The Clarkson Review: Audi RS 3 saloon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’ve been to Rome you’ll know what I mean. The driving there is completely different from the driving you find in, say, Houston, or Bournemouth. Then you have Vietnam, where everyone gets into fifth gear as soon as the car is doing 3mph, which is in direct contrast to Syria, where no one drives anywhere unless the engine is turning at 6,500rpm. Eastern Europe is naked aggression, Paris is belligerence and India is dithering.

“In London, the only thing you know for sure is if the Prius is in the left lane, indicating left, it doesn’t mean it’s going to turn left”

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

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

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

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

It produces nearly 400bhp and in a car the size of the RS 3 — think Hot Wheels — that means 0 to 62mph is dealt with in about no time at all. The potential top speed is 174mph unless you want it to be 155mph. I’m not sure why the former is an option, but it is.

Of course for many years there have been Audis that could travel quickly in a straight line, but in the recent past we’ve started to see Audis that can go round corners quickly as well. This is another. With sensors and algorithms on hand to decide which of the four wheels gets the power, the RS 3 is a car that just flies down a country lane. It’s a joy.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Head to head: Audi RS 3 saloon vs Mercedes-AMg 45 4Matic

	RS 3 saloon	CLA 45 4Matic
Price	£45,250	£44,695
Power	394bhp	376bhp
0-62mph	4.1sec	4.2sec
Fuel economy	34.0mpg	40.9mpg

 

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The Clarkson Review: 2017 Porsche Panamera Turbo (part 2)

THE ODDEST thing about getting old is that you start to lose interest in style. You look at a pair of zip-up slippers on a market stall and think: “Mmmm. They look warm and comfy and they’re only a fiver so I shall buy them.” And it never occurs to you that they are even more hideous than the tartan shopping trolley you bought the previous week.

Old people have a similar attitude to everything. They buy furniture because it’s easy to get in and out of and don’t seem to notice that it’s upholstered in the material used to paper the walls in the local takeaway.

They see no reason to buy water with a lemon zest when they can get pretty much the same thing for a lot less from a tap. And why spend all that money on a snazzy telephone when you can talk to anyone in the world from the Bakelite set on the hall table? This is all because old people are not very interested in sex.

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When a young person examines a new pair of shoes, they will not really care how much they cost or how many Vietnamese children were killed in the sweatshop where they were made, just so long as they look good. Because looking good is an essential first step on the road to procreation.

When you are choosing a book to read on a beach, you are, of course, tempted to buy the latest Jack Reacher tome. But you suspect that passers-by will clock you as a moron, so instead you choose something about ancient Rome. And when you are hanging pictures in your living room, you know that a poster of a Lamborghini Countach won’t do. So you go for something curious and weird instead.

Sex is behind every single thing we choose to buy: the cigarettes we smoke, the beer we drink and certainly the cars we drive. There’s a tiny bit of our brain that is constantly saying: “Yes, I know it does five thousand miles to the gallon and only costs 10p but it’ll make me look like a dork.”

All of which brings me neatly to the door of Porsche’s new Panamera. Yes, I know I’ve driven this before, and reviewed it on these pages, in fact. But that was a review written after a two-mile drive on inappropriate roads in Mallorca while I was suffering from pneumonia. This is an actual review, written after an actual drive and while I feel well.

As you sit there pressing buttons, you feel just like Star Trek’s Mr Sulu

You open the Panamera, you step inside and immediately you are consumed by a desperate need to buy one. You are less cocooned than you were in the previous model, but you still have a sense of being hemmed in place by the extremely light door and the enormous transmission tunnel. This sense of being cocooned is one of the things that made the old Porsche 928 so desirable.

And the transmission tunnel isn’t enormous just for show. It’s big because it houses all sorts of interesting buttons. All of which operate with the satisfying sense that they are fully German.

Then you have a widescreen television, which allows you to operate all the things that can’t be controlled with the buttons to your left. You feel, as you sit there pressing stuff, that you are Mr Sulu on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Except your hands are hotter. Much hotter.

This is because you’ve turned on the heated steering wheel. You don’t know how you’ve done this, but you know that if you don’t turn it off quickly, all the skin on your hands will melt. You have a cursory glance around the cockpit for something that might shut it down, but there seems to be nothing. And then you remember saying to your mum that you can’t find your shoes and her saying: “Have you looked properly?” So you have a more careful look. You go into all the menus on the control system and you put on your reading glasses and you crawl about in the footwell.

