Cars

Any historic London footage inevitably features cars busily rounding Hyde Park Corner and shooting off up Park Lane, against the background of sky-scraping hotels and thriving offices. Have you seen the same bit of London now? It’s a giant car park, brought to a standstill by an administration with seemingly little idea how to promote a thriving capital. The city’s best-known thoroughfare has been reduced from three lanes to just one open for traffic northbound, one for bicycles (used sparingly in rush hour) and one for buses, usually empty. That’s just one lane for normal traffic, used by Londoners simply trying to get from A to B via one of the main routes across the capital. Any world capital needs to offer choice in the way its population gets around.

Some years ago, I was despatched to Las Vegas to learn how to be a chauffeur. The Wynn hotel had purchased a fleet of Rolls-Royces, and their Aloysius Parkers were being taught how to drive the Rolls-Royce way – i.e. a cut above your Lincoln Town Car etiquette. ‘The umbrella can be used both defensively and offensively,’ I recall Rolls-Royce’s Andi McCann saying, as if he’d walked off the set of Kingsman. Andi is the personal driver to Rolls’s CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös and the company’s lead trainer.

The new Aston Martin Vantage is shorter and hotter than the DB11: a smaller, truer sportscar, though slightly less elegant. 'Gentlemanly' is what the copywriter calls the DB11, but this is a 'hunter' and 'predatory'. Ferraris, meanwhile, are a little too hot for me – though I accept that they are sublime, if Ferraris are your thing – and the Toyota Supra, which I love – even shorter, even hotter, much cheaper – doesn’t make quite the same impression on the A30. People (I mean men over 40) love Aston Martins. They view them as an expression of British pride, and coo over them like babies, by roaring past, overtaking, and slowing down, and then insisting you overtake them in turn. The whole encounter is managed by hand signals and engine snorts, and it is delightful.

I recently spent a long weekend in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, driving a fast car, eating tortellini alla panna twice a day and rifling through Luciano Pavarotti’s DVD library. The tenor’s house, outside Modena, has been converted into a museum filled with his many shiny awards and Hermès scarves, framed photos with Bono and Mandela and, yes, his unrivalled collection of Police Academy movies. I also visited Modena’s sprawling San Cataldo cemetery to see the imposing family tomb of one Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, 1898-1988. I listened carefully. It was peaceful. Apart from birdsong, not a whisper. There was no whirring, no drilling, no vibration or rumbling from underground. Everybody said he’d be spinning in his grave. Talk about a let-down.

Britain makes the world’s best luxury cars: we got there early, as we did with the Industrial Revolution, which is why our infrastructure is fraying, though our cars aren’t. You can argue about Rolls-Royce vs Bentley, and both be right, though the late Queen chose a Bentley for the state limousine and a Jaguar Land Rover for the state hearse in Royal Claret. (It was little discussed, for reasons of taste, but it was a very beautiful hearse. The claret was right.) Perhaps a Rolls-Royce is too elitist though; with minimal specification, it could be made to look like a crown. Here is the Bentley Flying Spur Mulliner: the Bentley saloon, a GT with four doors. You can take a 4.0 litre V8 or a 6.0 litre W12 engine, but electrification is coming: this is the 2.

When Land Rover finally axed its ‘old’ Defender in 2016 and promised to replace it with something better, traditionalists shed tears as readily as their beloved old-school Landys dripped oil. And the arrival of the ‘new’ Defender in early 2020 did nothing to help: ‘too expensive’, said some; ‘too complicated’, said others. ‘Too precious’, they moaned. ‘Not a real Defender’, they concluded. Oddly, it seemed, such people really did want to carry on driving a car based on a 70-year-old design that was bereft of safety features, as aerodynamic as a breeze block, as draughty as a shed, rusted readily underneath and with the turning circle of a tanker.

Prior to kick-off, Fifa declared the World Cup in Qatar to be ‘a fully carbon-neutral event’, triggering enough spluttering, snorting and involuntary cackles to feed an entire wind farm. Seven giant brand-new stadiums, open-air air-conditioning in the desert, goodness knows how many long-haul flights in and out, and an armada of cruise ships to store the Wags. Righto, Mr Infantino. The Fifa president is the poster boy of talking tripe – the Comical Ali of sports-washing. Football is losing the climate fight like Costa Rica lost against Spain (7-0). Instead, the world’s most eco-friendly sport is motor racing. I’m serious. Let me introduce you to Extreme E. Extreme E, or XE for short, is like Mad Max meets The Blue Planet.

