Buch lesen: «Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars»

CONTENTS

Introduction

Alfa Romeo 156 Selespeed

Fiat Uno

Lexus IS200

Smart Car

Nissan Skyline GT-R

Bentley Arnage Red Label

Range Rover Autobiography

Porsche Boxster

Jaguar XKR-R

MGF

AC Cobra

Chrysler Voyager

Delfino

Mercedes S55 AMG

Subaru Impreza

Rolls-Royce Corniche

Chevrolet Camaro

Maserati 3200 GT

Porsche Carrera

BMW X5

Ferrari 456M

Mitsubishi EVO VI

Fiat Multipla

Saab 9-3 Aero

TVR Tamora

Mini Cooper S

Jaguar X-type Sport

Mercedes CLK500

JCB 3CX

Morgan Aero 8

Toyota Prius

Porsche 911 TARGA

Chrysler Grand Voyager

Land Rover Freelander SE TD4

Lotus Elise 111S

Noble M12 GTO-3R

Bentley Continental GT

Mercedes SLK

Nissan 350Z

Mitsubishi Lancer

Nissan Murano

Lotus Exige S2

Dodge Ram SRT-10

Mercedes S500

Ferrari F430

Dutton Commander S2

Caterham Seven

Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder

Armoured Range Rover

G-Wiz

Alfa Romeo Spider

Going mobile

Motorists, revolt: me, I’m on my bike

Going my way

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Author

Picture Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

For years after that terrible death, I felt a pang every time I pulled into Oxford station.

There was the scrapyard. There was the grabber with its evil jaws. Whenever I saw it I remembered the T-rex aggression with which it lurched down on its victim; how it paused and juddered as though savouring the moment.

Then it smashed through the windows, the windscreen, buckling the paper-thin steel, and with a hydraulic jerk the monster hoisted its prey. High in the air I saw it go, framed against the drizzly morning sky like some clapped-out old tup being lifted for the slaughter. I turned away because I could hear the whine of the crusher and I could not bear to watch the rest.

I could not listen to the death agonies of my driving companion, or see the reproachful look in those loyal headlights, and even today I cannot go past that knacker’s yard without bidding peace to the ghost of the Italian Stallion.

It was the King of the Road. It was my trusty steed. It was a Fiat 128 two-door saloon, 1.2 litres, and a vehicle so prone to rust that it is years since I saw one in motion. In fact, the whole race of 1970s Fiat 128s seems to have oxidised into virtual extinction. They are fading as fast as the veterans of the First World War. You can hardly even find their photos on the Internet.

The Serbs kept making the 128 until the 1990s, under the brand name Zastava, until a crescendo of global ridicule reached a climax in 1999 when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair actually bombed the factory. Yes, Nato ended the production of my favourite car, as if those F-15s were charged with taking a surreal revenge on behalf of thousands of disappointed western consumers.

But from 1982 to 1986 it was the Italian Stallion, the machine that emancipated me from the shackles of childhood. Inside that happy brown plastic cabin, with its curious fungal growth on the roof, there took place all manner of brawls, romance, heartbreak and general growing-up. Above all, it was the car in which I had my first crash.

No one knew how the Italian Stallion came to be in the family. My mother claims it was hers, though other sources suggest my father bought if off a Brussels squash opponent called Sue.

It was sitting in the yard one day when my brother Leo and I decided to take it for a ride. Neither of us could drive, but there is a two-mile dirt track that links our farm to the main road, and we felt we could learn. We lolloped off down the drive, groaning in first gear, until at length we reached the main road at Larcombe Foot, where the machine stalled and a cloud of steam rose from the bonnet.

We had a problem. We had to turn round, and we couldn’t go on the metalled road, since neither of us had a licence. There was a large-ish dirt patch, in which a normal driver would simply have done a neat three-pointer. But we hadn’t done a turn before and we were aware of another car about 20 yards away. This obstacle was probably the only other vehicle within five square miles of this bit of underpopulated moorland.

With every manoeuvre we made, we seemed to arc ever closer to the other machine, as if sucked by some fatal magnet. Now our boot was just feet from its bonnet, and it was necessary to reverse.