And finally you resort to Google, where you discover the button is … Actually, I’m not going to tell you where it is. It’s a good game to while away a couple of hours next time you’re bored and passing a Porsche showroom. Get the salespeople to make you a cup of tea while you ferret about. It’ll serve them right for hiding it away so thoroughly.

Yes, it’s better-looking than its predecessor, but that’s like saying it’s better-looking than a gaping wound

Eventually, the steering wheel had cooled down sufficiently for me to drive the car, and I won’t beat about the bush. It was sublime. There are three engines on offer: at one end is a diesel that will give you an astonishing range of 800 miles between fill-ups but will cost you £10,000 a minute to park because various councils have changed their minds and decided diesel is the work of the devil. At the other is a bloody great V8 turbo that you can park for sixpence because somehow that’s OK these days.

Strangely, it is not the very fabulous V8 that Porsche’s parent company, Volkswagen, uses in the Audi A8 and the Bentley Continental. It’s a completely different V8, with its turbocharging based between the cylinder banks. And it’s also fabulous. Really fabulous. It’s quiet and unruffled most of the time, but when you poke it a bit, it makes a deep, growly noise like a dog having a dream.

Naturally there is a great deal of power, all of which is fed to all four wheels by an ingenious arsenal of algorithms that makes sure no matter what you do, the car always feels planted and secure. It also feels sprightly, because much of it is now made from aluminium. That’s why the door is so light.

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All of which make the gigantic brakes look like overkill. These are the sort of discs you like to envisage being used to bring an Airbus A380 to a halt. You imagine when you lean on the pedal that you are actually altering space-time in a measurable way. And on my test car they were carbon ceramic, which meant they could go on affecting nature all day long without fading.

Make no mistake: this is a wonderful car to drive. And it doesn’t feel even remotely like a large five-door hatchback with a boot big enough for a trip to the garden centre, folding rear seats and (just) enough room in the back for two adults. It even rides properly, so everyone is always comfortable.

However, there is a problem. Yes, it’s better-looking than its predecessor, but that’s like saying it’s better-looking than a gaping wound. It’s still a long, long way from being even remotely handsome or appealing. And to make things worse, my test car was painted the sort of red that speedboats go in New Zealand after they’ve been in the ozone-free outdoors for a couple of years. And to make things worse still, that’s an optional extra for which Porsche charges almost £3,000.

No one is going to buy this car for its looks, which means it will just be bought by people for whom sex is no longer important. Which makes a change from the usual Porsche customer, I suppose.

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Head to head: Porsche Panamera Turbo vs Audi RS7 Sportback

	Porsche Panamera Turbo	Audi RS7 SPortback
Price	£115,100	£94,185
Power	542bhp	597bhp
0-62mph	3.8sec	3.7sec
Economy	30.4mpg	29.7mpg

 

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The Clarkson Review: 2017 Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport

I REMEMBER it so vividly. I was seven years old and my dad had just announced over our evening bowl of tripe and onions that the next day he’d be taking delivery of his new company car.

I was beside myself with tinkle-clutching excitement, because what sort of Ford Cortina would it be? The old model with the CND-badge rear lights that I’d seen racing once on a friend’s television? Well, I thought I’d seen it. It could have been a Mini. Or some footage from inside a beehive.

Or would it be the new Mk 2 model, which none of my friends’ dads had?

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The next day, after school, I raced home as quickly as possible and gobbled down my bread and dripping sandwich so that I could wait in the drive — my working-class northern roots imagery has taken a bit of a hit there — to see which one it would be. Some of me wanted it to be the Mk 1. But most of me was delighted when it turned out to be the Mk 2.

I sat in it most of the night, playing with the switches. Well, moving the heater controls back and forth. And I can still remember every detail of the dash. I can even remember the registration plate: KHY 579E.

I also know it was no ordinary model. It was a “super”, which, though I didn’t know it at the time, must have meant my dad was selling more timber than had been expected by his bosses. That’s how a good performance was measured back then. Not by a pay rise or a lunch at the Berni Inn. But by a Cortina that had a clock or a rev counter. Or maybe both.

A company car was a perk, a reward, a doggy chew and a pat on the head for good behaviour. And because it was such an enormous thing — to be given an entire car by your company — it became the measure of your worth. And because of that, about 80% of all new cars back then were company-bought. Which meant in essence they were either Fords, Austins or Vauxhalls.

I remember Simon Shepherd saying his dad was going to get a Sunbeam Rapier. And Nigel Thompson reckoned his dad had a BMW CSL, but these were playground myths. Nobody’s dad sold that much timber.

