Presented very much as I like my meat; barbeque black on the outside and red in the middle, with blood oozing forth hither and thither, the first Kia Soul I drove back in 2009 was dubbed the Burner edition – ostensibly random, silver go-bonkers decals not constituting some gay, cabbalistic symbol but rather, if you …
Built on an all-new modular electric drive platform (MEB) designed to underpin some 20 million members of VW’s forthcoming 70 model ID all-electric family by 2029, not only is this Golf-sized ID.3 VW’s first purpose-built electric vehicle, but -thanks to a factory that relies entirely on renewable sources of energy- it’s also delivered to customers …
There’s so little about this car with which to find fault that the use of the number 718 in its name may very well constitute the only sand in the Vaseline. A few years ago, Porsche sought to big-up engine downsizing through genuflection to the flat-four racing 718s of the mid-20th century. 2.0 and 2.5 …
A monochrome mithering of petrified nuns crammed under their chapel pews, fear-propelled rosary beads flailing like amphetamine-laden abaci in the sisters’ utter conviction that the Devil is on his way and world is about to end… Not the first thing that springs to everybody’s mind at the mention of the word Dacia, but for me …
Toyota’s decision to re-name this latest generation Auris a Corolla in the interests of global name-tag unification was such a late call that the finished article had already completed the full motor show roundelay proudly badged as the former before hitting the streets as the latter. Auris never struck me as a particularly I-just-have-to-get-me-one-of-those names …
The very first iteration of Audi’s Big Grille was smeared across the front of an wholly innocent A8 in 2005, and today, now model ubiquitous some 15 years later, the company still struggles to make it look any better than the business end of an inflatable doll wearing chrome lipstick. I recall, at the launch …
ARMIN THE PORTALOO… They say that, at the point of drowning, a person’s life flashes before their eyes. Odd, then, that at the very moment I resign myself utterly to the inevitability of death by World Rally Car, the one overriding image Blu-Tack’d to the petrified pinboard of my mind is that of Bob Monkhouse …
MUD SLINGING It’s highly unlikely -even if you find yourself in the market for one- that any of these denizens of the Dorking driveway will get your heart going like a stolen moped. Fact is, though, these four C-SUVs represent one of the few automotive markets that still records regular growth, which makes the (deep …
To date, the original Moose Dodger was the best A-Class produced by Mercedes – a sophisticated chunk of sandwich-floored engineering, and something of a Tardis in the accommodation stakes to boot. Alas, over-deterred by the all too real risk of an unseemly encounter between permanently nose-bagged, Twiglet-legged quadruped and Mercedes in, say, Macclesfield, the company …
ONEUPMANSHIP What’s interesting about this little tete a tete is that it pitches a small car the intended rear-engine, rear-wheel drive platform of which was rejected by the world’s second largest car maker on the grounds of cost, against a small car only armed with precisely that platform because a third party -the world’s third …
CHIRPY, CHIRPY, CHEAP, CHEAP You’d think a quick Interweb rummage would suffice but, truth is, it’s easier to make love standing up in a hammock than to establish which four cars are, at any given moment, the cheapest in Britain. At the time of writing, for instance, Peugeot is offering £900 off the 107 and …
In addition to spending leg numbing lengths of time on the loo, most creative types seek inspiration through as great a diversity of sensory input as possible. The designers of both cars in this brisk, Britain versus Bavaria face-off, for instance, strike me as stout devotees of the silver screen. Excluding hi-fi installation specialists whose …
TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Remember those Kia-Ora-fuelled, matinee movies of yore wherein every party scene featured a gurl sporting an orange mini dress, white thigh-length patent leather boots and impossibly pointy breasts flailing through four bars of the ‘hitchhiker’ atop the grand piano before the action cut away to our hero parked at a corner …
JAGUAR XF SPORTBRAKE vs MERCEDES CLS SHOOTING BRAKE Jaguar Director of Design Ian Callum has dusted off his tricorn and conjured a boat. No, I’m not being derogatory about the lines of the new XF estate; he really has designed a boat. It’s a rather spiffing, 20ft long sharpened suppository with teak decking, a curved …
