Go further into that cornucopia of image associations and there are some truly bizarre ideas, all forged in that funny old furnace of childhood hopes and dreams. It’s more than just finding the notion of cruising round in a 3^rd-gen Capri genuinely appealing, thanks to Bodie and Doyle. There’s truly random stuff, like never wanting a Vauxhall thanks to the string of sheds owned by my dodgy Uncle Keith. Or being put off Peugeots because the nice old chap who lived up the road drove a 504 estate and it turned out he was a paedophile. Even old urban legends from school play their part. Darren Reid, the dog-botherer? I saw him years ago, driving a Mitsubishi Starion. So what would otherwise be a cool retro-80s throwback car is now indelibly associated with canine companionship of an inappropriately intimate kind. Mark Young, the boy who used to take Polaroids of his cock and slip them into unsuspecting 3^rd Year girls’ school bags? Last seen driving a Saab. And thus a potentially individualist, left-field brand becomes forever tainted with the notion of being driven by grubby little perverts.

Maybe I am entirely unique in constructing such a complex web of associations that every car purchase becomes a confusing, at times disturbingly revelatory, odyssey into my psyche. But I suspect that many of us do it on some level, and probably always have. The difference now is that we are all free to spread our silly ideas round on the internet. Which brings me back to the original point – just how much are all those millions the car companies spend on marketing and brand-positioning really worth, when all their work can be undone so easily? And not just by a high-profile Clarkson comment or Steve Coogan character like in the old days, but through daft, personal, random associations that can now propagate uncontrollably, virally across the web. Mapped 335d anyone?

I wonder if the adverteers themselves have finally realised this. After all, if you go back to the pre-internet days of the 80s and 90s, you’ll find car ads that were inventive, contentious and spirited –you got the sense that they really were trying to change your mind. But these days it just looks like they’ve given up, content with little more than an artfully-shot photo and ten words which say nothing and mean even less. Either way, whether it’s a conscious thing on their part or just symptomatic of a general dearth of creativity, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. After all, we’ve already made up our minds without them.

The Evil of Diesel: Postmodernism, Particulates and Pavarotti

2009-10-27T18:57:00.005Z

Jean-François Lyotard once wrote that “eclecticism is the degree-zero of contemporary general culture”. Yes, I know this is a car column not Postmodernism Today. But bear with me, because if you replace 'general culture' with 'car design' there’s real truth in that statement. Designers and marketeers have become ever more gratuitously po-mo over the years, breaking down the barriers between market segments, deconstructing the meta-narrative of the family saloon in an emancipation which has brought us the SUV, the MPV, the sportswagon, the coupé-convertible... And, of course, in the midst of all this mash-up madness, that greatest of all dividing walls has come crashing down - the division that once distinguished the beauty, art and freedom of the sports car from the industrial, communistic utility of the diesel workhorse. The resultant spawn is the ultimate bastard child of genre-melding eclecticism; that gene-spliced Frankenmotor we now recognise as the diesel sports car.

Such a thing would have been considered insane in the 70s, unlikely in the 80s, unusual in the 90s... yet now it’s normal. And don’t tell me you’ve not been tempted by a little DERVish yourself - I know you have. Hell, I know I have. Because when you do the figures, they make a lot of sense. I mean, come on, you get to go quickly and you don’t use much fuel. That’s a win-win in anybody’s books, right? Certainly there’s no shortage of driving enthusiasts who have apparently succumbed to the lure. Browse around the eternal manhood-measuring contest that is the world of internet car forums and you’ll find armies of Superchip-on-shoulder diesel diehards telling tales of beating off 911s whilst still getting 40mpg, quoting Ferrari-beating pound-feet statistics and reminding us all how torque wins races.

But the inferiority complexes which lurk behind such boasts immediately raise suspicions that perhaps all is not rosy on the oil-burning dark side. Maybe it’s not that easy to break down the thrill of driving into 50-70 times and miles per gallon after all. But if those ardent particulate-fanboys are using their stats and cost comparisons to cover some kind of loss, what is it? The noise? Maybe. Few could deny that today’s big-banger diesels can sound... powerful. But comparing them to their petrol equivalents is still like comparing Motörhead to Pavarotti. Both are impressively loud, but you’d no more want to hear a V10 TDI at 8000rpm than you would Lemmy doing Nessun Dorma.

It’s got to be more than just that though. Maybe the answer lies in that old cliché – “it’s not how fast you go, it’s how you go fast”. Because for those of us who have savoured the joyous, relentless, building urge of an AJP V8 or the bestial, endless thrust of a twin-turbo RB26, or even just a little 4-pot VTEC on cam... the power delivery of a turbo diesel can only ever be a despicable, damaging, evil thing to live with. Evil? Let me explain. Get a TDI in its narrow powerband and it is undeniably quick. That urge feels good, great even. But the hit is short – little more than a fleeting taste of real acceleration before the puff runs out quicker than a crack pipe. And psychologically speaking, building up your expectations repeatedly just to crush them back down is, simply, evil. If it felt consistently slow and dull, you’d be able to adjust your perceptions, recalibrate your senses and relax. But instead it keeps teasing you with those tantalisingly short-lived bursts of thrust, keeps on pricking that memory of what it was like to own a proper performance car. As a certain Mr Cleese once put it: “It’s not the despair. I can stand the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand”.

So next time you’re stood at the pumps with the chill wind of economic reality ruffling your wallet, wondering if you should give in and go bat for Captain Carcinogen’s team; stick with your heart not your head. Because I know, deep down, you’re like me. I know that as a small boy you had an involuntary urge to touch yourself inappropriately whenever you saw an Alfa GTV. I know that something dies inside you every time a Brera JTD goes rattling past. Let’s not kid ourselves that we’d truly be able to live with the memory of what we’d sacrificed to save a few pennies. And let’s not fear that harbouring such love for petrol power places us increasingly further from the norm. After all, in our topsy-turvy, post-modern society it’s OK to be... eclectic.

Of Speed Limits, Sanctimony and Self-Abuse

2009-08-29T19:00:00.006+01:00

There are many irritating, petty little onanists out there in the never-ending cock-comparison contest that is the world of internet car forums. Indeed, if you wanted to update the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of tiresomely competitive wanker, you could draw all manner of exemplar material from the denizens of the online motoring world. Between them they demonstrate a veritable gallimaufry of dubious opinions, questionable predilections and curious approaches to punctuation. However, there is one particular characteristic that appears to be universal; an insatiable need to prove their choice was right, to be seen to be Making their Point™.

Still, it can be educational. You’ll have to put up with a fair amount of virtual testosterone flying around from the armchair racing drivers. You’ll certainly need to become inured to the posturing of prematurely-balding keyboard warriors, seeking to regain some self-esteem after their wife asked “Is it in yet?” again last night. And, of course, you’ll have to learn to ignore whole armies of statistic-autistics quoting endless facts and figures in an apparently perpetual ability to confuse us with anyone who cares. But if you can manage this, car forums can give you a surprisingly detailed insight into the thought processes of those drivers out in the real world whose behaviour might hitherto have appeared incomprehensible. Like, say, those men (and it is, always, men) who drive like mad dervishes on National Speed Limit roads, overtaking all and sundry, but who then crawl through 30mph zones at 29mph. I’ve never understood this sort of behaviour. I mean, you’re either in a hurry or you’re not. You either take risks, or you don’t. But, thanks to the world of internet forums, I’ve been blessed with fresh understanding. It turns out that their reason behind their behaviour is simply that they are sanctimonious, hypocritical hand-pumpers.

You can spot them on every forum. They love to talk about the capabilities of their ‘high performance’ cars, and how their choice of vehicle distinguishes them from the unthinking masses. They will frequently refer to their superior observation and judgement, perhaps touching on their finely-honed car control. And they will espouse, although not always explicitly, the opinion that these factors together constitute sufficient justification for their regular excursions above the National Speed Limit. But what really illustrates their mindset, what really defines them as adopters of the worst kind of holier-than-thou stance, is that they are also regularly to be found in a state of apoplectic rage, spitting torrents of vitriol at anyone they have encountered who has dared to exceed a 30 limit. Now, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago, such malice would have been justifiable. After all, back then you could probably say that most 30 zones actually indicated a genuine reason for travelling slowly. But today? They’re just as likely to indicate that a local councillor didn’t like the noise living on a major trunk route so got the limit lowered. Or that a Local Authority pedalphile judged that the needs of one cyclist per week outweighed those of several thousand motorists per day. Or simply that you’re in Suffolk, where any combination of two houses, a church and a disused barn constitutes a real and present danger that necessitates slowing everyone to a crawl.

The fact is that after so many hidden-agenda-driven limit reductions, it’s perfectly possible to exceed many 30mph limits without leaving behind a trail of burnt rubber and orphaned children. So an apparent belief that religious obeisance to the 30-zone somehow absolves you of all your other motoring sins is, frankly, unforgiveable. What, you’re quite happy to career over a blind B-road crest at 75mph whilst maintaining the tragic belief that you’re Petter Solberg, because the sign says NSL? Yet just because you slow down for every spuriously-designated, barely-populated 30-zone, you’re entitled to claim the moral high ground as a safe, responsible driver? It’s farcical. You really believe that you’re safer than the 40mph monospeeders, with your snidey little comments about their lack of attention thinly veiling your eager anticipation of schadenfreude, as you wait for them to have a horrible accident with a child in a 30 zone. But the sorry fact is that their 40-in-a-30 will invariably be far less dangerous than some of your precision-timed A-road overtakes, or your dab-of-oppo country bend heroics.

And why is it that you are quite, quite certain that your superior observation skills and judgement allow you to safely and responsibly exceed the National Speed Limit, yet such judgement apparently deserts you when faced with a 30 sign? At which point you happily abrogate responsibility and slave yourself to a speed decision made by some faceless quangocrat who probably hasn’t even got a driving licence. It’s a joke. I mean you do realise, don’t you, that it’s probably the same quangocrat who decided where to place that Safety Camera Van - you know, the one which caught you doing 75 in a 60 the other night? The one about whom you righteously vented bile all across the internet, what with the injustice of it all, picking on you with your well-maintained vehicle, excellent judgement, full concentration and... masterful observation skills... oh.