I had never reversed a car before.

Sweating and cursing, I at last pushed the gear stick into the right position. I lifted my foot smartly off the clutch; one of the lovely features of the Stallion was that it had a very forgiving clutch. You could pull away in second, and quite easily change from first to fourth, and vice versa, usually by mistake.

The wheels spun in the dust and the car shot backwards, like a bolt slamming suddenly home, and with a smooth easy grace we thumped into the other car. Of course I was too amazed to brake, and what Leo and I remember is not just the sweet impact in the small of the back. We both remember the sense of exhilaration as we shunted the only other car in the district rapidly and deftly into a tree.

When the tinkling had stopped, Leo broke the silence and said, ‘Hey, that was great’, speaking for every human being who has ever experienced the thrill of the automobile—the joy of moving far faster than nature intended, by a process you barely understand, and yet somehow surviving.

When I became a motoring correspondent it wasn’t just because I am a speed freak (though I am, a bit, in a terrified sort of way). It wasn’t just because I wanted an endless series of beautiful machines for the weekend (though that is a factor, I have to admit). It was also because, at the risk of being pretentious—and why the hell not, eh?—I am interested in politics and society, and it has always seemed obvious to me that the car has not only made our modern landscape, it has been the biggest revolution since print, and the spread of the car, like the spread of literacy, has been a fantastic and unstoppable force for liberty and democracy.

It was the invention that defined and created the twentieth century. In the last hundred years the car has done more for human freedom, I venture to suggest, than the aeroplane, penicillin, the telephone and the contraceptive pill put together. Add in the ice cream Mars Bar, the computer, the trouser press, the television and the non-stick saucepan, and you still do not approach the revolutionary quality of the automobile.

When any invention has such power to promote individual freedom, the state is always driven to respond. The more widespread a liberty becomes, the more necessary it seems for government to regulate, trammel and constrain.

As I look back 25 years to my life with the Italian Stallion, I see that box-rumped old Fiat suffused with the golden glow of an age of comparative innocence, because in the subsequent decades our masters have decided to control our cars, and our lives, in ever more detail. They want to control how we drive and in what condition. They want to regulate what we do in our cars, where we park our cars, and now they want to tell us where we can drive, installing inboard computers to check up on us. We have got to the stage where you can be threatened with imprisonment for eating a sandwich at the wheel, for heaven’s sake.

I confidently predict that it will not be long before each journey, each turning of the ignition, each firing of the cylinders, will be a matter for negotiation between the driver and the state, because these days your car is deemed to be much more than a threat to life and limb.

It was a Fiat 128 two-door saloon, 1.2 litres, that emancipated me from the shackles of childhood. Inside there took place all manner of brawls, romance, heartbreak and general growing-up. Above all, it was the car in which I had my first crash.

Oh yes: the internal combustion engine now stands accused of threatening the existence of life on earth. The charges are incredible, terrifying. If the scientists of the Stern Review are to be believed—and who dares contradict them?—then every thin trail of exhaust that curls from your engine is snaking up to heaven, where it is joining the exhaust of billions of other machines, and together these vapours have already quilted a thick tea cosy of carbon dioxide about the planet.

And with every second that great transparent envelope of fumes is getting thicker and thicker. Round the clock the sun’s rays are penetrating that integument of pollution and, as with a greenhouse, the light goes in and the heat stays put, so every day the atmosphere gets hotter and hotter, the winters shorter and more feeble, Hyde Park in August is turned into a parched dustbowl, and every time you drive your kids to school another poor polar bear gives a bewildered growl as he plops through the melting floes. In fact our whole future looks so ghastly and stifling that I find myself loosening my tie and mopping my brow as I write these words…

In this sweaty dystopia I foresee a time when you will have to engage in carbon offsetting every time you make a trip to Waitrose. You will have to ring up Environment Secretary David Miliband or one of his officials to explain how you are going to propitiate the wrathful sun god; and whenever we get to drive our cars, the government will insist that we plant a small bush, or possibly sponsor an abattoir to kill a cow, since it seems that cows are up there with planes as emitters of greenhouse gas.