Two surprising revelations surfaced over the course of the first night I’ve stayed awake throughout since I was a schewdunt: Firstly, New York may be the city that never sleeps, but you just try getting a cup of coffee anywhere in London at 3.00 in the morning; and, secondly, with precious little else to peer …
X-TYPE ACROSS THE USA. Of all the encouragingly daft souvenirs I’ve accumulated over the course of this three and a half thousand mile, X-Type enhanced lunge across America -diminutive mouth organ earring (Nashville), severed baby alligator head (Russellville), fake Elvis Presley driving license (Memphis), whole rattlesnake walking stick (Oklahoma), fetching bear carving for the …
VELOSOLEX. MISERY. It was the cross that did it; the final straw. It wobbled by six hours into the slowest, hottest, coldest journey I’ve ever made in my life. And, at that moment, I came to the conclusion that bicycles are only fit for healthy children who don’t mind appearing in public wearing a hand …
VANQUISH. Too busy bullying squirrels in the local park to notice 130 slavering pounds of incoming canine Exocet, a friend’s Heinz 57 mutt recently found itself the hapless recipient of a rigorous going over at the jaws of a particularly malevolent Doberman pinscher. Unfortunately, my quick-thinking chum had heard that the only sure-fire …
THUNDERBIRDS ARE SLOW. The Great White Shark has a bite pressure of three tons per square centimetre. Its favourite meal is seal. It attacks from directly below said hapless snack; 2500lbs and more of bunched muscle propelling a mouth full of serrated teeth the size of a shot glass vertically upwards at a good …
BACK TO THE FUTURE The rules are simple: Staying in the company of your car (which –with the Karl Malden-hootered Bristol Freighter no longer lumbering aloft out of Lydd- rules out air travel unless you can blag a ride in an RAF Hercules), just how far can you travel in one 24 hour period? …
RING PIECE It’s no good. The die is cast. It’s definitely going to happen… And my only hope of retaining some small shred of decorum is to try and synchronise the inevitable with the passing of a particularly loud machine… Green Hell it may have been to Jackie Stewart, but to me -12 …
NASCAR If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, then NASCAR is surely the USA’s way of teaching the rest of the world motor racing. The banked, two mile oval of an American Speedway circuit is the coliseum of the new millennium; burgers and stock cars the bread and circuses of the …
The Saab Moose Crash Test. Meece? Muce? Mace? Mooses? Wasted conjecture. There is, it transpires, no plural. Furthermore, strictly speaking, we’re talking elk here; moose, though identical, all live in Canada and star in nature films. In the interests of trade, the Swedes themselves are wont to get this wrong too, since tourists know …
WHITE MISCHIEF. Nothing, we’re told, focuses the mind quite like fear… Codswallop. Truth is, when the ocean liner of sang froid inadvertently clouts the iceberg of blind terror, courage instantly tramples the women and children of wisdom and logic underfoot in a frantic scramble to be first aboard the lifeboats. I know this …
IKUZO, IKUZO, IKUZO… (‘ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go…) As recently as a scant 150 years ago, Japan’s strictly enforced policy of self-imposed isolation guaranteed any visitor to its shores a terminally warm welcome: The hapless tourist would be met on the beach by an enthusiastic crowd armed with a large …
HOBBYCAR ON LOCH NESS. How much do false teeth cost in Germany? I only ask because an entire coachload of Leica touting tourists, recently caught tooling, at attention, through the Scottish highlands early one May morning, badly need to know. And it’s all my fault. I was, at the time, behind the wheel …
Goodbye to Old Tat… Back in the early days of our relationship, when the safest way to establish what might have been for supper was to loiter outside the kitchen window as it hurtled by en route to the ever burgeoning throng of staunchly constitutioned local fauna (Pavlova for the Pavlovian, as it were), …
APOCALYPSE? NOW THEN…. Deep in my impressionable past lurks a favoured short story concerning a stout police sergeant on a standard issue, un-sprung bicycle. The premise of the tale was that policeman and bike spent so much time joined at the saddle that an infinitesimally small yet relentless degree of molecular transfer actually took …
BUGATTI VEYRON 16.4 GRAND SPORT VITESSE Price £2,440,000 (est) Engine 7993cc 64v quadruple-turbo W16, 1184bhp @ 6400rpm, 1106lb ft @ 3000-5000rpm Gearbox Seven-speed twin-clutch, all-wheel drive Performance 2.6 sec 0-62mph, 7.1 sec 0-125mph, 16.1 sec 0-185mph, 5.9 sec 0-62-0mph, 12.9 sec 0-125-0mph, 23.9 sec 0-185-0mph, 254mph, 12.2mpg, …