“No one ever wanted a Vectra. They were given to salesmen who had sold no timber and who had goosed the boss’s wife at the Christmas party”

Then, back in the 1990s, the government decided that it couldn’t have companies handing out cars willy-nilly and made them part of a person’s tax structure — before then only directors and the highest-paid employees paid tax on them. So while company cars still take about 60% of the new-car market, they’re not really perks any more.

What’s more, people get to choose what they want. And what they want is an SUV or a BMW or something that tells the neighbours life is good and they’re the top-performing IT specialist at Siemens Staines. What they emphatically do not want is a Ford. That’s why the car giant’s market share has dropped to about 12%. And if they don’t want a Ford, they definitely don’t want a Vauxhall.

I have only once met someone who wanted one. I was doing vox pops for the old Top Gear — the William Woollard years — and I asked a young chap with weird Nottinghamshire hair what car he would buy if he had all the money in the world. And he said: “A Vauxhall Calibra Turbo.”

No one else has ever said that. No one has wanted an Astra of any kind or a Cavalier or even a Senator. And it’s for damn sure no one wanted a Vectra. They were given to salesmen who had sold no timber and who had goosed the boss’s wife at the Christmas party.

The Vectra was Vauxhall’s darkest hour. Built at a time when the company car rules were changing and people were no longer taking what they were given, it appealed to no one. Even James May, whose first car was a Cavalier, says that the Vectra was no good. It was worse than that, though. It was hateful. The last word in “That’ll do” design.

Since then Vauxhall has been making a range of extremely good-looking cars — the Astra coupé springs to mind here — but no one is paying attention. They’d rather have a Kia Sportage. Or a Boris bike. Or nothing.

The only way Vauxhall can get people to pay attention is to build an absolutely superb car and sell it for 9p. And that’s nearly what it has done with the Insignia Grand Sport that I tested recently.

“I saw a reflection in a shop window and thought: ‘You know what? This is not a bad-looking car.'”

The SRi badge had me fooled. I dimly recall some mildly sporty Vauxhalls with that handle in the 1990s. And I dimly remember thinking that they’d be sort of all right — if they weren’t Vauxhalls. But my hopes were dashed when I noticed the rev counter’s dismal span of ability. Yup. It was a diesel. A diesel in running clothes. And how dreary and depressing is that? Because that’s like a fat man in a tracksuit.

I was a bit miserable as I set off, especially when I noted on the first turn that the steering needs more turns than the wheel on a child’s toy. You need to whirl away like a dervish to achieve even the smallest change in direction.

And then there was the performance. I had the most powerful diesel engine available — 168bhp — and Vauxhall claims this means 0 to 62mph in eight-and-a-bit seconds. That’s pretty sprightly, but from where I was sitting, it didn’t feel that way. “Average” is how I’d describe it.

But then I noticed the crease in the centre of the bonnet, a styling gimmick, for sure, but it gave the front of the car a solid feel, as if it had been made from thicker metal than is actually the case. And then I saw a reflection in a shop window and thought: “You know what? This is not a bad-looking car.”

It’s also spacious on the inside and very well laid out. You’re never fumbling around like how women do when they’ve lost something in their handbag, saying: “Where’s the button to turn the damn parking sensors off?” Everything is where you expect it to be.

And that’s quite an achievement because, ooh, there was a lot of stuff on my test car. It had its own wi-fi router and head-up display. It also had tools to make sure you didn’t drift out of lane on the motorway and all the stuff that you normally find only on top-notch Mercs and Beemers.

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Obviously a lot of it is listed as an option. Even the paint, which Vauxhall calls “brilliant” but is in fact just “red”, will set you back £285. The front seats were very good, too, but then they needed to be because they add a further £1,155.

And yet, despite all this, the total cost of the car I tested, which has a base price of £23,800, was a whisker over £30,000. It’d be a whisker under that figure if Vauxhall had ditched the £160 wireless mobile phone charger.

And there’s no getting round the fact that £30,000 for a roomy 140mph five-seater with all the trimmings is not bad at all. It’s just a shame you don’t want one. Because it’s no longer 1967.
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Head to head: Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport vs Hyundai i40

	VX Insignia Grand Sport SRi VX-Line Nav 2.0 (170PS) Turbo D Blue	Hyundai i40 SE Nav 1.7 CRDi 141PS Blue Drive
Price	£23,800	£23,135
Power	168bhp	139bhp
0-62mph	8.2sec	10.3sec
CO2	136g/km	114g/km

 

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The Clarkson Review: BMW M760Li xDrive V12 (7-series)

HELLO? Hellooooo? Is anyone still out there? Or has everyone glossed over these pages [in the Sunday Times Magazine] and become engrossed in the recipes? I only ask because you could be forgiven for thinking that there are now fewer car enthusiasts in the country than there are registered ventriloquists. That means three, in case you were wondering.