The government will make us have little inboard satellite devices—installed by the state in attack-proof steel black boxes—to verify that we have travelled no further than agreed, and that we have taken the shortest route, and that our engines have parped and puttered no more than their stipulated quota of carbon fart…and…

Aaargh…Is it really going to be that bad?

I don’t mean, is global warming really that bad? I mean, is the future of motoring so grim?

Will the state finally annihilate the joy of the car?

Or will Science come to the aid of Freedom—as she has so often in the past?

If we want to understand the future we must, as ever, look back. Going back in history, we can see reasons for gloom, and reasons for hope, and we can see that the state has always panicked in the face of any transport revolution. From the very introduction of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, the ruling elite were nervous of mass mobility. All those people! Moving around! And under their own steam! In Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) Lord de Mowbray warns against the railways for having a ‘dangerous tendency to equality’.

As late as 1897 the pathetic male students of Cambridge protested against the arrival of female students; the trouble with these harpies was that they presumed to travel independently, and on complex pieces of machinery that they indelicately straddled, and which they could handle as well as a man. When they hung an effigy of a female undergraduate from a lamp post, it was significant that she was attached to that engine of sexual equality, the bicycle.

These alarms were nothing, of course, to the shock that greeted the arrival of the first motor car. What happened to the first Benz machine upon arriving in London from the docks in 1894? What do you think? It was stopped by a policeman.

Before I start moaning about our namby-pamby, mollycoddled, airbagged society, I had better admit that those Victorians—those tough old Victorians, whose children died in droves, those Victorians who lived cheek by jowl with death and pestilence—were so terrified of the new motorised machines that they make the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents look positively gung-ho.

It really is true that during the first few years of the automobile’s existence in the UK it was regulated by the Red Flag Act, originally designed for traction engines. This measure restricted speeds to four miles an hour in the country and two miles an hour in the town, and required every ‘road locomotive’ to have three attendants, one to walk no fewer than sixty yards in front carrying a red flag.

Admittedly, this insanity was soon repealed but it wasn’t long before British MPs were engaged in their characteristic activity—whipping up public panic about some new threat to health and safety, then demanding legislation. By 1909 the car was still only about as powerful as a kind of motorised sewing machine, yet some Liberal MP was so wet as to stand up in parliament and warn the electorate about ‘wandering machines, travelling at an incredible rate of speed’ (i.e. 4mph).

Adumbrating one of the major themes for ’elf ’n’ safety campaigners for the next hundred years, this Liberal went on to have a pop at drink-driving. ‘You can see them on Sunday afternoon,’ said the anti-car Isaiah, ‘piled 20 or 30 feet deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.’ Already, it seems, the car was associated with sin: unnatural speed, disrespect for the Sabbath and alcoholic intoxication!

His warnings were quite counterproductive, of course, since anybody listening to his speech would have been filled with an immediate desire to drive to the pub. Humanity fell on the car with greed and amazement.

It was as though, as a species, we had found the biggest technical improvement in our lives in a million years of evolution. By replacing the four legs of a horse with four rolling wheels we stumbled on something as important, and as naturally suited to human dimensions, and as obvious, in retrospect, as the shoe—or the wheel itself.

Between 1919 and 1939 the number of cars on the roads in Britain went up twenty times, with the millionth Morris rolling off the Cowley production lines shortly before the Second World War, and as the invention began to percolate down through the socioeconomic groups, it began to democratise the planet. Until the First World War, it was a luxury item. As Hilaire Belloc puts it:

The rich arrived in pairs

And also in Rolls-Royces.

They talked of their affairs

In loud and strident voices.

But even as he wrote, a production breakthrough had taken place in America.

He went on to say:

The poor arrived in Fords

Whose features they resembled.

They laughed to see so many lords

And ladies all assembled.

And there we have it, in the merriment of those Ford-driving folk: the chirpy insolence of democracy. They knew that in spirit and in essence a Ford was the same as a Roller; though the rich man might still have his castle and the poor man might still be at his gate, they both possessed implements as essentially alike as one fork is like another, and although one fork may be of steel and one may be of gold, they will be equally suited to their task.