BARBIE. “Like, I mean, as if … That Aqua stuff: “I’m a Barbie girl, in my Barbie world…” What kind of baloney is that for chrissakes? HELLO-OH. I’m, like, totally not into that scene. It totally sucks. Eeuch. I mean, excuse ME, I was, like, 40 years old on March 9th (Pisces; totally cool …
Switzerland COOL RUNNING Legendarily beautiful, obsessively tidy, alarmingly punctual and wallet-meltingly expensive, Switzerland is, for me at least, the stuff of nightmares. Not for any of the above reasons, you understand… It’s the cheese that does the damage. Most Swiss national dishes invariably involve the consumption of enough suitably hole-ridden cheese to …
Snugged chin deep beneath a duvet of aromatic foam, big toe fumbling an ecstatic top up from the hot tap, the soap dish-to-ceiling panoramic glazing of my bathroom affords me an unimpeachable view of a large, blatantly male vervet monkey which has just catered across the roof, thumped onto my private terrace, settled itself in …
DUTY FREEZE. In the absorbing world of extreme cold, Absolute Zero weighs in at around -273.16 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, molecules simply stop moving. So forget about wrapping up warm, you’re already dead. At a mere -20, as indicated on the thermometer hanging outside the Jukkasjarvi Ice Hotel reception today, my molecules …
SERVING SUGGESTION. Frog’s legs, definitely: On the basis that you should try everything in life once except incest and folk dancing, it just has to be the frog’s legs. Besides, that particular dish isn’t actually on my menu for tonight and I feel like being an awkward customer. Purely in the interests of research, …
BLOTTO IN BURGUNDY…. “You can swallow if you like, you know” chides Bruno Jaivrand of the Beaune tourist office. “But, if you do, it becomes hard to remember which wine is which after you’ve tasted a dozen or so…” Yesh indeed. But, hunched deep within the cellars of Maison Champy, the oldest of the …
IF THE SUIT FITS… Some of us are natural clothes horses; lean, lucky people who can stroll into any store and buy a standard, off the peg suit that looks as if it had been lovingly tailored specifically with them in mind. I, on the other hand, am a clothes hippo. Having been …
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN. To say that Tim Heywood designs boats is akin to crediting Edward Lutyens with the erection of the occassional, home-counties conservatory. Only the very, very rich indeed visit Tim’s Thames-side studio when they feel a floating, weekend retreat coming on. So, if you’ve just won the national lottery, …
TALES OF THE RIVERBANK. Like so many good ideas, it hatched in the bath. Not, I hasten to add, my long standing fisherman’s fantasy of catching a wild Scottish salmon, hurrying it, muscles still quivering to memory of the surge upstream, to a traditional West Highland smokehouse and then -abetted only by a loaf …
HEAVEN SCENT. Bees. It never occurred to me that there would be bees… I’ve had a bit of a problem with nature’s pollen navvies ever since, atop a bicycle, aged eleven, I head-butted a particularly boisterous specimen coming the other way. Understandably, it retaliated. And, for the next week, I staggered myopically about with …
ICELAND. Prihyrningsfjallgardur… Kirkjubaejarklaustur… Bjarnarflagsstod… You’d be forgiven for assuming that the cat’s been stomping about on my keyboard again. Truth is, however, plucking place names at random off a map of Iceland as we fly north over the island’s vast, utterly uninhabited interior, I’m praying that we don’t get lost over the course of …
ROBBERY WITH VIOLINS Its narrow, cobbled streets ambling amiably across a largely nondescript corner of Lombardy’s flat, fertile plains about an hour’s pelt down the autostrada south east of Milan, the city of Cremona can be all too easily overlooked by the inattentive traveller. But this, if there’s any music in your soul …
HERE BE DRAGONS. …From deep within the massive, slab sided flanks of Dracula’s brooding mountaintop fortress echoes a piercing, agonised scream that sends wildlife scurrying for cover and brings the hairs on the nape of the neck of every mortal within earshot springing smartly to attention… Sorry to shatter the pastoral peace, everyone. …
HOLLAND AND HOLLAND. On learning that perhaps the most important ingredient in the manufacture of a 12 bore shotgun costing about the same as a brand new 328i Convertible is, in fact, soot, you’d be forgiven for thinking twice about disturbing the moths in your wallet. However, having just spent an utterly riveting …
For most of the North London beret and brioche set, saving the whales remains very much a five day a week concern. Let’s face it; come Friday evening, the only Wales on the collective radar is the one hosting the weekend cottage, the only serious consideration joining the M4’s camelhair coat caravanserai in the appropriate …