Most damningly, thanks to the internet, there is plenty of evidence supporting the very worst indictment of your behaviour - the fact that you wilfully drive in a manner specifically designed to Make your Point™ out there in the real world. Yes, I’m talking about all those tales you post about being a proper little Road Captain. You know the ones I mean: The scenario always begins in a National Speed Limit with a car in front, which is travelling at a lower speed than you consider appropriate. You tell us how you execute an overtake, and describe for us in outraged tones how you received flashed headlights and hand gestures as a result. Presently, a 30 limit arrives, you slow down dramatically, and the overtaken car catches up. We are then regaled with details of how your speedo remained locked on 29mph, how your eyes were perpetually in the rear view mirror, gorging on the self-satisfaction derived from forcing the car behind to adhere to your definition of safe and reasonable progress. You tell us how the speed was held until the last yard of the limit, perhaps prompting the irate driver behind to attempt an overtake themselves. And then the story invariably finishes with you unleashing the full force of your steed immediately on passing the NSL sign, tearing off into the sunset having Made your Point™ to the poor fool behind.

I mean, honestly... Is there any better indicator of a proclivity for self-abuse than that pernicious arrogance; that obscenely sanctimonious, dreadful belief that you are somehow entitled to educate other drivers in the error of their ways? And is there any more obvious irony than the similarity of your behaviour to that of your own arch-nemesis, the flash-when-overtaken 40-driver? After all, he’s maintaining that speed because it gets him the best mpg, and he objects to your flagrant disregard of CO2 emissions with your wanton acceleration, so he gives you a bit of main-beam education. Does that make him right? Hell no, that makes him a petty-minded, interfering little arsebiscuit who should be forced off the road and beaten to death with his own slip-on shoes. But, the thing is, when you’re deliberately flying past him on the derestricted bits just so you can play The Enforcer in 30-zones you are truly no better. Because every time he pulls that flasher stalk, he thinks he’s Making his Point™ too.

The Future of Fast: Conform or be Cast Out?

2007-12-04T18:59:00.001Z

So, the GT3RS has won Evo magazine's car of the year award. A bright-green, noisy, thirsty two-fingered salute to the moron majority who’ve bought-in wholesale to the notion that infernal internal combustion is the cankerous root of all our planet’s ills. A last hurrah for high-octane exuberance, an antidote to mediocrity; one in the eye for the grey world of white-goods motoring! Almost enough to bring a tear to the eye? Well, nearly. But I won’t be joining the celebrations. Because, much as I love the idea of giving the finger to the hand-wringing, environment-obsessed public in such a fabulously obvious manner, I’m beginning to wonder just how much of a threat these sorts of cars might have become to the long-term future of the thrill of driving. For all of us.

You see, I’ve a suspicion that there’s a new order on our roads with which the GT3RS is spectacularly ill-equipped to cope. Let’s call it something like Driving 2.0 - the art of enjoying a car without attracting the wrath of motoring’s ever-increasing enemies. And the GT3RS is strictly only Version 1.0 compatible. Of course, driving a 911 has always been likely to get you a few hand-gestures indicating your proclivity for indulging in onanistic pleasure. But my unwillingness to buy into the whole Stuttgart dream is no longer just about avoiding such jealousy-fired opprobrium. Now, adding to the sickly jade of envy, we also have to contend with the green Gaian glow of environmental concern.

We live in a world so attuned to eco-consciousness that merely asking for another carrier bag at the supermarket is enough to get the recyclists frantically grabbing at their bags-for-life, shielding their children from the sight of such wanton consumption. So, when you’re driving an overtly, incontrovertibly fast car that broadcasts its planet-destroying status so vividly, howling past the mpg-counting constant-56ers just convinces them yet further of their moral superiority. And whenever your flat-6 rumble propels you down the high street on a wave of look-at-me extroversion, another crowd shake their heads and vow to vote Lib-Dem. You don’t even need to be moving; each time you park across two spaces in Tesco to protect your lurid green paintwork from stupid breeders and their door-bashing progenies, there’s an army of shoppers so disgusted that they’d happily see you banned from the road. Be in no doubt, petrolheads are under a concerted, sustained attack and we can ill-afford such blatant provocation as that offered by cars like the green Porsche.

So, if we shouldn’t be promoting such cars because of their perceived environmental impact, what should we be advocating? The logical conclusion is to celebrate manufacturers who build beautiful, aggressively-styled sports cars that also happen to be environmentally friendly. Biofuel Lotus anyone? Electric Tesla? Well, that sounds like the perfect solution, except it isn’t because in our media-saturated, vacuous excuse for a society, image is everything. Let’s face it, if you’re dim enough to buy into the idea that performance car emissions are having a global effect on our climate then you’re clearly not too interested in the details. The sort of person, in other words, who’d blithely gob on an electric sports car, daub paint on a hybrid SUV or key a hydrogen 7-series just because they look like planet-killers. No, these sorts of cars are not the solution - owning one you’d be like a paediatrician; entirely blameless but forever fearful of the vengeful power of ignorance.

It’s time manufacturers woke up to this. Enough of the bulging arches, huge wheels and lairy colour schemes. Let’s delete the graphics, the big aero-wings, the carbon diffusers. We’ve lost the battle for hearts and minds; our best rearguard action is to become inconspicuous. We should demand cars which can slip under the radar - we need street-sleepers, Q-cars; bland-looking, non-confrontational, utterly nondescript cars that can drift round Adenauer Forst or take our breath away up the Col de Turini without antagonising the general populace to the point where they WILL vote to take away our toys for good.

It is time to take more responsibility for our future as driving enthusiasts. If we can stop drawing so much attention to ourselves with such blatantly flagrant cars as the GT3RS, we might yet escape the day when the environmental bailiffs come calling for our pride and joy: “More than 220g/km? Straight to the crusher, boys!” It might mean the shiver of delight from that over-the-shoulder car park glance gets lost. But if it increases the long-term chances for the rest of Evo-ness, I’d say it’s a compromise worth making.

Speed Cameras: Time for a Re-think?

2007-10-07T17:57:00.000+01:00

[This article is now published in Evo magazine issue 112]

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that much-maligned item of our street furniture; the humble speed camera. As car enthusiasts, it may be time to reconsider our views. For whilst these grey boxes have been the recipients of our hatred, contempt and the occasional burning tyre over the years, I predict that it won’t be long before we will be going all dewy-eyed, remembering the dumb surrogate policemen that were so easy to evade. And by then, it'll be too late. The black boxes will have been fitted, the ANPR cameras rolled out...

Yeah, sure. It’ll never happen, right? We’ve been hearing about GPS tracking, ECU-strangling and all that Orwellian control-freakery for years, but we know the government won’t get rid of speed cameras because they bring in too much cash. Right? Except… they don’t. Not to the people who matter anyway - most of that money never gets near robbin’ Brown and his merry mentalists. You don’t really think your sixty quid SP30 gets spent on NHS breast enlargements for low-esteem teenagers, child benefit for Polish mothers and all those other worthy causes our democratically elected demagogues have chosen to bless with munificence? Hell no, it gets siphoned off by those unelected, unaccountable quangos called Road Safety Partnerships, for them to buy more cameras. To bring in more cash. To buy more cameras… As a result, despite the fact that these collectives of knitwear-clad little hitlers have bootstrapped themselves into something approaching a self-replicating von Neumann ecology of GATSO-proliferation, their determination to keep the cash at a local level makes their influence on central government negligible. Thus, if their interests should come to conflict with a real political force like, say, the green consensus (née the environmental lobby), you know which one’s going for a Burton.

But surely their interests won’t conflict? Surely the eco-conscious majority should be all for speed cameras, given that their entire philosophy is apparently constructed around the premise of eradicating every last source of human joy and promoting angst-ridden guilt? Perhaps it’s not that simple. Think about it. The reactions to speed cameras on the road are many and varied. Some swear. Some give the finger. Some allow a moment of self-congratulation at having spotted it in time. Some panic. Some adjust their grey cardigans and salute the sentinels of safety, standing alone by the roadside in valiant defence of our nation’s moral values against the godless hordes and their roaring, speeding killing machines… Whatever. There is one reaction, though, that is common to all of us. Well, all of us who have been stupid enough to tell DVLA the truth anyway: We brake. Sure, you may think you always spot them early enough just to coast down. Of course, you know your speedo over-reads so you can go past at a little over the limit anyway. But, for all your infinite wisdom, it’s still a safe bet that the muppet in front will feel the need to emergency-brake to 20mph below the limit and you’ll end up hitting the middle pedal anyway. It’s a fact – cameras make people brake.

So what? Well, any enviro-mentalist will tell you that regularly speeding up and slowing down is bad for the planet. More CO2. Bigger carbon footprint. You know the story. So, given that there are literally millions of brake/accelerate motions caused by speed cameras every day, it’s fair to say that they alone are responsible for a considerable tonnage of emissions each year. Oh, the irony – cameras are bad for the environment! Of course, the grey cardigans from the RSPs will be apoplectic by this point, slavering around in a frenzy of self-righteous indignation, frothing at the mouth as they clamour to tell us that if we didn’t speed in the first place then we wouldn’t need to brake when we saw a camera. We need education! More cameras! More funding for RSPs! Indeed, their cries may be heeded for a while yet. But it won't be long before the real power-players in Westminster recognise a solution that's going to cut the be-cardiganed RSP middlemen right out of the equation: The environmentally sound way to get people to go slower is to prevent them from going fast in the first place. Which means bye-bye Safety Camera and hello to a whole new world of legislated power-output limits, compulsory speed-limiters, pervasive roadside surveillance and prosecutions for driving in a manner detrimental to the troposphere. The future is dull. The future’s green.

Depressed? Yeah, me too. As car-lovers, we’re dinosaurs facing the extinction event that is total political acceptance of the green agenda on emissions. So let's lay off our grey-poled, square-faced double-flashers and their supporters - after all, they may be our only hope of postponing the inevitable annihilation of our way of life.

Review: 2003 Honda Accord 2.4i Executive

2007-08-27T17:22:00.003+01:00

Quick Summary

A car of more confused intentions than an Alzheimer’s victim in a revolving door, yet still inexplicably satisfying to own.