Car magazine sales have dwindled to virtually nothing. Fifth Gear went into the outer reaches of satellite television and has now disappeared altogether. Top Gear’s audience figures are way down. And as far as I can tell, most of the mainstream car makers are now offering cash money for you to scrap your car and buy an Oyster card instead.

My children are fairly typical, I suspect. They couldn’t care less what they drive, just as long as it does a million miles to the gallon. Speed? Handling? Style? They can’t even get their heads round the idea such things could matter. My son wanted a Fiat Punto, not because of the Ferrari connection, but because the manager of Chelsea is Italian. And I bet Fiat’s top brass hasn’t factored that into its marketing strategies.

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In the wider world we have governments saying that petrol and diesel-engined cars will be banned from the roads completely by … (pick a date shortly after the people making the announcement have died). And the news coverage of motoring-related issues focuses entirely on the need for lower speed limits and driverless cars.

When I go out to dinner these days, people often say: “If you’re going to talk about cars, I’ll sit somewhere else.” Seriously, being a car enthusiast is like being a Tory. You just don’t admit it in polite company.

And yet there are Tories out there. And plainly there are car enthusiasts too. I met one last week. He was a young removal man, who looked at the BMW M760Li xDrive V12 that I was driving and said, quietly, so his mates couldn’t hear: “Why has that got less power than the M6?”

I was staggered. So staggered that I was unable to correct him. The M760Li has 601bhp, which means it has more power than any BMW since the time of Nelson Piquet. And that raises a question. Why? Because this is a long-wheelbase, super-comfortable limousine full of soft headrests and adjustable interior lighting. So why on earth has BMW fitted it with a bonkers 6.6-litre V12 engine with TwinPower turbo?

“Being a car enthusiast is like being a Tory. You just don’t admit it in polite company”

Why has the company made it accelerate from 0 to 62mph in less than four seconds, which is faster than most Porsche 911s? Why has it given it four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering, so that on country roads you can drive as if you’re in a Caterham? Surely the people who buy cars such as this ride around in the back, and any chauffeur who uses the launch control system would be sacked before he’d hit 40mph.

Ah, well, that’s the thing, you see. If BMW had made it silent and smooth, above all else, what would be the point of spending even more on a Ghost from Rolls-Royce? Which is a BMW company, remember. And, let’s be honest, anyone who wants a silent and smooth car in which to arrive at Heathrow is going to choose a Mercedes S-class.

BMW, then, was forced by marketing and its own history of making the “ultimate driving machine” to come up with something different. Which is why the car I borrowed was finished in the sort of matt-black paint the drifting community love so much, and a red leather interior. And I don’t mean subtle red. I mean bright red. Very bright red — 1950s-film-star-lipstick red.

It looked hilarious. And everyone who climbed inside said the same thing: “It’s fantastic.” Then they found the iPad-type thing mounted in the rear armrest that controls the rear displays, and they liked that too. And then they found the fridge and were all swooning about that when I put the car in its Sport setting and put my foot down. “Aaaaaargh,” they all said. “That’s horrid.”

This car blows your mind with its turn of speed. Not because the turn of speed is so vivid. A Lamborghini or a McLaren is faster still. No. It blows your mind because you’re just not expecting it. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but it reminded me of those bespectacled and rather fierce-looking women in old-fashioned porn films. You cannot believe the transformation when she takes off her specs and lets her hair down.

“What’s an eco-mode doing in the M760Li? Who wants Uber-driver fuel efficiency in a turbocharged 6.6-litre supersonic boss wagon?”

And neither can you believe how planted it all feels when the going gets twisty. Some of this is down to the four-wheel-drive system and some to the clever-clever suspension, but, whatever, as you sit there with your passengers vomiting into their handbags, you really are left open-mouthed by the way BMW’s engineers have made a 2¼-ton limo handle, grip and go like a hot hatch.

But then, when I was leaning forward to adjust — oh, I don’t know what it was: the night-vision cameras or the massage-seat facility perhaps — I accidentally hit a button and everything changed. The car slowed down. The readout from the sat nav became a Toyota Prius-style diagram full of arrows and dotted lines telling me that the engine was off and I was charging the battery. And the dash? Well, that went blue and was full of stuff that I couldn’t read if I wasn’t wearing spectacles and that made no sense if I was.

There was a diagram of a petrol pump on the left with a symbol saying +0.6mi, and a dial that read from 90 down to 50 and then, for no reason I could work out, 16.2.

