Most car interiors are still in the dark ages

THAT demented artist of Fast Show Fame, Johnny Nice Painter, would have had a field day with the latest hatchback I’ve driven.

My abiding memory of the Audi A1 a colleague and I had the pleasure of piloting wasn’t that we had the delicious irony of driving an A1 car along the A1 road, or that it suffered from having a particularly dim-witted automatic which forever wanted to change up. No, it was that once you’d clambered inside absolutely everything – dashboard, floors, seats, even the headling along the roof – was black. Black! Black! Black like the dark that envelopes us all!

Comically challenged painters aside, the A1’s unrelenting sea of blackness does raise a question which has longed irked me about today’s cars. Why are almost all of them various shades of black and grey?

Ingolstadt’s smallest offering is by no means the worst offender – I’ve driven countless cars, usually German hatchbacks, which offer the owner an interior which is virtually indestructible but with all the flair and colour of a prison cell in Dresden. It’s as though the VW Group’s chief designers invited Joy Division, Morrissey and LS Lowry to create a car interior which would perfectly encapsulate the steely industrial feel of Manchester on a grey Monday morning, and have – save for a few chrome flourishes in recent years – stuck with it.

Is there some unwritten rule that car interiors have to be crushingly dull, so that drivers are forced to look at the (equally grey) road instead? It’s got to stop. There are a few rare flickers of light in the car cabin world – step forward, Fiat 500 – but it seems ludicrous that you can specify pretty much any interior colour you like at B&Q and fifty shades of grey at BMW.

Surely, in today’s era of Grand Designs and trendy hotel rooms, we deserve to be able to go into a car showroom and pick out whichever pastel shades please us most? For what it’s worth, I reckon it would make us happier drivers, and a happy driver is a safe one.

I know lots of people – including one chap who enjoyed a four hour commute every day - who spend very nearly as much time in the car as they do in the house. Would you decorate your living room to look like the inside of the new Volkswagen Golf?

Nope, neither would I.

Why buy the new Audi TT when the original is so cheap?

CONTRARY to what most pub experts might tell you over a pint, the world, as a general rule of thumb, is getting better rather than worse.

It’s heartening to note, for instance, that smallpox has been eliminated, we can all now communicate instantaneously using internet-enabled smartphones, and that platform shoes, Party Seven and outdoor toilets are all but a distant memory. In fact, just about the only things I can think of that have gone backwards in the past 15 years are the speed jet airliners can cross the Atlantic (a call to bring back Concorde) and the battery life of mobile phones (a call to bring back, ahem, the Nokia 3310).

Oh, and the Audi TT. Largely because I reckon the new one has lost touch with what made the original such a hit.

The third generation of Audi’s swoopy coupé has just been unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, and I’ve no doubt that it’s faster, more refined and safer than the two which preceded it on suburban driveways up and down the land. It’s also likely to register more prominently on my petrolhead radar if it’s any more involving to drive, but – to my mind at least – it misses the point completely because it looks so similar to the one it replaces. The new TT will, I’ve no doubt, be parked on every street by the end of the year, but you’ll no longer be granting it a cheeky second glance when you walk past.

Yet all the attention being given to the new TT means you might have missed one of the motoring world’s worst-kept secrets. The TT that’s most likely to be a classic car in a decade’s time, the wonderfully Bauhaus original version, is an undisputable bargain right now.

Peruse the classifieds and there are stacks of first generation TTs there for the taking, with the one you want – the 225bhp quattro coupe in metallic silver – starting at around two grand. 

Admittedly, you can also pick up early Mercedes SLKs, long-legged BMW Z3s and – if you try really hard – Porsche Boxsters for the same sort of money and they’ll be a lot more fun to drive, but there is something about the original TT’s shape and attention to detail which will still be turning heads in years to come.

So you can spend the thick end of £30,000 on an Audi TT which no one will bat an eyelid at, or you can have the head-turning original for a tenth of the price. Which would you go for?

New classic car show for Liverpool

PETROLHEADS are being urged to back a new charity car show taking place in Liverpool later this Spring.

The Woodlands Hospice Liverpool Motor Show, which takes place on 25 May, will feature more than 60 of the latest models, and displays of classic cars.