The Story

If ever a car could be described as an identity crisis on wheels, this was it. Not fast enough to be a performance saloon but too powerful to be economical. Too dynamic to be luxurious but too soft to be truly sporty. Too expensive to be an unpretentious workhorse but lacking the status to cut it with the real premium brands. Cream leather and fake burr-walnut trim in a body that, for its time, was chiselled and modern. A free-revving VTEC engine mated to a slushmatic box with intergalactic gearing. It was a car of more contradictions than thirty years of climate ‘science’...

Here’s a report from mid-way through my ownership in 2007:

As it’s a Honda, let’s start with the engine. And let’s say straight off that it falls a little short of the glorious perfection one would expect from a marque with such an illustrious engineering history. Sort of like your wife’s DIY brazilian – it feels quite smooth and silky at first but it doesn’t take long to discover the rough patches. Yes, it’s still way more refined than the typical bag of spanners / washing machine interface found in comparable Fords or Vauxhalls but there’s definitely a touch of mid-range grumble and some vaguely strained harmonics in the high-end VTEC zing. Or, I should say, i-VTEC, that being the accurate designation for the later iteration of valve/camshaft trickery with which this particular motor is gifted. It may only be a small i, but its impact on the characteristics of power delivery is noticeable. Honda’s earliest VTEC efforts were legendary for yielding about as much accelerative force under 6000rpm as a paraplegic on a bicycle; the addition of continuously variable intake-cam phasing has certainly addressed this issue of balance between low-down torque and high end pull. I can’t help but feel, though, that the whole thing is something of a sell-out. Like Metallica’s black album - the elements are still there, but watered down and made nice for mass consumption.

17" wheels nicely aggressive compared to shopping-trolley 16s.

The thing is, once diluted those same elements just make much less sense. Without the primal arse kick of the old VTEC on-off cam profile change, that huge chunk of wonderful anticipation as you wait for the magic rpm figure has simply been engineered out of the experience. Of course, in these dark days of diesel hegemony, where the joyously deferred gratification of high-end power has been sacrificed on the smoky pyre of instant grunt for those with a deficit of attention, you can understand why Honda has tried to come up with a motor which can hold its own with the TDI road warriors in the outside lane. But in doing so it’s ended up with a power curve that’s lost the high-end magic without gaining enough at the bottom to make it a worthwhile sacrifice. Yes, it can just about keep up with Captain Carcinogen and his forced-induction oilburner, but it feels like you’re attached via a bungee rope; the turbodiesel torque advantage sending him off in a puff of particulates before you just about reel him back in with your extra rpm headroom.

This type of driving soon exposes an unexpected weakness in another aspect of the car – its exceptionally long-geared automatic box. You would expect this to offer a relaxed gait and good economy, and indeed these are delivered happily on a traffic-free motorway. But, perversely, the length of the gearing actually makes for a more frenetic outside-lane experience in most dual-carriageway driving. With 5th being so long, to really keep up with traffic you need to floor it, which then kicks right down to 3rd and you find the motor screaming well beyond 5000rpm. Constantly using the tiptronic override can help, as dropping into 4th gives just enough urge to keep up. But I do have to wonder whether buying an automatic and then changing gear manually is a bit like paying for a call-girl and having her just sit there whilst you knock one out yourself. Not what you would call good value.

What’s it like when you throw a few bends into the equation? Its Type-S sibling was hailed by Evo magazine as one of the best-handling front-drivers ever made. But then, these are the same people who think that lift-off oversteer is a desirable trait in a front wheel drive car, which is somewhat akin to thinking that a proclivity towards axe-murdering is a handy attribute for your next wife. Not necessarily an opinion to trust, then. Still, I guess that if you have grown up on a diet of rear-driven trackday heroism, weekend trips to Spa-Francorchamps and tall tales of drifting your 964RS round Adenaur-Forst then you’d be quite impressed with the Accord’s resolute aversion to understeer. Indeed, if that’s your single holy grail of handling prowess then you might even enjoy the experience – it’s certainly capable of holding its nose line with far more determination than you would expect from a mere repmobile. The thing is, this otherwise commendable ability simply highlights the confusion of a car that is neither truly comfortable nor genuinely sporty. The ride is, quite rightly, tuned towards comfort but this means the ‘sporty’ front end response in corners simply accelerates the onset of body roll and makes the car feel unwieldy even though it is actually holding its line.

Interior curiously old-school, but still a pleasant place to be.

The feeling of a car that’s ill-at-ease with its purpose is exacerbated by the inconsistent steering. It is responsive and the initial turn-in is fairly sharp, which gives the impression of sportiness. The trouble is, once you’re in a bend it comes over all unpredictable. I guess “non-linear” is the best description. You’re never entirely sure how much wheel turning is needed to reach a particular angle, so you end up making constant over-and-under corrections which on longer corners makes for an experience more twitchy than a pet shop gerbil after Richard Gere’s just walked in the store. Although thanks to Vehicle Stability Assist you’re perhaps marginally less likely than the rodent to actually end up in the shit…

If the driving experience is confused, at least the interior is more cohesive. The cream leather and carpets give a high-class ambience, even if the plastic wood is more Allegro Vanden Plas than XJ6. The dash is well laid out, and there’s the usual smattering of sub-executive toys including cruise control, dual-zone climate control and a touch-screen satnav and entertainment system. Sadly, with outdated maps and a routing algorithm that gives some truly bizarre suggestions, this device is to efficient navigation what Stephen Hawking is to karaoke.

So, to sum up; the Accord’s got a compromised engine and drivetrain, unpredictable handling and a nice but flawed interior. Why then, did I buy one? Surely it’s a car which is simply trying to be too many different things and failing to be any of them? Well, yes. But that makes it just like… every other car it’s competing with. Long gone are the simple days when four-door saloonwas, in itself, enough to define an entire market sector. Now, such easy boundaries have been subsumed by an adjectival melting-pot where ‘sporty’ must vie with ‘luxurious’, ‘efficient’ must compete with ‘spacious’, ‘quality’ must take on ‘value’ and ‘fast’ must coexist with ‘economical’. It’s inevitable that cars attempting to meet such a contradictory set of demands will all be fundamentally confused in their purpose; the Accord is merely doing what’s necessary to compete in what Baudrillard might have referred to as a world of proliferating spec-lists and shrinking sense. Mondeo? Econobox trying to be a sports car. 407? Econobox trying to be a style icon. Passat? Econobox trying to be a quality experience. Even a poverty-spec Vectra’s covered in executive-style chrome trim these days…

If all the competition is equally confused, why did I choose the Accord? And why a 2.4 Executive? Two things, really. Firstly, it’s not a diesel. I don’t care how much more sense a diesel engine might make for a commuter car; the thought of waking up each day to face that despicably agricultural, utterly joyless death-rattle resonating through my bones just fills me with horror. Secondly, it’s a Honda. When you’ve got a tiresome commute every day, the single most important thing is that your car starts in the morning every time and never fails to get you home at night. In a Honda, this is a given. But choosing a Honda is about more than just unquestionable reliability – it’s also about the image projected by the brand. Bolstered by those wonderful paeans to engineering that its TV adverts have become, the Honda name now conjures an image of underlying integrity yet otherwise seems impossible to categorise. For those of us who couldn’t bear to be associated with the tawdry aspirationalism of a 3-series or a (shudder) A4, yet who are equally unprepared to join the ranks of grey, joyless, white-goods pilots in their Sonatas and Magentises, the difficulty of pinning down exactly what Honda represents makes all the difference: In a world of the tediously obvious, it's nice to keep people guessing. So, driving an identity-crisis car with a badge that’s uniquely difficult to pigeon-hole is pretty much... perfect!

Ratings

|❻|A-Road Overtaking
|❻|B-Road Blasting
|❽|City Driving
|❾|Long Distance Comfort
|❿|Reliability
|❽|Stealth Factor
|❻|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Fuel economy not a strength if you’re serious about keeping up with traffic. High 20s mpg typical for dual-carriageway duelling; mid 30s when taking it easy.

● I paid top dollar for my car just before 2007's massive oil-price jump and by the time I came to chop it in, repmobiles with big petrol engines were about as desirable as syphilis. Depreciation over my period of ownership was therefore horrific and probably not really representative.

● Nothing broke, wore out or needed fixing at all. Just routine servicing and a set of tyres.

● For some reason, I never managed to take any photos of my Accord, so the pictures above are not actually of my car. Thanks to Imperial Cars, Portsmouth for their images of an identical motor.

● 17” wheels dramatically improve the looks – the standard 16s look ridiculously small. Having tried both, there is no discernible difference in ride quality or noise from the larger wheels.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Quite possibly. I still warm to the Honda brand image and the new shape Accord is a nice looking car, especially the estate. I’m just not sure I will ever have a need for this type of car in my life any more.

Life Beyond the Fast Lane

2007-06-03T17:31:00.003+01:00

It’s the decision every petrolhead dreads. Unless you’re spectacularly wealthy, stunningly dim or just autistically single-minded then you’ll know what I’m talking about: Is it time to sell the motor and do something sensible with the cash? It’s a question I finally answered in the affirmative last year, when I sold the last in a long line of fast cars (a Skyline GTR) and embarked upon a journey back to driving normality. And if you’re one of those people who’s just put up a crying-emoticon-covered post in the For Sale section of your favourite forum saying “Car must go, buying a house” then read on. There are words of comfort for you here…

Let’s get straight to the point. The fact is, I don’t miss fast car ownership very much. There. I’ve said it. Have I become some kind of limp-wristed, green-voting, car-hating wet liberal? I don't think so. But the fact remains; I’m actually rather enjoying my new role as a voyeur rather than a participant in the high-octane world. The question is, why?

The first reason is psychological. You know that after a couple of months, your brain re-calibrates its sense of speed. What felt ballistic on the test drive soon seems… pedestrian. It’s this innate human ability to normalise which is at the root of every car enthusiast’s never-ending quest for more power. It’s also reinforced by a fundamental law of performance car ownership; namely that within two weeks of purchasing your latest motor, you will always get your doors comprehensively blown off by something quicker. Usually a smoky old Sierra Cosworth. At which point you immediately forget your new toy and start saving up for expensive modifications or yet another trade-in.