Plainly, I had put the vehicle in some kind of eco-mode. This required some investigation, so I went onto BMW’s website, where I couldn’t find anything about an eco-mode in the M760Li. I therefore rang the BMW PR man, using the number listed on the publicity material. But was told his number isn’t listed any more.

It’s all a bit of a mystery. Not just the way I activated something that doesn’t seem to exist in this car. But what it’s doing there anyway. Because who wants Uber-driver fuel efficiency in a turbocharged 6.6-litre supersonic boss wagon?
‘

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It’s true. Using this mode would save a few pounds over the course of a year, but the fact is, anyone who’s interested in not wasting money would never in a million years think about buying a big-engined, super-complicated large Beemer. Because history has taught us that they depreciate like a piano falling down a mountain. The car was supposed to be collected the other day at eight. And I suspect the reason it’s still with me is that it’s now worth less than the cost of sending a man to pick it up.

So there we are. A very expensive, pointless car that will, in this Uberised world of average-speed cameras and silly insurance premiums, appeal only to one removal man who can’t afford it and who would rather have an M6 anyway.

But still, there’s nothing like going out in a blaze of glory, is there? For what it’s worth, I thought it was tremendous.

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Volvo V90 Cross Country review (2017-on)

VOLVO KNOWS that not all drivers in need of a large family car want a big SUV. For the past 20 years, it has offered a large, four-wheel drive estate car with sufficient ground clearance to make it into a music festival campsite, and enough space onboard for five people, their tents, luggage and a ukulele or two.

The new V90 Cross Country is the latest incarnation and continues that line of go-anywhere – well, almost anywhere – estate cars that are more affordable than a large, luxury SUV. Not to mention more car-like to drive, easier for loading in dogs, antiques, or whatever else takes your fancy.

There’s also the personal matter of taste. In the minds of some drivers, big SUVs are statements of aggression, built to dominate the road, whereas an estate car could be considered a nondescript workhorse, as neutral as Switzerland.

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Is the V90 Cross Country a practical family car for those who only need five seats, though?

The price gets it off to a promising start. The most affordable V90 Cross Country is £40,350, for a D4 diesel model (meaning it costs £450 a year in road tax, from the second to sixth year of ownership). An XC90 leaves precious little change from £50,000, starting from £48,655 for the D5 diesel. A D5 V90 Cross Country, reviewed here, costs from £44,150.

However, at the business end of a family car – namely, the boot – the V90 Cross Country is at a considerable disadvantage to the XC90. It has a 560-litre boot, whereas the big SUV boasts 775 litres; fold all the seats down and load it to the gunnels and you get 1,526 litres in the estate, which is more than 400 litres less than the SUV.

You might have noticed from the pictures that the V90 Cross Country is one of the more handsome estate cars on the road. With its Scandi-chic style, it looks like a four-wheeled extra from an episode of The Bridge or Trapped.

But your Labrador won’t care one bit for such styling nuances when its face is pressed against the heavily sloped rear window, even if the load sill is nice and low. And there’s no cargo net integrated within the luggage cover.

A Mercedes E-class estate is considerably more accommodating, holding 640-litres. Happily, the Volvo’s seats fold flat at the touch of a button located in the boot, and the powered tailgate doesn’t open begrudgingly, like some; in fact, you’ll need to step clear sharpish if you’re not to get clocked on the chin.

Volvo fitted a Family Pack to our test car. For £450, this provides booster cushions that spring up out of the normal seats, child locks and a pair of sun blinds. It doesn’t seem like good value for money, given you could buy a pair of Isofix high-backed seats, with improved side-impact protection, and sun blinds for considerably less. And manually setting child locks is no hardship.

You could happily spend a couple of days at the wheel, with the family aboard, driving to the South of France or foot of Italy, without feeling fatigued

The rear seat space is generous, and the seats are comfortable on long journeys. Volvo includes air vents for back seat passengers in the door pillars, and the rear headrests can be lowered at the touch of a button on the dashboard.

In the front, this is one of the classiest interiors of any family car. Volvo is on a roll right now – only Mercedes is making nicer cabins.

The seats and driving position are comfortable. The touchscreen interface eventually becomes intuitive. And the materials used throughout – from the supple Nappa leather to the diamond-cut finish of controls for the engine start button and driving modes – are straight out of a interiors glossy magazine.

You could happily spend a couple of days at the wheel, with the family aboard, driving to the South of France or foot of Italy, for the summer holiday, without feeling fatigued.

That’s not just because the interior is so calming. The driving experience is soothing, too. Volvo’s engineers didn’t want the V90 Cross Country to be sporty, like a BMW, they wanted it to be relaxing. And it is.