The show be held at Croxteth Hall Park (Croxteth Hall Lane, Liverpool L12 0HB) on 25^th May 2014 from 12noon to approximately 5pm. Any proceeds from the event, which is free to enter, will go towards helping the Woodlands Hospice Charitable Trust.

For more information about the show call Neil on 0151 529 2640.

The MINI Countryman isn't as bad as everyone makes out

I GET the feeling this particular article is going to be an expensive one.

The trouble is, I’ve ended up spending three days in a car which everyone loves to hate. In order to dissuade me from being too nice about it, my friends have used Facebook to set up a £10-per-compliment fines system, payable next time I see them in the pub.

A tricky call when the car in question is the MINI Countryman.

It’s one of a trio of jacked-up, off-roader-esque diesel hatchbacks (or ‘crossovers’ in automotive marketing speak) I’ve had the privilege to try out lately, with my weekend in the most massive MINI of them all coming after stints in Honda’s latest CR-V and Volkswagen’s Tiguan. It’s probably worth tackling the rather bloated, retro elephant in the room first; the MINI is, to my mind at least, the ugliest of the three.

I didn’t like the styling when I roadtested it forThe Champion three years ago and it still doesn’t look great now – it’s not that it’s a ridiculously oversized retro pastiche of the original Mini, but that, compared to the Honda and VW it just seems a bit blobby and ill defined. Perhaps as a conscious result of how it looks, the boot is also noticeably smaller than most of its rivals too.

Sadly, I don’t get a tenner back for every time I’m critical of the Countryman, so a few callous comments about its styling aren’t going to help me. Annoyingly, there are quite a few things the Countryman has in its favour.

The interior, for instance, is far more imaginative than anything else in its class, and if you’ve spent a lifetime on the M6 being bored by the relentless sea of grey trim and unassuming buttons in most modern motors then you’ll love the MINI’s rocker switches, lashings of chrome and the silly, pizza dish-sized speedo.

It’s also quiet at speed, rides superbly, is more than roomy enough for you and four of your average-sized chums, and it comes with the same feeling of sturdiness you’d expect from a car masterminded by BMW.

What you might not be expecting – and I definitely wasn’t until I ventured off the motorway and onto the quiet country lanes criss-crossing Cheshire – is that the MINI Cooper D Countryman handles and steers so much better than any of its chief rivals. There is, I begrudgingly admit, a faint whiff of Nineties hot hatch about the way it chews up corners, and a confidence-inspiring finesse to the steering I genuinely wasn’t expecting.

Given twenty grand it’s not the crossover I’d go for – that’d still be the Skoda Yeti – but the Countryman is far better than my mates give it credit for.

Mates who, by my reckoning, I now owe roughly £80. Oops.

Audi confirms new TT

THE first new Audi TT in almost a decade will be unveiled at next month’s Geneva Motor Show, it has been confirmed.

While Audi is remaining tight-lipped until the show about the prices and specification of the new car, a teaser sketch released by the German firm reveals elements of the car hark back to the original TT of 1998.

The new car will replace the current version of the TT, originally introduced back in 2005.

DVLA red tape leaves Life On Cars at the mercy of the French police

IS IT possible to break the law in order to avoid not breaking it?

That’s the rather perplexing scenario I’ve spent the past week pondering, after it transpired that in order to not flout this country’s laws I run the risk of simultaneously falling foul of another’s.

All this thanks to the DVLA, some red tape, a J-registered Saab and the Belgians. 

It all started a week or so ago when the state agency responsible for driving licences sent me a polite letter to remind me that the photo on mine was looking a little out of date, having been taken in a branch of Woolworths at a time when Britain’s two main talking points were the Iraq War and The Cheeky Girls. 

For the sake of £20, a new and equally embarrassing photo and filling out a form, I’d avoid getting a £1,000 fine. There was only one snag; it was a legal requirement to send off both parts of my driving licence with it. 

After a few minutes of moaning to anyone who’d care to listen, I duly obliged.

It’s an inconvenience, but the not the end of the world. Or at least it wasn’t until two days after posting the form off, when I got asked, for a business trip, to go to Belgium.

A business trip which is not only in the very near future but will involve co-driving a friend’s Saab 9000 across France on the long trip to Antwerp. Places which, should I get stopped by les Gendarmes, I’ll almost certainly get asked to produce the driving licence I no longer possess.