The point is... getting off that escalator is liberating. Of course, going the other way’s not easy at first. You’ll end up on the opposite carriageway feeling more exposed than George Michael in a public convenience, thanks to your brain still thinking in 400bhp-sized overtaking gaps and your new car struggling to make a quarter of that. But soon you’ll find that just as your brain re-calibrated a fast car to feeling normal after a few weeks, so it has done the same thing to make a slow car feel... normal.

In fact, it often feels a lot better. Why? Well, the lack of aggravation for starters. We drive on roads that are chock-full of ignorant, pig-headed, petty-minded onanists who enjoy venting their pent-up frustration on anyone who dares to look like they might be faster, richer, happier or in any way doing better than them. In a performance car, you’re rubbing their noses in it. In a normal motor you’re flying under their radar. Parking, too, becomes straightforward. No more skulking at the back of supermarket car parks to avoid the serial door-scrapers who lurk there. No more worrying about whether it will still be there if you leave it after dark. No more returning to your car to find it surrounded by 12-year old boys from the lower social orders, greasy noses smearing your glass, waving camera phones and asking if it’ll do 300mph.

Even the driving experience itself has benefits. Visits to the pumps become a weekly event, rather than a daily chore, meaning that on very long journeys you can actually arrive quicker than before, as long as you learn to get your thrills from the mpg-meter instead of the change-up light. And of course there's the pleasure of a little comfort on your journey - your new steed may roll a bit round corners, but after years of haemorrhoid-hammering 'track tuned' suspension your arse will at least get some relief.

So, any regrets? Er, no. I suppose I do miss the car as a conversation piece; “Oh yeah, I used to own a Skyline GTR...” makes you sound like your sad old uncle harking back to the glory days of his 3 litre Capri. And just like you always suspected that he only really ever had a 1.6L, now your audience almost certainly doubts your tales of derring-do on the Thetford bypass. Still, it’s a small price to pay. And I can honestly say, if that’s you with the impending divorce, the unplanned pregnancy or the dawning realisation that still sharing a house with your parents when you’re 28 is not exactly living the dream... don’t be afraid. Get the car sold and get on with the rest of your life. Really, it’s not so bad.

Retrospective: 1999 Nissan Skyline R34GTR

2007-04-29T11:03:00.002+01:00

Quick Summary

In standard form, characterised by a dramatic surfeit of mouth and a tragic deficit of trouser: A velvet fist in an iron glove.

The Story

They always say you should never meet your heroes. Perhaps I should have given that a bit more thought before I bought my ultimate dream car – a Nissan Skyline R34 GTR. But I didn’t, so for the time I owned it my GTR became the object of a love-hate relationship which never really resolved itself one way or the other. Unlike some hero-meeting disappointments, looks were never the issue, at least after a Nismo body kit and Trust lowering springs sorted out the comedy ride-height of the standard car. And opening the garage door to be greeted by those über-cool rear lights remained a genuine thrill throughout my ownership. Sadly, the lethargic and unpredictable driving experience of the standard GTR so utterly failed to fill the hole left by my Evo 6 that I often found myself closing the garage door again and taking the wife’s car instead. So, using the twisted logic familiar to anyone who’s sunk £30k into a car that they end up hardly driving, it was time to throw some good money after bad in the form of a Stage 1 Abbey Motorsport upgrade. Did it work? Well, seeing as I sold the car 4 months later, I guess not. But it did at least make the last few weeks of ownership more entertaining.

Here’s what I thought of my newly Stage 1’d GTR back in 2005:

Figures first. 326bhp @ the hubs, 400bhp @ the pub. Not too impressive these days but still a significant upgrade from the original; the result of a full exhaust system, induction kit, ECU, boost controller and remap. So what changes does it bring? The first thing is the full-throttle noise; this car now howls in a frighteningly bestial way - every trip to 7500rpm brings you the glorious sound of a yeti getting his todge caught up in his fly zip. It’s a schizo thing, too, as at normal speeds it’s just as quiet as standard. Of course, lifting off brings the obligatory pops, bangs and the occasional chavtastic flame although presumably it can’t be overfuelling too much as it now does at least 50 miles more to a tank than it did when standard. If you’re brutal with the lift-off you can also get a dog-yelp noise (think Jack Russell sitting on a cactus) which is rather amusing.

Skirts and springs fixed the tippy-toes look of the standard car.

The second thing is the choice of performance - the stealth-installed boost controller in the driver’s sunglasses compartment has three boost settings, all labelled "Fuck": 0.8 bar (Fuck, that’s slow, have the turbos broken?); 1.0bar (Fuck, now that’s more like it) and 1.2bar (Fuck, now I really have broken the turbos). I’m sure the 1.2 setting is fine really but adding high boost to ceramic turbines is like bringing Ian Paisley to the Pope’s birthday party – it’ll be fun for a short while but fireworks are guaranteed and you know it’ll all end in tears. Possible best saved for special occasions, then. Which is, of course, why I’ve been driving everywhere with it on max. Ah well, if you shut the compartment you can’t see the overboost warning light anyway…

GTR looked lardy next to super-cool supercharged S2000.

Now to the real question: Is it quicker than an Evo? At long last, I think the answer is yes. Acceleration in the intergalactic-geared GTR has always been a more drawn out affair than the sprint-special Evo and the ‘linear’ effect is clearly exaggerated by the power increase. It certainly feels like 80-120 is as quick as 40-80 (which given the still-very-much-present lag in 2nd gear at 40 may actually be true). Hit 5th at 125 or so and things get silly as it just keeps on hurling itself at the horizon. Of course, I have never kept my foot in to see where it would end up and any tales that you might have heard about an indicated 170 on the Thetford bypass are entirely fictional. But if straight-line bahn-storming is your thing then I imagine a Stage 1 GTR would be quite up to the task.

Pulling in for a quick pray before taking on those bends.

So, do I finally have a car that is as enjoyable to drive as my old, standard Evo 6? Well... nearly. The noise and the speed are all good fun but as usual there’s a pube on the soap bar, which for this car is the computer that controls the ‘handling’. Have you ever seen a silicon chip wearing a chestwig and medallion? If not, have a look in the boot compartment of a GTR and check out Mr ATTESA. He’ll be sat there, gold connectors glinting like teeth, secretly wishing he was in a real man’s car like a Mk3 Supra but in the meantime ensuring he impresses the laydeez with a super-macho display of manly oversteer at every possible opportunity.

The end result of Mr Hero-chip’s efforts is that the GTR wags its tail more than a beagle on Benzedrine. This is most noticeable when attempting to perform basic, everyday manoeuvres like overtaking. In these situations, the Evo loves to be flicked. I mean, really loves to be flicked. Like a lesbian with no arms. Engage acceleration, flick onto opposite carriageway, fly past and flick back in again. No fuss, no drama. By contrast, taking any kind of bend in the GTR is an uncertain experience and if it’s wet then it’s downright scary; you just never seem to know quite what the computer is going to do. In short, cornering is like farting must be for pensioners – you can’t enjoy really pushing one out any more because you never quite know whether you’re going to follow through.

The GTR's favourite road - a straight one.

The standard car was the same, but with the power upgrade it’s now even more keen to play Ditchfinder General when you’re trying to pass slower traffic. The only way to do it is to proceed at a very gentle angle onto the opposite carriageway, straighten up and ensure there is no more than 0.0001 degree of steering lock applied, floor the throttle, wait for the lag, check your foot to see that the mat hasn’t got stuck under the throttle as you still don’t appear to be going anywhere, check that the steering wheel is still perfectly aligned, observe the approaching lorry that is now rather closer than it was, wait a bit more for the turbos to wake up, ignore the wife calmly pointing out the apparent imminence of death, hold on tight to make sure you’re absolutely straight as everything goes warp speed and you scream past three more cars than you’d intended to pass, tuck back in very gently to avoid any sudden movements that may rouse Mr ATTESA from watching his re-runs of Magnum PI in the back, wave politely at the lorry driver who’s doing the special “I’ve seen a Skyline” wave that everyone does (you know, the wrist-action one) and then laugh as you look in your mirror and see one of the Rovers you overtook slew off into a field after the pensioner driving has a coronary from your exhaust noise. It’s kind of fun, but then so is train-surfing or crocodile wrestling or masturbating on public transport… either way, one day you’ll get caught out and the result won’t be very pretty.

Filthy GTR raised hackles - this photo prompted death threats.

What’s the conclusion? A Stage 1 GTR is finally a worthy competitor for a standard Evo – I can actually be bothered to get the thing out of the garage to go to work now, which has to be an improvement. However, what the power upgrade, springs and bodykit highlight more than anything is just how utterly, completely, unforgivably crap a standard GTR is. It looks unfinished; it’s pathetically slow; it’s got a stupidly harsh ride; it drinks petrol; it doesn’t handle... In short, once you look past the hype it really is a rubbish car. Be in no doubt – the towering legend of the GTR is built entirely on race-bred versions flying round Bathurst, massively modified cars being driven round the ‘Ring by pro drivers and, of course, your mate’s cousin’s brother’s one that has a thousand horsepower. None of which have anything at all to do with the sorry effort that Nissan stuck in the showrooms.

Fair play, you could probably say the same about Evos and their rally heritage but next time you hear someone talking about road-going Evos having bugger-all to do with the rally cars on which their reputation was founded, remember that a standard, unmodified Evo is still a blindingly capable car. Perhaps Nissan will raise their game with the 2008 GTR or perhaps they’ll continue peddling a substandard product on the back of the brand’s image. Whatever, until then the Evo boys can keep flying round the track while the GTR owners keep fishtailing into the gravel like a bunch of auctioneers… going… going… gone!

Ratings

|❼|A-Road Overtaking
|❸|B-Road Blasting
|❹|City Driving
|❽|Long Distance Comfort
|❿|Reliability
|❶|Stealth Factor
|❻|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Bought from official UK GTR supplier Middlehurst Motorsport, mine was actually a Jap import. It had sat on their forecourt for some time, probably because it wasn't one of their UK cars, although the horrific aftermarket Jap wheels probably didn't help either. I persuaded them to put some original GTR rims on it, and still got it for a knockdown price.