So forget about the ‘High Performance’ driving mode, because it’s an oxymoron. Nothing will excite the driver if they floor the accelerator; this car is all about making calm, considered progress.

The D5, four-cylinder diesel engine provides acceptable performance (0-62mph in 7.5 seconds) and fuel economy (53mpg), and the eight-speed automatic gearbox shifts cogs quickly enough. The optional air suspension (£1500) is probably not worth paying for, but it was hard to tell, as Volvo had also fitted the optional, 19 inch allow wheels to our test car, which affected the ride comfort.

On the road, the four-wheel drive system is only likely to make its benefits felt if towing. The V90 Cross Country D5 can haul up to 750kg of unbraked trailer weight, or up to 2,500kg using a braked trailer.

Its four-wheel drive system uses a smart clutch system that allows it to operate in two- or four-wheel drive, helping save fuel in day-to-day driving conditions, or diverting power to the wheels with the most grip when venturing off the beaten track. Wisely, it is always engaged from a standstill, to help prevent wheelspin.

The Cross Country rides 65mm higher than a regular Volvo V90, and it comes with a protective skid plate under the engine and features such as hill descent control. We didn’t get to put it to the test off-road, however.

It may not be as accommodating as some rival estate cars, or indeed the XC90 SUV, but the V90 Cross Country has enough going for it to ensure that Volvo’s adventure-seeking estate car is likely to remain popular for another 20 years.

The post Volvo V90 Cross Country review (2017-on) appeared first on Sunday Times Driving.

source https://www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/volvo-v90-cross-country-review-2017/

The Guy Martin review: 2017 Ford GT

THE NEW Ford GT isn’t a supercar pretending to be a racing car — it is a racing car. It sounds vicious: you can’t escape the noise of the wastegates as you change gear and the cracking and banging of the exhaust on the overrun.

Ford built this car to win the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2016 and has now released a road-going version off the back of it. The company did the same thing in the 1960s when it made the GT40, and the new car was created to win Le Mans on the 50th anniversary of the original Ford supercar beating Ferrari — and everyone else — at the endurance race in 1966.

You know the story: Ford was set to buy Ferrari, but the Italians pulled out at the eleventh hour; the American firm got the hump and thought it would teach Ferrari a lesson by beating it in the biggest sports car race in the world. And that’s what it did.

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But don’t call this one a GT40, as I accidentally kept doing, because it’s just the GT. Amazingly for a company the size of Ford, it lost the right to use the name GT40 in 1999, when the trademark was bought by a company in Ohio that sells spares for the original cars.

Just opening the “butterfly” doors on the GT is something out of the ordinary and had me champing at the bit to get in it. Start the car and the dash reminds you — as if you needed it — of the machine’s racing roots, as it tells you much more than most road cars: oil pressure and temperature, gearbox temperature and gear position.

The GT had come from a track test at Silverstone and I noticed it was brimming with super-unleaded, but the dash said the distance to empty was 87 miles. That’s thirsty. It has a 57½-litre tank, and Ford’s own spec sheet reckons it should do 200 miles on a complete fill-up in normal driving conditions, which is about 16mpg. On the track it’s doing closer to 7mpg.

You can tell this car has a racing pedigree because of the aerodynamics — they’re really something else. There’s a rear spoiler that raises and lowers and tilts at different speeds. Then, when you slam on the massive carbon-ceramic brakes, it flips to act as an air brake. Another hangover from racing is the seats. They are bolted in position so they don’t compromise the strength of the chassis. You adjust the steering wheel and pedal box instead.

Ford launched a previous GT in 2004, and built just 4,000 [Jeremy Clarkson famously rejected his GT after just a month of ownership — read his review here]. This 2017 version doesn’t have much in common with that car, except the name. You could argue it’s got more similarities with another 50-odd-year-old Ford icon: the Transit van. The GT has a 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 EcoBoost engine. The American-spec Transit has the same basic unit, but it doesn’t make 647bhp, as this GT does.

In fact, not even the track version of the GT that won its class last year at Le Mans produced that much power. Because of the world endurance championship’s handicap system, the Ford team had to lower the power to less than 500bhp to level the playing field. So, strangely, the road-going GT is much more powerful than its race-winning sister car. My GT also had the American-spec Transit’s headlight switch. I liked that about it.

The Ford delivery driver said it was my decision, but he’d prefer it if the GT didn’t go out in the wet, perhaps because of that 647bhp rear-wheel-only drivetrain.