It’s an absurd state of affairs. In order to avoid breaking the laws of this country, I’ve been forced into a position where I’ll have to break the laws of at least one other country should I dare to do what I’m legally entitled to on the other side of the Channel.

A quick call to the DVLA didn’t help. Partly because it wasn’t an especially quick call and led me to believe that humankind has actually abandoned Swansea and left the agency’s phone-manning robots to fend for themselves, but because once I actually got past the computerized phone switchboard it turned out the poor girl at the other end of the line didn’t actually know how to help me.

Having explained that “Have you asked the authorities in France and Belgium?” wasn’t the answer I was looking for, she was happy to sell me a Certificate of Entitlement, which for a fiver will prove to the police you really are entitled to drive. Unfortunately, it also comes with a whopping great disclaimer which states it isn’t valid in other EU states.

It is ridiculous that, in the event of the DVLA requiring your licence back at renewal time, it has absolutely no procedure in place should you need to pop over to the continent.

I look forward to writing my next column from my cell in La Bastille.

Mid-life facelift for BMW X3 confirmed

A NEW version of BMW’s X3 will go on sale across the UK later this summer, it has been announced.

The off-roader has been treated to an extensive facelift and will go on sale in July, with customers able to choose from four different variants, with all the engines on offer being diesel-powered.

Prices for the entry-level model, the X3 sDrive18d SE, start at £30,990.

The MGB GT is back

Click on the image to enlarge

Originally published in the 5 February edition of Classic Car Weekly. All rights reserved

How Citroen came up with the C4 Cactus

THE Parisian schoolboy put down his Crayola and hit the pause button on his Magic Roundabout DVD.

“Daddy”, he shouted excitedly in French which I’ve had to translate into Layman’s English. “I’ve managed to sort out that new hatchback you’ve been struggling with.”

The young designer’s dad, the boss of one of the biggest car companies in the whole of France, was astounded.

“That’s impossible”, he explained with an anguished tone of surprise in his voice. “My team have been working for months on this car, because it’s absolutely crucial that we come up with a rival for the Nissan Juke. You’re only seven years old. How have you managed to design it in twenty minutes?

"More to the point, what exactly are those things on the side supposed to be?”

The French firm’s brilliant new design guru paused reflectively and considered putting The Magic Roundabout back on again, but then he remembered how important this bit of extra homework was. This wasn’t just any old car doodle. This had to take on not just the Nissan Juke, but all the other jacked-up, supermini-sized hatchbacks that had already been launched to take it on.

“This is a lot more sensible than all the other cars I design when I’m at school – it’s only got four wheels, and there aren’t any machine guns or rockets on it. It’s just a normal car, like the one you and Mummy take me to school in.”

The boy’s father repeated the question. “But what is that thing on the side of it?”

“Oh sorry, dad, I forgot about that,” the youngster said. “I dropped a Dairy Milk on the paper and it melted, and now it’s stuck there.”

Dad was impressed. “Brilliant! I love it. It’s so avantgarde – no one but Citroen would think to launch a hatchback with a giant chocolate stuck to the side of it. Love the wheels too. I’ll get it signed off for production tomorrow.

“The only problem”, he explained to his pre-pubescent protégé, “is I’ve no idea what to call it. People love the Juke because it not only looks like it’s got landed from another planet, but it’s got a mad name too. So has the Vauxhall Mokka, and so has the Renault Captur”.

Citroen’s new chief designer smiled and instantly turned to his dad with a suggestion for this new, taller version of the company’s C4 hatchback, which goes on sale across the UK later this year.

“Let’s call it the Cactus, daddy”.

Life On Cars shortlisted for national award

LIFE ON CARS has been shortlisted for a national award celebrating blogging, it has been confirmed this week.

Originally created by motoring journalist David Simister in July 2009, the blog is one of just eight from across the UK which have been shortlisted for the Automotive category of the UK Blog Awards 2014, with the winner due to be announced at a ceremony in London on 25 April.

The blog, which is accompanied by a sister column in The Champion newspaper in Southport, focuses on a wide range of motoring topics with more than 750 articles since its launch, including many of the misadventures David has encountered in his own cars!

David is the news editor of Classic Car Weekly, and regularly contributes to The Champion as the motoring correspondent for the series of weekly newspapers.