● It wasn’t a V-SPEC, which meant I missed out on an even harsher ride, a G-force meter on the graphic display and a more advanced rear diff. And, of course, the all-important badge on the back.

● It was suggested that the ‘erratic’ handling might have been the result of a dodgy kph/mph conversion carried out on import cars. There is certainly some logic to this, as the computer would have been applying handling ‘interventions’ thinking the car was going a lot slower than it actually was.

● In typical Jap fashion, it never broke down or required anything other than normal service parts during the time that I owned it.

● It was more economical after the Stage 1 remap than it was before. Standard car did 16-18mpg; once tuned it could do low 20s. Probably something to do with originally being designed for 100RON Japanese petrol, whereas the remap was done on UK Super unleaded.

● It’s probably worth noting that fitment of an aftermarket manual 4WD controller can transform the handling. I drove a car which had one fitted and it was far more sure-footed and predictable. Sadly, the controllers also had a reputation for wearing out the front drivetrain components which were never spec’d to cope with power being sent to them continually.

● GTR owners were a funny bunch. Of course there were a few decent, friendly chaps but the others seemed to be divided into two camps; either snobby anal-retentives spending their weekends preening and polishing, or fabulously wealthy playboys spending tens of thousands of pounds on a never-ending string of performance upgrades for their weekend plaything. Just not my scene, really.

● It might be different now the Fast’n’Furious spotlight has faded, but when I had mine it was an embarrassing magnet for pubescent males. Every journey would have young lads following and fawning over it. I once drove through a Scottish town and picked up a tail of at least twelve teenage boys on bicycles all pedalling desperately to keep up, waving their cameraphones madly. It was, frankly, disturbing – I felt like the Paedo Piper of Hamelin. However, I will admit to a guilty laugh on another occasion when an entire troop of Scouts out on some kind of roadside adventure saw me coming, quickly lined up and saluted as I went past.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? An R34? No. The smiles-per-£ ratio is just not good enough. However, the new Nissan GTR is a different ballgame - it looks like Nissan have made it into the car it should have been all along.

The Highway Code (Norfolk Edition)

2007-04-22T10:20:00.000+01:00

Norfolk. Not so much a gene pool, more a small puddle. Not so much a family tree, more a stunted shrub. A place where the definition of ‘virgin’ is a sister who can run faster than her brothers. Where men are men and pigs are nervous... Yeah, I know, you’ve heard them all before – the old clichés and cheap jokes rooted in ignorance of the locals’ custom and culture. And, yes, I know those self-same locals are thoroughly sick of the tired old digs about inbreeding and buggering farmyard animals. But frankly, I don’t care, as I’ve just spent 7 years living there and I’m now thoroughly sick of all the locals. And much of it is down to how they drive.

Let me explain. If you’ve never been there, you probably have some idea about what to expect when motoring in Nelson’s county. Naturally, you think you’ll be entertained by the sight of odd-looking fellows with no teeth driving tractors. Of course, you know you’ll need patience for occasional encounters with wizened centenarians in pristine Austin Metros. And, I’m pretty certain that having been trained in city-commuter car combat you reckon a few old pensioners and the odd farmer won’t give you much trouble. And you’d be right... it’s just the rest of the local population you’ve got to worry about.

I have never come across so many normal-looking, average people driving normal-looking, average cars who can turn so completely schizo purely over someone else’s driving manoeuvre. God only knows where it comes from. Possibly it’s born out of a burning resentment for the steady influx of commuters and second-homers into their little backwater. Maybe it’s because they’re Green voters, all twisted up inside by their own guilt at having to use a [shudder] motor car because there is no alternative. Or perhaps it’s simply rooted in a primal fear of things which can move faster than them. Whatever. If you like to make fairly rapid progress on the road then expect to be lectured at, sworn at, gestured at, threatened and generally obstructed by almost everyone else. Even just being seen in a fast-looking car is enough for some of them – you can be stopped dead in traffic and still get unprovoked abuse from some middle-aged cardigan in a 10-year old Peugeot diesel.

I have therefore come to suspect that there is some kind of secretive alternative set of road rules at work which guides the behaviour of the locals. Maybe like a special Norfolk Edition of The Highway Code. It wouldn’t be difficult to guess the content of at least two of the sections...

144: Overtaking

144(a) If a driver is trying to overtake you, move further into the middle of the road to discourage their attempt to pass. If they continue to pull out, wait until they are alongside and then accelerate. Speeding up or driving unpredictably while someone is overtaking you will help them to learn that we don’t do that sort of thing in these parts. Should they manage to pass, flash your lights and, if dark, leave them on full beam.
144(b) If you need to overtake a slower moving vehicle, always check your mirror to see if there is anyone behind who also wishes to pass. If there is, pull out and perform your manoeuvre slowly enough that the car behind is unable to pass as well and has to pull back in to avoid oncoming traffic.
144(c) If you spot a driver overtaking towards you, always flash your lights and use a hand signal to indicate their error. Note: It is advisable to perform this action even if the overtaking car has safely pulled back in ½ mile before you pass.

148: Dual Carriageways

148 (a) The Norfolk speed limit for dual carriageways is 67mph. You must not exceed this speed in any circumstances other than 148 (d) below.
148 (b) If you see a faster vehicle approaching from behind, pull out into their path even if there is no traffic in front of you.
148 (c) If you are already passing a slower vehicle and a faster vehicle approaches you from behind, brake sharply and match your speed to that of the slower vehicle on the inside. Proceed alongside the slower vehicle for at least 2 miles, using occasional hand signals to the car behind.
148 (d) Remain in the outside lane until the car behind attempts to pass on the inside. At this point, you may choose to return rapidly to the inside lane without warning or accelerate hard. Should they manage to get in front, flash your lights and use a hand signal.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The point is that there are some fabulous roads in Norfolk, utterly ruined by the fact that the entire region is apparently populated by people whose sole purpose in life is to obstruct the progress of anyone else. And if you are ever tempted to exit your car and enter into a meaningful dialogue with the man who’s just spent the last 10 minutes deliberately blocking your way, you might want to think twice. After all, you don’t really want to find yourself on the wrong end of a shotgun, being bundled into the boot of an old Range Rover and spending the rest of your days as a scarecrow. Or as pet ‘piglet’ for a man who is technically his own uncle. Remember. In a beet field near Downham Market, no-one can hear you scream.

Review: 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 7 GT-A

2007-02-13T16:42:00.002Z

Quick Summary

Final proof that Japanese engineers are nuttier than a sack of squirrel shit; a torque convertor ‘box in an Evo. Driving it was like shagging your cousin – you knew it was wrong but God, it felt so right...

The Story

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Automatics are for a limited market, right? You know, fat Americans; arthritic pensioners; one-legged forklift accident victims; scatty women with ‘auto only’ licences; people who need to keep a hand free so they can masturbate vigorously whilst driving... And whilst you might have a certain respect for those wishing to knock one out in perfect safety whilst negotiating a tricky roundabout, you really don’t fancy being associated with the average auto-user. Nope, a manual gear box is the only way to go, right? No niggling doubts or aching left knees at all, no sir. And anyway, even if you did secretly occasionally think that you might fancy an auto for those tiresome commutes and town runs, you wouldn’t want an automatic Evo would you? I mean, what sort of abomination is that, right? Who the hell would buy one of them?

Big wing was optional. Delete option would have been a better choice.

I know. That’s exactly what I thought too, but one still ended up on my drive. It's funny - I remember thinking rationally, considering the practical choices logically, looking at MPG figures, measuring load spaces... then there’s a strange kind of blank episode and the next thing I can remember is shaking the salesman’s hand and finding I’ve put a deposit down on a car which met absolutely none of my requirements. Like alien abduction, I guess, minus the sore arse afterwards. And instead of strange green men, I got a strange green car. Well, more sort of greeny-gold I suppose. Depends on the light really, but it’s certainly unusual whatever it is. I suspect that the Japanese paint engineers were aiming for a classy touch of champagne-beige metallic in homage to classic early-80s British Leyland style. Of course, things always get altered a little in the translation and what they actually achieved is closer tomildly-infected piss. It’s unique, if a little disturbing - you almost expect to see little streaks of blood in it when you inspect it closely.

Interior not the most cohesive of designs.

So, it’s an automatic Evo then. I bet the engine must be a bit watered-down to go with that poofter’s gearbox, right? Well, no not really. It’s a seriously fast car by pretty much any real-world reckoning, mainly thanks to the remarkably responsive power plant, which goes a long way towards mitigating the delayed reactions of the torque convertor. The turbo design is unique to the GT-A and was apparently chosen specifically for low-down response and zero lag - it may only put out 272bhp and 253 lb/ft but you can give it a tickle at 1500rpm and it will pull you off quicker than a £5 crack whore. OK, you’re never going to get the brutal catapult power of the closer ratios found in a manual Evo, especially when the GT-A gearing is super-long (~2800rpm @ 80mph). But with a more accessible torque band you’ll never be far behind.

You also have the advantage of knowing that every gear change is going to be perfect. Sure, the INVECS II box is a bit erratic when left to its own devices in full-auto mode – it’s supposed to ‘learn’ your driving style but unsurprisingly struggles to get it right given the massively variable demands of a typical UK journey. However, train it to stay in maximum-Gran mode (which means nice smooth short-shifting up the box when you’re not in a hurry) and then you can just knock the stick sideways to Tiptronic when you’re initiating warp-speed. Manual changes can then be made by tapping the stick up and down or using the steering wheel buttons. Other than a slight delay on the 1st-2nd change they are slick and fairly quick changes; a decent driver could certainly match that kind of change occasionally, but not each and every time.

Choosing the ‘right’ gear yourself also means the auto doesn’t have to slip - get it into 3rd gear and mash the throttle at 65mph and it takes off with the whole transmission clenched tighter than a choirboy’s sphincter at a priests’ convention. Can it ever beat the tactile pleasure of a perfectly-timed manual change? Of course not. But it definitely has its advantages. It’s like your favourite lady of ill-repute… you might miss the personal satisfaction of having ‘scored’ yourself, but you’re guaranteed a result every time.