All that power and acceleration, but it’s left-hand drive, so you can’t see to overtake

Ford also said this test car was a prototype, so while we waited for the rain to stop, the delivery driver showed me how the car switches to Track mode at the press of a button. The whole vehicle drops 2in on its suspension, to just 2¾in. It isn’t subtle when it does it — anyone standing by the car might want to watch their toes — and you’d struggle to drive it on most normal roads when it’s that low. Ford even sent out a note in capital letters saying it must not be driven on the road on the lower height setting. There are two modes where the car drops: Track and V-Max. The difference between the two is the spoiler stays hidden in the body in the latter setting because it would affect the top speed. Ford reckons the GT will do 216mph.

When finally the rain stopped and I did get the car going, the rear spoiler was moving about that much, I thought I’d left the boot open. I could hardly keep my eyes off it in the rear-view mirror. Another thing is, the Ford is made as left-hand-drive only, so for all that power and potential acceleration you’ve got under your right foot, you can’t push it on real roads because you can’t see to overtake anything.

That means as a road-going supercar in Britain it’s pointless. In a machine this quick there would never be a time when you weren’t about to overtake something. Another thing is that the GT is wide, quite a bit wider than the Honda NSX I tested last week. I felt as if I had to drive with two wheels in the gutter so the other side of the car wasn’t creeping over the white line.

In the end I didn’t do more than 100 miles in the GT in the time Ford let me have it, but that was enough to get the measure of it and to learn that, while it’s impressive, it isn’t for me. I’d be just as happy to drive the Transit that the Suffolk-based customiser Krazy Horse and Radical Sportscars of Peterborough built for me to race in the Silver State Classic Challenge road race in Nevada last year.

It had the same engine as the GT, but the one in my Trannie was even more powerful, producing 700bhp. Because of the difference in aerodynamics, the van would only do 155mph flat-out, which is good for a Transit. It didn’t take itself as seriously as the GT. Come to think of it, given a choice, I’d be happiest in the special edition Transit I’ve designed myself.

Ford is going to build 1,000 GTs, so it’s not enough to have the £450,000 asking price to buy one. A friend of mine has the previous GT and he was on the waiting list for one of these but wasn’t allocated one in the first round of sales. He asked if I could help him get one, as he doesn’t do any of that social media stuff and part of the application process is how many Twitter followers you’ve got.

Since when has it mattered how many followers you’ve got on Twitter, or even if you’re on it, when it comes to whether you’re the right person to buy a car? That puts me off it even more.

Head to head: Ford GT vs Krazy Horse Ford Transit

	Ford GT	Krazy Horse Ford Transit
Engine	3,497cc, V6, twin turbo	3,497cc, V6, twin turbo
Power	647bhp	700bhp
Torque	550Ib ft	530Ib ft
Top speed	216mph	155mph

Ford’s “application window” to buy the GT will reopen in spring 2018. The Guy Martin Proper Edition Transit is available now from guymartinproper.com

 

Second opinion on the new Ford GT:

First Drive review: 2017 Ford GT

 

And Guy’s view on the competition:

The Guy Martin Review: 2017 Honda NSX

The post The Guy Martin review: 2017 Ford GT appeared first on Sunday Times Driving.

source https://www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/guy-martin-review-2017-ford-gt/

The Guy Martin Review: 2017 Honda NSX

THE NEWSPAPER asked me to do a couple of road tests while Jeremy Clarkson is away, and offered me a couple of decent supercars that arrived at the lorry yard in Grimsby on the same day. Both were new versions of former flagship models: the Ford GT and the Honda NSX.

I saw the NSX pull up at the gates, and while I’d admit it is a good-looking car, it’s a Honda, isn’t it? I haven’t had the greatest experience with Honda’s racing bikes this year, and its performance in Formula One is embarrassing. It would be better for the brand if it were winning something.

And how can a Honda cost £144,765 (or £180,000 in this spec)? It makes great CR-Vs and Civic Type Rs, but the Japanese brand is not one I would associate with supercars.

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I quizzed the bloke who dropped off the NSX half to death and learnt about some of the technology the car is loaded with. I knew it was a hybrid, with a 3.5-litre V6 petrol engine and electric motor assistance. What I didn’t know was that it had three electric motors that combine with the V6 for an output of 573bhp.

I drove the NSX home from the yard and climbed out of it feeling the car was nice — nothing more. I thought it was like a fast Volkswagen Golf R: understated, though not as understated as a Golf R, but not very exciting. I reckoned I’d soon get to the bottom of it.

If I’d been busy, I might not have bothered getting in it again that evening, but I had nothing doing, so I decided to take it out for a spin on the north Lincolnshire back roads, which I know like the back of my hand. After half an hour I realised the NSX is a true supercar.