In a weird sort of way, I miss the Renault Espace

A CAR you’d long forgotten existed is celebrating its 30^th year of production this week. Many happy returns, Renault Espace!

Admit it, you’d forgotten all about the Espace, hadn’t you? In fact, it’s so synonymous with big people carriers that I bet it’s just blended into the motoring background, quietly offering overproductive couples everywhere a spacious and well-equipped means of ferrying their children to school.Only – in this country at least – it hasn’t.

Even though the Espace is still very much in production, you haven’t been able to buy a brand new one in Britain for at least three years. It is proof positive that most Nineties of motoring institutions, the big people carrier, is on life support. 

Once upon a time everyone would offer you a roadgoing ocean liner with more seats than wheels, enough window glass to front a small office block and the ability to buckle up your youngest children in what might as well have been a different time zone. If you didn’t want a Renault Espace, you could have a Vauxhall Sintra, a Toyota Previa, a Fiat Ulysse, a Peugeot 806, or a seven-seater from just about any other manufacturer you can think of. 

The old ones are easy enough to find – just check your nearest minicab firm, and once you’ve overcome the distant whiff of stale vomit and kebabs you find examples with snooker ball smooth steering wheels with roughly three million miles on the clock. New ones, however, are all but extinct.With the notable exceptions of Ford’s Galaxy, Chrysler’s Grand Voyager and VW’s twin offerings of the Sharan and SEAT Alhambra, the truly gargantuan people mover is all but dead.

Renault, ironically, is partly to blame, because with the original Megane Scenic it sparked the idea that people carriers no longer had to be absolutely enormous to succeed. As soon as Vauxhall’s Zafira managed to offer up a normal sized car with seven seats – and this was 15 years ago, remember – the Espace and its ilk were finished. 

Which, in a small way, is a bit of a shame, because for every Espace that’s disappeared from our roads a BMW X3 or an Audi Q3 seems to have taken its place, with their aggressive – sorry, “sporty” – aesthetics and their tendency to sit three inches of your back bumper on the M62. Big people carriers might have been utterly unromantic, but at least you knew where you were with them. 

The Espace might be all but a distant memory on this side of the Channel, but in a weird sort of way I miss seeing it clogging up the nation’s school runs.  

Nissan spices up the Micra with new limited edition

NISSAN is now offering the Micra with a choice of two-tone paintjobs in order to give the supermini a more youthful vibe.

The limited edition Micra, imaginatively called the Micra Limited Edition, costs £12,300 and is available with three different colour combinations – white and red, blue and white, and red and black.

Based on the existing Acenta trim level, which comes mid-way through the Micra in terms of gadgets and equipment, the Limited Edition follows a number of its supermini rivals in offering contrasting roof and mirror colours, notably the MINI One, Vauxhall Adam and Citroen DS3.

The new model, which comes with 15-inch alloy wheels, air-conditioning, cruise control, and a roof spoiler among other niceties, is available to order now.  

Happy birthday, Toyota RAV-4!

TOYOTA has celebrated the 20^th birthday of one of its models by offering the latest version with more gadgets at a lower price.

The original RAV-4 proved a hit back in 1994 with its blend of edgy styling, off-roader stance and its inviting driving experience, and the name has remained a staple of the company’s range ever since.

The latest version, which with a starting price of £22,195 is now £400 cheaper than its predecessor, is also offered with a more generous helping of standard equipment than previously.

Farewell, Ford Mondeo

FORGET oil, diamonds or the mysterious underground gas that's been getting you so fracking angry lately. I reckon the world’s most valuable commodity is attention.

Studies have shown that while attention occurs naturally in all human brains – even the ones of reality TV stars – it runs out completely if you try to mine it for more than about 45 minutes or so. Once that’s gone, all you’re left with a dangerous void of mentally planning your next holiday, pondering the plot of Sherlock and wondering whether you really did lock your front door when you left the house this morning.

Even a few seconds of not having an abundant supply of attention at your disposal can cause all sorts of problems. I know this, because that’s roughly how long it took for another driver to write my FordMondeo off beyond repair.

Regular readers might recall how proud I was to finally depart the 1990s and plump my posterior onto the leather lined throne of something modern for a change. The 2.0 litre Ghia X might have been 12 years old but it came stashed with an armada of gizmos so extensive it’d make viewers of The Gadget Show proud. Electric seats and an electric sunroof. Cruise control and a six CD autochanger. It had all of these things, and just about everything else besides.