4G63 setup unique to GT-A: Tuned for response not power.

So, we’ve established that in Tiptronic mode at least, it’s a seriously rapid car. But can it do that real Evo-thing when it comes to being the fastest thing on four wheels down a B-road? Actually, it can do better than that. In the real world, with your average driver behind the wheel, it would almost certainly get from A to B quicker than a similarly-powered manual Evo. For starters, the steering is marginally slower and the suspension is tuned a couple of notches off the ‘it goes to 11’ harshness of the manual car. On a track this might be a disadvantage but on the average poorly-surfaced UK road it gives a massive boost in confidence, with no tramlining and far less skittering across holes with the wheel tugging about.

Composed is probably the word – this is a car which comports itself with some considerable decorum, at least in comparison to its less Evolved brethren: It may hitch up its skirt and hurry along but you never get to see its knickers. Yes, the filtering applied by the slightly softer suspension and steering may reduce the quantity and depth of feedback but that can be a good thing – it tells you what you need to know and doesn’t bother you with unnecessary, peripheral information. I can balance this car on a roundabout and still feel precisely where the limits of grip are, but I’m not being distracted with continual detail about tiny changes and imperfections in the road surface. I can punt it down a rough, bumpy B-road and place the car where I want it to go, not where the potholes dictate. Of course, all you über-skilled drivers would claim to prefer the unabridged feedback offered by the pure-bred Evo but less-adept drivers like me can’t always filter all that information quickly enough, so the GT-A wins every time for us.

Yes, those are cream coloured dials. Nice!

Put simply, it really is a genuinely talented machine that is truly great to drive. It just gets it right, every time. Period. Which is, I suppose, rather more than can be said for the way it looks - the performance might not be watered down but the shape certainly is. OK, you could say that applies to the evolution of the standard car from 6 to 7 but with the ‘tasteful’ colour options, smooth bonnet and central number plate the GT-A removes itself even further from the real ‘rally’ Evos. In fact, the polished wheels, clear lights and tints push it uncomfortably into proper blinged-up chavmobile territory. But, really, so what? If that bothers your sense of rally heritage, well good for you. Each to their own and all that - I’m sure you’re very happy with a bit of the old 45 Left over crest into 90 Right on weekends and the occasional furtive wank over some rare Tommi footage. As it happens, if I’d bought a new GT-A I’d have forgotten all about weekend gravel-stage warriors and just spec’d it completely badge-and-wing-less for a bit of Q-car fun.

Inside, it has to be said that the can’t-quite-make-its-mind-up look continues with a resoundingly unsuccessful attempt at blending luxury with sporting. The original Evo 7 interior is a long way off being the last word in style, but the GT-A ‘special touches’ really do turn it a mish-mash of clashing bits and bobs. Gone are the nondescript plastic door handles, replaced with glitzy chrome affairs. No more sporty gauges – instead there are off-white dials straight out of a Rover 75. Except they glow bright red at night, unlike the rest of the dash illumination which is white. The seats are comfortable, but wouldn’t be out of place in a Lancer 1.6. And of course, the carbon-effect panels of the manual car are replaced with some utterly random blue trim which looks dull until the sun shines, at which point it glitters with a totally unexpected metal-flake sparkle. Which is kind of cool I suppose, in a 70s-roofchop-Mini sort of way. Still, if you wanted a quality interior you’d be mincing about in an Audi TT or something, so it’s not really of much consequence in the overall scheme of things.

Colour seems so wrong for an Evo but somehow looks right.

OK. So there you have it. Looks and interior aside, the Evo 7 GT-A is a uniquely great car. I know most of you will remain unconvinced but, frankly, that’s your loss. If you can overcome your prejudices, this car is not as irrational as it first sounds. When you’re doing a crappy, tedious journey in traffic it is half as stressful and twice as comfortable as a manual Evo. When you want to really let rip then it’s got better real-world handling, nearly all of the outright speed and almost all of the involvement. It all boils down to this:An Evo with an automatic gearbox is always going to sound like a stupid idea. See it that way and it will only frustrate you; it’s a travesty, it’s missing the point, it just makes no sense. The trick is to understand that the GT-A is notan Evo with an automatic gearbox. Really, it isn’t. No, what the GT-A is, is an automatic car that just happens to handle, steer, stop and go like an Evo. Now that, to me and my ageing left leg, makes all the sense in the world.

Ratings

|❾|A-Road Overtaking
|❿|B-Road Blasting
|❽|City Driving
|❽|Long Distance Comfort
|❿|Reliability
|❸|Stealth Factor
|❿|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Steering wheel had gearchange buttons for up and down on both sides, so you could even drive in manual mode with just the one arm.

● Remapping a GT-A used to be a lot trickier than the standard Evo, as the ECU is also programmed to control the gearbox. The experts worked it all out after a while but I didn’t bother going down the tuning route. However, the chap who bought it from me took it up to 400bhp.

● Fuel economy didn’t seem to be much worse than any other Jap turbo – high teens to low twenties mpg. Tiny tank meant very short range though.

● Prison-shower depreciation figures. Bought from a dealer, sold privately for a quick sale. Running it as a second car to a Skyline GTR was never going to be financially sensible, but losing £1000 a month did sting a bit.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? If I could afford the petrol then yes absolutely, although I’d go for the estate GT-A version instead that they did for the Evo 9.

Retrospective: 1999 Mitsubishi Evo 6 GSR

2007-01-28T17:02:00.004Z

Quick Summary

Like treating haemorrhoids with a soldering iron, it could never be described as an elegant solution, but by hell did it get the job done...

The Story

God, I loved this car. Rear-drive purists will sneer, but on public roads I found the Evo’s active-yaw-control 4WD trickery to be way more fun than flailing about with more-than-a-dab of oppo around every wet corner. On our typically damp, greasy roads the Evo would just kick itself round bends that had the German rear-wheel drive contingent flapping around with more fishtails than Harry Ramsden. Artificial? Sure. Covering up a lack of driver skill? Absolutely. Entertaining? More than any other car I’ve driven…

Careless adjustment of comedy wing could drop mph and mpg. Not funny.

Of course, that’s a deeply unfashionable view to hold on a motoring website which has its roots in the hairiest of hair-shirted rear-drive purism. But, hard as it may be to believe, there are actually people out there whose driving Godhood is insufficient for them to be able to hang the back end out on every corner without feeling a little, well… nervous. People who prefer their driving enjoyment to have a little less sense of imminent death about it. People who are content to hyperlink straight to the instant thrill of piloting a staggeringly competent machine, as opposed to devoting months or years learning their way round a vehicle which is inherently less capable. People, in short, like me. Laugh scornfully if you will, but for us mere mortals the Evo was the ultimate expression of everything we ever wanted from a fast car. It felt sharp; it feltraw; it felt brutal. But, underneath, it still had our backs covered.

4 doors, 3 diamonds, 2 litres, 1 turbo... No chance, suckers! [/irony]

The Evo’s tail was mobile enough to pretty much eradicate understeer, so turn-in felt ultra-sharp going in to a bend. But before that tail movement could transition into full-on oversteer, the AYC would torque-balance things back under control, maximising the power to all four wheels so you could blast back out of the corner. It worked brilliantly, just as long as you didn’t counter-steer too much yourself. Now admittedly, I had spent a couple of years being hand-held by a friendly Impreza which had perhaps given me a head start on all-wheel-drive corner exit strategies. But I did suspect that the truth was, theless natural skill you had at managing oversteer yourself, the better the Evo tended to work. This would certainly explain why talented rear-drive aficionados who found themselves behind the wheel of an Evo would invariably end up frothing at the mouth with indignity, as they wrestled with the car for full control-freak privileges. And it would also explain why they’d inevitably give up after a while and declare it a horribly artificial, heretical travesty that took all the skill (and thus for them, the fun) out of driving.

Blue dials highlight the Evo's legendary classy, timeless interior...

Definitely not a car for everyone, then. But for me, I couldn’t get enough of it. Which rather begs the question; how come I sold the damn thing if it was so perfectly suited to my idea of driving enjoyment? Put simply, because I was foolishly chasing a dream. A stupidly vacuous, ignorant dream that took the shape of a Bayside Blue R34GTR as it happened. If I’m honest, I think all the ‘chav’ jibes about the Evo were also getting to me a bit by that stage as well. I was never entirely comfortable with the working-class-hero image thrust upon me by a car that to the uninitiated looked pretty much like a council-estate Halfords-modded Cavalier. Perhaps in the late 90s it had been genuinely cool; the default transport for all those hero-geeks dashing from site to site as they gallantly saved us from the Millenium Bug. But by the Cossie-bereft mid-00s it had become the new ram-raiding icon of the lower social orders and was attracting entirely unprovoked, fiercely disparaging remarks from almost every other section of the population. Living in Norfolk, and thus regularly encountering folk whose idea of non-conformist rebellion was wearing their casual corduroy trousers to church, that biplane wing in particular proved to be a real red rag to their bullshit.

4G63 was too ugly to polish anyway.

I still loved it though. It just turned into a bit of a guilty love. Love with a touch of shame. A dirty love. In the end I concluded that the Evo was really the cheap slapper of performance motoring - face like a busted sofa; really not the sort to be seen with in public, but faithful as only a hound can be and when the time comes, she knows all the tricks and will do anything to please. As it turned out, I discovered that was a much better proposition than the trophy wife Skyline which replaced it - good to be seen stepping out with; got admiring glances from everyone but, how can I put it… really didn’t go that well. And you could never be quite sure whether she was going to murder you one rainy night and run off with the insurance money…

Ratings

|❿|A-Road Overtaking
|❾|B-Road Blasting
|❻|City Driving
|❼|Long Distance Comfort
|❿|Reliability
|⓪|Stealth Factor
|⓫|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● It wasn’t quite perfect in standard form. The Brembo brakes were spongy and often developed a nasty judder. Like many other owners, I chose the time-honoured solution of AP Racing 6-pot callipers and grooved discs. These not only fixed the problem - they also introduced a brand new mode of fun, as slowing down became nearly as entertaining as going fast.