“A BMW M3 CSL was the quickest thing I’d driven on rural back roads in the last 10 years. Until now. The NSX is the next level”

With all its engineering and electronic gubbins, some people might think that it’s doing the driving for you, but it isn’t like that. I’m not one of those people who describe bikes or cars as having soul; they’re either good fun or they’re boring. And how this car works is just brilliant. The proof is that it is so manageable on rural back roads.

Ten years ago I had a BMW M3 CSL. It wasn’t that impressive in terms of top speed, but it handled so well and was so predictable, I reckon it was the quickest thing I’d driven on those roads. Until now. The NSX is the next level. I can’t think of any car that could keep up with it on my local lanes.

To give it a proper workout as The Sunday Times requested, I spent a full day on the track last week with racing instructors, and still I could not get this thing into bother.

If you really wanted to, you could drive the NSX so hard it would be jumping out of line, the back end coming out, and you wouldn’t need to do anything to correct it: the systems sort everything out. The car was just laughing at me. After a couple of days I was struggling to think of anything I’d driven that was better than this.

A lot of it is down to the powertrain. Honda has been making V6 engines for the US IndyCar series for several years, but the unit in this car has nothing to do with that, even though the NSX is made in Marysville, Ohio. The NSX’s 75-degree V6 uses blocks and heads developed by the British company Cosworth.

V6s may not sound exciting in a world of V8s, V10s and V12s, but the NSX’s engine is spot-on. It sits in the middle of the aluminium body, with a nine-speed double-clutch gearbox bolted to the back, driving the rear wheels. Between those two is an electric motor that increases the torque and helps to fill in any turbo lag. At the front end, two more electric motors drive a front wheel each.

Entering villages, I’d drive at 30mph and the engine would turn itself off, and we’d roll through on electric power; then, as I accelerated, the petrol unit would cut back in, but it was so quiet, smooth and seamless that, as a passenger, you probably wouldn’t notice.

“Cars like this are bought as much for what they say as what they do. And in that sense the Honda isn’t going to cut it in the golf club car park”

There is a driving mode that allows you to hear the exhaust more, but it’s never popping and banging like a racing car. I like the subtlety of the NSX. I also like that I went from Caistor in Lincolnshire to Abergavenny in Monmouthshire on about half a tank, as the NSX averaged 29mpg. That’s good in a supercar.

The other thing the NSX has is four-wheel drive, or Super Handling All-Wheel Drive if you swallow Honda’s pill. The setup includes torque vectoring. As far as I understand it, torque vectoring is adjusting the drive delivered to each wheel to aid the handling. If you had a chassis with four wheels that were fixed pointing straight ahead, torque vectoring could make it go round corners just by altering the speed of the individual wheels. And it helps the NSX go round corners in a way I hadn’t experienced.

With all that good news, there must be some bad. One thing is that all the on-board technology makes the NSX weigh much more than purely petrol-powered supercars such as the McLaren 570S. The Honda and McLaren have a similar power output, but the NSX has a lower top speed: Honda claims 191mph and McLaren says the 570S does 204mph.

The difference is mainly down to the power-to-weight ratio. Even though the NSX has what is described as a “multi-material space frame”, it has a kerb weight of 1,776kg, compared with the 1,440kg of the McLaren.

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Another thing is that cars like this are bought as much for what they say as what they do. And in that sense the Honda isn’t going to cut it in the golf club car park. Everyone has an idea of a Ferrari driver in their mind. Or a Lamborghini owner, or even an Aston Martin driver. You’ve got a box to put them in. But what is a typical NSX owner?

None of that matters, because the NSX is amazing. When people ask me what I drive, I say: “A Trannie van and a Volvo estate, mate.” I like the fact that if you had an NSX and someone asked what you drove, you could say: “I’ve got an old Honda.”

Yes, it’s understated, but if you’ve chosen an NSX, you know your stuff. It’s a proper doer’s car without screaming about it. And possibly the greatest car I’ve driven.

Head to head: Nonda NSX vs Porsche 911 Turbo S

	Honda NSX	Porsche 911 Turbo S
Price	£144,765	£147,540
Power	573bhp	572bhp
0-62mph	2.9sec	2.9sec
Top speed	191mph	205mph

Read more Guy Martin at guymartinproper.com

Jeremy Clarkson is away

Write to us at driving@sunday-times.co.uk, or Driving, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

The post The Guy Martin Review: 2017 Honda NSX appeared first on Sunday Times Driving.

source https://www.driving.co.uk/car-reviews/guy-martin-review-2017-honda-nsx/