From the very beginning, rich and not-sorich had basically the same set of four wheels propelled by the same internal combustion engine, and controlled by the same steering wheel, and above all we human beings found that the car created a great equality in our ability to occupy, at any one time, that rectangular patch of road beneath the chassis.

It is in the nature of the machine and the design of roads that we must wait in the same traffic and stop at the same lights, and it is significant that it was only in some of the worst left-wing tyrannies, such as the Soviet Union, that for part of the twentieth century the ruling elites had car lanes reserved for themselves. Everywhere else the car levelled and democratised the experience of motion, and it is no wonder that the spread of the car coincided with the spread of universal suffrage in the west and with female emancipation.

Even more completely than a bicycle, a car neutralises any female disadvantage in strength. It gives her a cabin, a door that locks, a place to put her stuff. It allows her to be Madame Bovary without having to worry about the discretion of the coachman, and in spite of all the efforts by the male sex to blacken their name, the overwhelming statistical evidence is that women drive better and more safely than men. They may fail their three-point turns, on average, more than male driving test candidates, but having passed, they have fewer accidents and attract far lower insurance premiums.

It is a sign of male desperation, and failure to adjust, that throughout the twentieth century we find deprecation of female driving skills—even from the finest stylists of English literature. One thinks of Evelyn Waugh and his ho-ho account of Mrs Stitch, bowling along the pavement in her glossy black machine until she ends up in a male urinal. Then note how two of the greatest American novels of the last century revolve around exactly the same sexist plot device—viz. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Remember: in both cases a man takes the rap for a woman’s fatal and incompetent driving. Isn’t that typical, eh? Blame the woman.

Ever since Eve, ever since Pandora, the male sex has muttered the same essentially protectionist mantra, that the womenfolk can’t be trusted with the technology, and if you seriously want to restrict the freedoms of the female sex and you seriously believe that modern western values are deplorable, then you actually continue to ban women from driving at all—as they do in Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden.

But for the British male and the American male and the rest of the western male sex, there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the sight of women at the wheel of a car. If you were going to let them drive, then you might as well let them vote as well, because apart from anything else, if you continued to deny the vote to female drivers, then the suffragettes would eventually stop hurling themselves under the hooves of horses and start running you down on street corners.

Yes, it was the car that made it impossible and ludicrous to deny women the political equality that had eluded them for 40,000 years, and for that achievement alone all remaining feminists should go outside now and reverentially kiss the hubcaps of the first automobile they see.

It was the car, too, that liberated the poor, that mobilised the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, that gave the victims of the Depression the chance to build a new life in California.

How did Herbert Hoover win the 1928 presidential election? With what vision did he inspire and enthuse the American electorate? He promised a ‘chicken in every pot—and a car in every garage, to boot’.

And what was it, 60 years later, that finally brought down communism? It was a car. It wasn’t just that the Ossies drove their Trabants round the Berlin Wall and through Hungary in such an unstoppable tide that in 1990 the East German state collapsed. The Trabant was not merely the instrument of revolution; it incarnated the point and necessity of the revolution.

It was a horrible two-stroke belcher of brown particulate smoke that would have rusted as fast as the Italian Stallion, except that its shell was made of a weird commie resin strengthened by wool or cotton. Its top speed was 112kph and it was a living sputtering embodiment of the economic humiliation of socialism.

It wasn’t Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It wasn’t Margaret Thatcher. It was the daily misery of East Germans trying to get their Trabants to work, when they could turn on their televisions and see images of their West German counterparts and relatives roaring around in Golf GTIs. Yes, it was the car that spread capitalism and destroyed communism; no wonder Polish Pope John Paul II gave a Trabant a special blessing when he visited Sofia in 2002.

The car was at the centre of the most important events of the last century and was in many ways responsible for them; and still the motor revolution goes on because the number of cars is still growing, and growing fast.