● The standard car could certainly handle more power than its factory ~280bhp. The accepted wisdom amongst the great and good of my contemporary Evo brethren was that 330bhp (induction kit, exhaust) made things nicely sparky whilst a 400/400 output (uprated turbo, boost controller, remap) was the ultimate balance of reliability, traction and balls-out pace. However, fearing the slippery slope of the eternal upgrade escalator, I eschewed their advice and carried on enjoying my car as it was.

● 4500 mile services intervals were awkward, especially as the general Evo-ignorance of Mitsubishi dealer service-monkeys made it necessary to travel a significant distance to a trusted independent.

● Economy was around the 20mpg mark as you would expect, but actual range was more of an issue because of the tiny tank. About 200 miles to a 45-litre fillup was usual.

● The ride was not as harsh as many claimed – in fact with the superbly-supportive Recaro seats it was quite a comfortable experience. It did get a bit noisy at higher speeds, but if you’re cruising on the motorway in an Evo then you’re probably doing something wrong, as that’s an opportunity to go cross-country you’ve missed.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Hell yes. Where do I sign?

History Lesson: 1992 Citroen ZX 1.9i Volcane

2007-01-21T16:32:00.004Z

Quick Summary

A loveless, festering, stinking, crapulous, oily piece of merde floating unwanted in the swimming pool of hot hatch history. Avoid at all costs.

The Story

As a mulleted, metal-loving teenager in the 1980s I once bought an Yngwie Malmsteen album. It was crap. And there the story would have ended, had I not got a foolish notion that it must have been a one-off; that this well-renowned, highly-rated guitar virtuoso must have released a duff record at some point and that this was the one I must have bought. In fact, this perverse logic persisted until I owned no less than four of this tiresome wank-meister’s turgid LPs; only then did I finally realise that, actually, I had been right all along: Yngwie sucked donkey balls.

It should have been a valuable learning experience about not trusting journalistic opinion in those wonderfully ill-informed, pre-internet days. Sadly, it wasn’t. In fact, I managed to repeat the whole sorry process some years later with French cars. Four times I threw away my hard-earned in the hope of experiencing the exquisite poise, the playful handling and the quirky charm that the motoring press had assured me I’d find. Four times my dreams were crushed to oblivion; in the end leaving me little more than an empty husk of bitterness and betrayal, finally driven to find solace in the aesthetically-questionable but reassuringly well-built arms of Fuji Heavy Industries.

The final nail in the Gallic coffin was a 1992 Citroen ZX Volcane 1.9i. The Volcane was essentially an 80s hot hatch that had been cooled-down for the early 90s. Insurance premiums had skyrocketed, mainly thanks to the TV constantly playing that footage of the MG Maestro doing h-turns round Blackbird Leys. After Black Monday and Black Wednesday, the economy was still reeling; car crime was going up whilst conspicuous consumption was becoming an increasingly unfashionable lifestyle choice. What better, then, than a swift-but-subtle car which could avoid the unwanted attentions of GTi-loving thieves and soon-to-be-repossessed neighbours? A car which hid its 130bhp potential under a mundane, five-door body whose only hint of any performance orientation was an 80s-hangover bumper stripe. A grey car for grey times indeed.

Depreciation disaster - ZX lost 97% in 4 years

By the time I got mine, around seven years after it first appeared, the Volcane’s Q-car appeal was rather less relevant for most people. However, as I worked in East Leeds at the time it was something of a key attraction. So, enthusiasm buoyed by clippings from contemporary issues of Performance Car, I found myself a low-mileage, superficially pristine example and embarked upon my final odyssey of French fancy. What joys did it bring me? How about the fragrant odour of burning oil wafting into the cabin on every journey thanks to those infernal valve-stem oil seals? Or interior trim that could only be described as narcoleptic, so prone was it to dropping off unexpectedly. Not forgetting a gear linkage apparently made from bits of wood and elastic bands lubricated by that oozy white stuff that accumulates in the corners of fat peoples’ mouths. Sticky, springy and obstructive, all in one ‘box.

Reliability was not a strength. Coolant pipes split, electrical items seized, mechanical items ground themselves into oblivion and the exhaust fell off. And, of course, even when you weren’t parked up waiting for the AA there was the thrill of never quite knowing which way round you’d be exiting a corner. On more than one occasion did I find myself heading unexpectedly backwards into the verge, pondering the curious fact that “Lift-off oversteer” is actually an anagram of “Oft frets: Life Over”

Inevitably, the bastard thing developed what I had by that time come to recognise as the archetypal French-car fault i.e. intermittent, tricky to diagnose and impossible to fix. In this case, it was a severe misfire that occasionally crippled the wheezy old 1.9, giving you about as much chance of hitting sixty as Ray Charles at a darts match. It went through several garages who kindly supplied some very expensive parts and labour but resolutely failed to find a cure. I gave up in the end and pensioned the ZX off as a second car that only did journeys short enough for you to walk home if it broke.

Roadholding? Best described as "revenge for Agincourt"

After several failed attempts to give it away for nothing, I finally sold it for £80. Forget new-car depreciation - this car was six years old when I bought it and over a 4-year period of ownership it lost over 97% of its value. Given the misery it caused and the many £100s it sucked up when getting fixed, I might as well have burned the cash instead. At least it would have smelled better than all that burnt oil. And I could even have chucked my Yngwie Malmsteen albums on the pyre as well.

Ratings

|❹|A-Road Overtaking
|❸|B-Road Blasting
|❸|City Driving
|❹|Long Distance Comfort
|⓪|Reliability
|❹|Stealth Factor
|❶|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● Got nicknamed Jif, as it was such a ing lemon.

● For less than the price of a new C4, you could buy every ZX currently for sale in the UK, although none are Volcanes.

● 1.9 engine was the same as that in the legendary 205 1.9 Gti. Only found in the earliest ZXs before it was replaced by a slower, catalysed 2.0.

● Did about 25mpg unleaded on a good day. Felt like about the same for oil.

● Things that I can remember breaking, falling off or wearing out included: Fuel pump, gear linkage (twice), valve stem oil seals, ECU, interior dash illumination, two wheel bearings, coolant pipes (several), central locking, electric sunroof, stereo controls, ashtray, wiper stalk, front brake calliper, passenger electric window, passenger mirror, battery, glove compartment, front towing eye cover, rear shocks, exhaust silencer, assorted interior switches, exhaust midsection, handbrake cable, rear parcel shelf and… Every. Single. ing. Bulb.

● Number of roadside recoveries needed: 7. Had to move to a different breakdown company.

● Why didn’t I get rid of it sooner? Because I’d naively made the mistake of taking out a 3-year loan to buy it. Madness, I tell you.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Seriously? I would rather stick my cock in a food mixer.

History Lesson: 1988 Renault 5 1.2 TR

2007-01-07T16:06:00.002Z

Quick Summary

Typically, tiresomely French. Dangerously unreliable; a seasick-inducing ride and a stereo that made everything sound like an accordion. Hopeless.

The Story

The Renault 5 is generally considered to be an iconic small hatchback. Sadly, like most icons, it rather outstayed its welcome. The 1972 original might have been a funky little thing which revolutionised small car design but the 2nd generation was more 80s-tack than 70s-chic. By 1988 even that was looking a bit long in the tooth, offering little more than a bit of reheated ‘Gallic charm’.

And unfortunately, this was the point at which the 5 and I became acquainted, in the form of a 5-door 1.2 litre in ‘TR’ spec. My memories are not fond. Steering with more free play than a Russian pimp. Suspension made from underpants elastic that would have struggled to stop your prize jewels jiggling into oblivion, let alone restrain the weight of a motor car. Badly-fitted dash trim inside that gave rise to more squeaks and squeals than a burning cattery, with a hard plastic steering wheel which on hot days would have you making those monkey noises that people make when lowering themselves into a hot bath. And all this was when it was brand new – after the warranty expired the fun just got better. There was the entertainment of guessing when the clutch cable would snap again; the excitement of watching the mismatched red paint race the plastic grey trim to see which could fade fastest; even the occasional surprise joy of your passenger enjoying their own personal foot-spa as the heater matrix collapsed once more.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the French lack technological prowess, either. Back in 1988 they had managed to equip this car with one of the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence I have yet encountered. It knew when you were pulling out in a hurry and would make the engine cough at just the right moment to stall. It knew when it was in the garage being looked at, as it always ran perfectly then. It knew when the MOT was due and would blow a hole in the exhaust the week before and lose a brake light on the drive to the testing station. Hell, it even knew when you were a bit hard up and would choose precisely that month to grind through two wheel bearings and destroy the head-gasket. Forget Turing compliance – it was more human than any machine I’ve ever known.

A badly-timed fart could cause panel damage.

It may be the fourth most-scrapped car in Britain but shockingly, you still see these evil little turds floating round our roads today, resisting the blessed mercy of rust in order to torment their poor owners a little longer. Is it because these particular examples have spent so much time off the road being fixed, they didn’t get a chance to pick up salt and grime? Or maybe so many bits broke or fell off so often that half the car is virtually new anyway? Is it significant that the remaining examples are invariably poverty-spec Campus editions which, lacking just about any electrical items beyond windscreen wipers and lights, had a lower chance of meeting a fiery end thanks to wiring-related spontaneous combustion? Who knows. Perhaps they just exist as a source of misery and discomfort to be endured, seemingly destined to be with us until the end of time, like herpes or Noel Edmonds. Whatever. If you’ve got a masochistic streak, a few quid spare and a burning desire to find out for yourself just how far small-car design has come in the last 20 years then get looking for a mid-80s 5 in the classifieds. It’ll be... educational.

Ratings

|❸|A-Road Overtaking
|❶|B-Road Blasting
|❹|City Driving
|❸|Long Distance Comfort
|❶|Reliability
|❽|Stealth Factor
|❷|Entertainment Value

Random Facts

● 55bhp, 730-odd kilos and a five-speed box meant overtaking was actually possible if the overtakee was doing less than about 45. 3rd gear could then be employed quite effectively. Higher-speed passes necessitated a tailwind, downhill gradient or prayer.

● Bodywork was made of tinfoil. The tiniest of tiny shunts when my mate rolled gently into the back bent the hatchback and caused the entire boot floor to ripple, costing £100s to repair. A 2mph side-shunt left a huge dent in the door skin.