Yet none of these gadgets could have prevented its fate on that dark evening in deepest Peterborough, as I gradually drew to a stop on the approach to a roundabout somewhere near the A1. The only clue I had that a rather rushed sales manager was about to indulge in a spot of creative parking – as in parking his company 3-Series half a foot into the Mondeo’s rear bumper – was the fleeting glimpse of a set of headlights in the rear view mirror, racing towards me through the darkness.

It is, to my mind, the worst kind of collision you can be involved in; the sort which you can do absolutely nothing about, other than watch it happen. You can be the best driver in the world (which, incidentally, I’m definitely not) and it still isn’t going to stop an errant Audi ploughing into your pride and joy. 

For the sake of driving too fast, too close and not nearly attentively enough, you end up causing weeks of headaches for people you’ve never met. In fact, having a car written off through no fault of my own is getting off lucky; what would have happened if Beemer Boy had been doing the full 70mph he was legally entitled to on that stretch of road?

So the Mondeo is gone. Luckily, I’m not.

Vauxhall launches the smartphone-on-wheels

A LIMITED edition hatchback billed as ‘a smartphone on wheels’ is Vauxhall’s latest offering for fashion-conscious motorists.

Just 250 of the new versions of the ADAM supermini, called the ADAM Black and the ADAM White in honour of their distinctive paintjobs, are being created, and are designed to be fully compatible with the latest versions of the iPhone to help make it easier for buyers to use them on the move.

The new model, which is powered by a 1.4 litre petrol engine good for 87bhp, is available now and costs £14,995.

Subaru brings an affordable performance icon back to Britain

A rally-bred favourite from Japan is being brought back to Britain by popular demand, it has been confirmed.

Subaru said that the turbocharged version of its Impreza – now called the WRX STI – will be sold in this country from June, with prices starting at £28,995 for the turbocharged, four-wheel-drive saloon.

While the company has said it will only be sold in limited numbers, the company’s decision to sell it here reflects the dedicated following Subaru’s performance models have previously enjoyed here.

David Brown will have a tough job developing a new sports car

IMAGINE the biggest number you can think of and then multiply it by ten. Nope, you’re still nowhere near how much it costs to develop a new car.

It’s such a fantastically enormous quantity of money that it hurts your head thinking about it. VW, for instance, threw £50bn at developing what it calls the MQB platform, which in layman’s English refers to the bits and bobs which hold the current Golf, Audi A3 and its family cousins together. Spend much less and you get the David Simisters of this world poking fun at the fact your latest sales rep special has a cheap-feeling dashboard.

My point is that because it costs such an extraordinary amount of cash to develop a new car properly, very few firms can actually afford to, which is why MG Rover went bust and why – despite the best efforts of the Chinese – you haven’t been able to buy a new Saab for nearly three years. It’s why Aston Martin’s ‘new’ models are always thinly-disguised rehashes of the decade-old DB9 and why Fiat ended up buying Chrysler outright the other week. Virtually no one can afford to develop a car.

Which is why I’m just a bit cynical about what’s roughly the 327^th attempt by a British businessmen to set up his own sports car company.

Last weekend I got word of David Brown’s efforts to set up his own firm, called David Brown Automotive. The name’s great – chiefly because it immediately conjures connotations of a (non-related) David Brown’s involvement in Aston Martin, which led to a string of beautiful GT cars – and the badge, a stylised Union Flag, pushes all the right patriotic buttons. He’s got talent on board too, in the form of Land Rover’s former design boss, and he’s confident he get a new car, as if from nowhere, ready to wow us this April.

It’s bold, it’s British, and it’s a new sports car. But haven’t we heard all this before?

For every Ariel Atom or Caterham there’s a Marcos or a Jensen, or an Invicta or a Lea-Francis, that has promised to take on Johnny Foreigner with a new sports car developed for about 50p – and subsequently vanished without trace. There are handful that crack this toughest of automotive nuts, but I’ve just got a horrible feeling that the David Brown will join all the other old sports cars you’d forgotten existed.

I would love, of course, to be proven wrong and for a plucky Brit to come good for a change. Sadly, I have my doubts.