When Leo and I crashed that Fiat in 1983, it was one of 18.6 million cars in the UK. Today there are 30.6 million registered cars. That’s right: the number of cars on UK roads has almost doubled in the last 25 years, and there are still about half a million new registrations a year; when you consider how much longer a car lasts these days, you can see that the British people are adding to their stock of viable cars far faster than they are adding to the number of indigenous British people.

We have, in other words, a car population boom. We have a crisis in car demography that some believe is as serious as the boom in the number of pensioners and the change in the dependency ratio. We seem to have more cars than our roads can support.

When I was at Oxford, you could get to London in little more than an hour; these days the traffic can start at junction six of the M40. I remember once being stuck in the Italian Stallion—a car with all the torque of a bath chair—and realising that I had 18 minutes to get from the traffic lights at Hillingdon (as they were) to a vital job interview in Mayfair, yet somehow we did it, me and the Fiat, in broad daylight, in mid-morning, and in conformity with the laws of the road. And where did I park?

In the last hundred years the car has

done more for human freedom, I

venture to suggest, than the aeroplane,

penicillin, the telephone and the

contraceptive pill put together.

Right outside, of course: slap bang outside the headquarters of GEC, because those were the days before traffic wardens all became bonus-hungry maniacs and, although the Italian Stallion was already showing signs of the terrible wasting disease that finished it off, although it could only go up steep hills in reverse (reverse being for some reason the most powerful gear), and although by now a horrible green fluid leaked from the radiator, those were the days when it was still cool and rare for a student to own any kind of car at all, and I will always be grateful to Ken Livingstone and the Inner London Education Authority for the maximum grant that enabled me to keep the Italian Stallion on the road, because it made me one of a tiny minority, and because I was one of a tiny minority I would park it all over the place.

My favourite parking spot was on the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk and sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket. But what did I care? The Italian Stallion had a James Bond feature that enabled me to beat the fuzz. As a means of eluding the law, it was far better than a gadget that squirted the road with oil or tintacks, or rear-firing cannon mounted by the exhaust. The Stallion had Belgian plates.

What were the poor parkies going to do? Contact Interpol? Ring up the Belgian police and ask them to track down my father’s squash partner Sue? Ha. I snapped my fingers at the parking tickets. I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until—for these were the days before they were even sheathed in plastic—the fines just disintegrated in the rain.

Before you get stroppy, let me hasten to say that I have more than made up for it since. With the many thousands of pounds I have paid to the parking enforcement departments of Islington, Camden and Oxfordshire, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have contributed enough, over the years, to pay for a full-time teacher’s salary, although if I know Islington the cash has probably gone on more traffic wardens, or the endless abstract creation and destruction of road humps.

There was an amazing optimism, in those days, about parking, a prelapsarian innocence, a belief that even on a double yellow you would probably get away with it for an hour or so. It is with incredulity that I look back at my happy-go-lucky parking style—because even in that Elysium, in 1983, a terrible new plague had just come ashore.

It had been invented thirty years earlier by one Frank Marugg, a musician with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a good friend of the sheriff, and it was designed to scare the pants off ticket-dodging swine like me. The first horrific sighting was in Pont Street, lovingly clamped round the wheel of a black Golf belonging to a record producer. From then on the yellow scourge spread like ragwort in our streets.

I remember in the mid-1980s rounding the corner of St James’s, where the Stallion was as usual stationed in defiance of all bylaws, and when I saw that evil metal gin about its forequarters I felt a sudden constriction in the throat: a spasm of rage and amazement.

How could they do this? By what right could the state take away my freedom of movement? Except that it wasn’t the state that had clamped my car, but a hireling of the state, a ruthless cowboy, and I was lucky compared to some.

In 25 years of tears, wails and ruined mornings, the clampers have immobilised a hearse with a corpse in the back, a Royal Mail van and a Good Samaritan who had stopped to help the victim of a hit-and-run driver. A disabled man of 82 was clamped in a pub car park because he walked out of the pub to post a letter before buying his usual half pint. The gangsters told him to pay £240 or see the fine increased even further. The other day they clamped the mayor of Middlesbrough while he opened a nursery.