● TR specification was mid-range. It had more power and amenities than the Campus or TL, but gave away 5hp to the 1.4 GTS and 35hp to the ‘luxuriously appointed’ 1.7GTX. GT Turbo might as well have been a different car – it had nothing in common with its shopping-trolley siblings.

● Stuff that went wrong: It snapped 4 clutch cables in total. Apparently right hand drive models had the cable routed half way round the engine bay, with right-angle bends that just frayed the cable away. The heater matrix went twice, destroying the carpet in the passenger footwell. A couple of coolant pipes split on different occasions. The exhaust blew. It was almost a West Ham supporter, forever blowing bulbs. And both front wheel bearings went prematurely at less than 40k.

● Stuff that was never fixed: It leaked oil from some indiscernible location, almost from brand new. And of course, the fuelling/ignition system had some kind of malaise that nobody could diagnose which meant the engine often briefly lost power or died at the most inopportune moment.

● I had to get rid of it when the head gasket went as the head had warped and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed up. By this time it was also making a nasty noise in 2nd gear and the driver’s side headlamp kept blowing the bulb every couple of weeks.

● Number of roadside recoveries needed: 5

● Fuel economy: Probably averaged mid-30s. Could top 40mpg but only if you kept the speed down.

● Originally bought new by my mother, I inherited it when she stopped driving in 1995. Costs below are given for the period of total family ownership.

The Big Question

Would I own one again? Not unless it was the only possible alternative to taking the bus. Even then, it would be a marginal decision.

Testing Times Ahead

2007-01-02T14:01:00.000Z

Ah, yes, here we go again - another new year, another new government initiative for improving road safety.

Under plans being considered by the Government the principles of safe driving may be included in the school curriculum. Learner drivers will have to keep a record of their training, undertake a minimum period of practice and demonstrate that they have a responsible attitude rather than just the basic skills to pass the test.

Well, that sounds just great doesn’t it? Have they not learned from the abject failure of the theory test to improve driving standards? Reading about driving does not make you a safer driver. Writing about driving does not make you a safer driver. Keeping copious notes about what you have learned so you can impress the examiner doesn’t help you maintain control in that emergency stop. And having driving ‘principles’ taught in school (the one place which teenagers probably respect the least), is going to be about as effective as a moped pulling a caravan.

Even if ‘education’ could make a difference, basic economics will start to undo its effects as soon as the test is passed. Teenagers don’t have much money. They can’t afford to buy a modern, safe car with ABS, traction control and multiple airbags. They might have spent 100 hours doing compulsory training in a shiny new 5-star-NCAP-rated motor but unless daddy’s rich they’ll still end up in a 10-year old Fiesta with worn out shocks, poorly maintained brakes and bald tyres. More likely to crash and more likely to crash badly. Basic biology is also a barrier. If you’re male and under 20, every day is a testosterone-frenzied race to be the alpha-male. And get a shag. As a result, it doesn’t matter how much attitude adjustment you’ve received in your driver training – it’ll all be forgotten when faced with an opportunity to get behind the wheel, impress your mates and attract the laydeez with your crazy skillz. Compulsory hormone therapy might help; a few extra lessons in school certainly won’t.

What’s saddening about today’s announcement is that there is one measure which actually has the potential to make some difference, but it’s been rejected by the government straight away: Restricting the number of passengers young drivers are allowed to carry. After all, the effect of back-seat passengers on handling, braking and stability is significant in any circumstances let alone an inexperienced driver in a crap car. Add in the aforementioned biological requirement for teenage males to show off in front of their friends and you’re dramatically increasing the risk of an accident occurring. Factor in the extra potential damage that can be inflicted by and to rear seat passengers in a crash and there’s a much higher chance that accident will be fatal for someone.

Why is the government rejecting this? Because it would be “too difficult to enforce” of course. Oh, the irony! The same morons who have spent the last 10-15 years decimating the traffic police, replacing them with profit-making Gatsos and the quango-feeding Talivan, now crying that they couldn’t enforce a law requiring a few simple police stop-checks? It would be funny if it wasn’t so sickening. Of course, it’s an admission that also unwittingly puts the final nail in the coffin of their own proposals. If the country now lacks an effective system of traffic enforcement (at least for offences that can’t be dealt with by poking a camera out the back of a transit van) then they can come up with the most comprehensive driver training scheme they like but if it’s too difficult, too time-consuming or too expensive then a significant minority will just bypass the whole system. Thus joining the growing ranks of Romanian pimps, Somalian taxi-drivers and ASBO-breaching chavmonkeys who already freely roam our roads without regard for minor details like actually possessing a driving licence. And, frankly, eradicating the dangers posed by that lot strikes me as a rather higher priority than yet another misguided education programme for kids.

Corollaholics Anonymous

2007-01-01T12:42:00.004Z

“My name is Jay and I’m a Corollaholic”. There, I’ve said it. And sure, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “that’s not so bad”. You’re thinking old-skool Hachi-roku, Initial-D style, right? Or maybe the black magnificence of the 600-horse Fensport rocket?

You’re sure-as-hell not picturing an 02-model 1.6 T3 Auto in cadaver-grey metallic, are you? Well, after 6 months of ownership that’s my addiction, I’m afraid. Here’s why:

Let’s be honest from the start. If you’re looking for magical touches then you’ll be disappointed with this car. But then, that revelation is hardly going to shock you, given that surprise and delight doesn’t exactly get to feature much at all in the family-hatch sector. Unless perhaps you count the Fiat Stilo, where you’ll be surprised at just how bad it is and delighted when the journey’s over. No, the Corolla’s never going to inspire awe and wonder. But it still lures you in with its less obvious charms: A responsive VVti engine that revs cleanly and pulls strongly all the way up to 6000rpm; a silky-smooth, intelligent automatic box; brakes which are progressive and perfectly weighted; a ride which absorbs all but the worst bumps yet avoids capsizing at the first corner; steering like a quality prophylactic - light, safe, yet retaining plenty of feel.

Grey with a blue tinge. Like a corpse, but shiny.

It’s an easy car to like straight away but spend a bit more time with it and the depths of its ability become even clearer. T3 spec is perfect, to the point where you wonder why Toyota bothered with the rest of the range. You get air-con, a CD player and a trip computer all in a cabin which avoids funkiness with a fervour that is almost religious. Where something could have been brightly-coloured, it will be grey. Where something could have been a funny shape, it will be rectangular. Where something could have been garnished with pointless chrome or silver, it will be left unadorned.

As a result you get a look that is clean, modern, functional and which does not impinge upon your concentration when driving. The seats are supportive whilst allowing easy access. There’s plenty of nicely concealed storage space and reasonably capacious door bins. And, of course, there are the usual Toyota buttons, switches and knobs which cannot be destroyed by any craft that we here possess.

On the road it may not be a fast car but it’s worth trotting out the old cliché of “it feels quicker than the figures suggest”. In particular, the ‘overdrive off’ button on the gearshift is a stroke of genius – it immediately slips the box into a ratio that is absolutely perfect for A-Road overtaking. It’s nippy enough to safely keep up the pace on motorway runs too – kick-down will get you from slip-road to outside-lane rapidly enough and once you’re there the long top gear allows for an economical, stable and quiet 80mph cruise. Throw some corners into the mix and you’ll find a predominantly safe attitude that’s still entertaining. Sure, it’s a little soft with the turn-in, but after the initial roll it will hold its line surprisingly well without washing wide. Impossible as it may be to believe for a car whose reputation is that of the dullest of dull, grey conformity; it is genuinely enjoyable to drive.

Corolla: Transcending fashion through longevity since 1966.

Now “driving enjoyment” is usually reserved for the VXRs, the 182s, the GTIs – the hot hatches at the top of the model range. Actually having some fun in a cooking 1.6 model is normally the preserve of just one car in this sector - the Ford Focus. Surely the Corolla can’t match this? Will the car in front be a Toyota? It’s a closer-run think that you’d think. Yes, the steering in the Focus gives it a sharper attitude, but there is a sense that it has been artificially tuned to feel sporty. The ride in the Focus is certainly tauter but that also makes it less comfortable and, in less-than-expert hands even a little twitchy.

And when you’re not using your family hatchback to terrorize your local back-roads, the Corolla shows up two real shortcomings of the Ford – an horrifically short top gear and a dog-rough engine that barks and wheezes up the rev range like an asthmatic spaniel. They make the Focus so noisy and thirsty at high speeds it’s comical, although when various bits of the horrid rubbery plastic dash start buzzing along in tune it stops being quite so funny. Indeed, after 10 minutes on the motorway watching the fuel gauge dropping quicker than Glen Miller’s altimeter, you’ll have long since forgotten that entertaining back-road blast and be wishing you bought a car that could actually do the basic stuff properly. Like a Corolla.

This comparison highlights the crux of the Corolla’s greatness. You get the feeling that Ford’s design team probably started with the Focus ST and then simply watered it down for the rest of the range, resulting in a great hot hatch but a horribly compromised set of lesser models. By contrast, Toyota’s designers focused on understanding the real purpose of a car like the Corolla and then engineered a vehicle that is designed first and foremost to be absolutely fit for that purpose. A car, in other words, that does exactly what it says on the tin.

The light may come on when the door's open, but that don't make it a fridge.

Does that sound dangerously close to the dreadful car-as-white-goods philosophy as epitomised by the Korean contingent? Maybe Toyota walk a fine line. But they pull it off because they do it whilst managing to retain that spark of life; that sense of joy that gets engineered out of the Kias, Hyundais and Protons. Which is why after 6 months of driving the Corolla I’m still grinning. Not in a catatonic rictus of boredom, but from a sense of genuine amusement that an unassuming, nondescript, grey little car with BHP barely into 3 figures can be so rewarding. I know you won’t believe me, but like I said, it’s an addiction. And I’m not ready for the cure just yet.

Ratings (October 2010)

|❻|A-Road Overtaking
|❻|B-Road Blasting
|❾|City Driving
|❽|Long Distance Comfort
|❿|Reliability
|❿|Stealth Factor
|❼|Entertainment Value