There’s nothing like the sound of automobile engines at wide-open throttle, whirring by like a squadron of World War Two fighter jets in dive-bomb mode. But at the Lime Rock Park racetrack, the adrenaline-pumping hum is made even more riveting by the fact that you hear the overture of baritone bees before you see what’s making it. Lime Rock is in northwest Connecticut, “between Boston and New York City and is easy to access from all points in the Northeast.” That’s what the website claims, though in my experience, no place between Boston and New York City is “easy to access.” The site is right, however, in saying, “An essential part of the Lime Rock Park experience is the journey here.

In April 2021 I wrote a piece for The Spectator which became the most-read article I have ever had published here. It began with the words: ‘I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t.’ It was the story of my ill-judged decision to get a Hyundai Kona Electric. I had hoped to use it to virtue-signal, but it turned into the car from hell. Many readers were kind enough to laugh at my self-deprecating jokes. I’ve always had a soft spot for gadgets. When electric cars started to become available in 2018, I ordered the Kona because it seemed to have a reasonable range of around 400km. It was a hatchback. With the rear seats folded down, it had plenty of room for the dogs. It was delivered a year later – and it proved to be not just the ultimate lemon, but a ticking time-bomb.

My day had started as it always does, with a near 40-mile round trip to school, then an hour’s walk in the pretty country park close to our home near Nottingham. As usual, I parked in the small car park and exchanged ‘good mornings’ and ‘beautiful weather, isn’t it?’ with the familiar faces I see most days – dog walkers, joggers and mums herding their kids to the village school. There was nothing out of the ordinary about my walk, which covers an undulating route on a track alongside the canal, through a small wood and past fields of sheep. Until I returned to my car, that is.  Straight away I realised something was different, but it took a few seconds to register what it was. The front number plate was missing.

Had Amtrak come to a screeching halt this week, as it was on the verge of doing, most Americans would not have noticed. Of those workers who still commute to in-person jobs, 76 percent drive their own cars, 10 percent ride a bike, and only 11 percent use public transportation. Other countries tend to give us a bad rap for our car-loving ways. Most of us — nine in 10 Americans over the age of 16 — drive. And we drive a lot: 59 minutes and 30 miles a day, on average. We’re on the road twice as much as our friends in France, Germany, and Great Britain. So when non-American critics blame climate change on our driving habits, I can’t help but think they’re just plain jealous. Here’s the thing about America: it’s huge. That means people can spread out, and we have.

‘A new girl drops in at the palace,’ announced the London Evening News on the front page of its ‘election special’ of 4 May 1979. The accompanying image showed a beaming Margaret Thatcher (pre-implant teeth in evidence) waving from the rear seat of a ministerial car, on her way to meet the Queen and receive her official invitation to form a new administration. Another ‘new girl’ (or boy?) might be dropping in at the palace soon – but if he or she wants to do it in the same car, it will cost them.

I remember still the foreboding language and tone when I was learning to drive in New Jersey over a decade ago. First, you needed to earn your permit. Never forget that driving is a privilege, not a right (which only works if driving is an option, not effectively a requirement, though drivers ed isn’t in charge of land use). After your permit, you start with your probationary license. And in a twist that somehow passes civil liberties muster, you’re not even allowed to appeal a ticket issued to you during your probationary period. You feel a bit under suspicion until you finally get that license. Yet for all that, it’s still, basically, a lot of bureaucracy and paper-pushing.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a day trip to Maryland, where we visited the National Capital Trolley Museum. It’s an unassuming building with an ornamented facade — a little like a Main Street building in a rural small town — and the gift shop, exhibits and ticket prices are all modest. There’s an interactive electricity exhibit for kids (and adults like me), where you can power a tiny trolley in a diorama of an old streetcar-suburb scene. One of the windows in a house even lights up. It’s simple and fun, a small, lean museum run by a dedicated group of people. An older man who worked there explained the old DC trolley map to me, recalling all the different lines he used to ride as a kid. That’s something you can’t get from a book.

Today’s youth get a bad rap for being boring: they don’t join clubs, volunteer, pursue hobbies, or invent anything. Their sartorial style is a sad mishmash of tired trends, their movies unimaginative remakes (there are nine Spider-Man movies now), and their music is largely stoned hip-hop artists talk-singing to the same hypnotic beat. There are many forces at work in the dulling of the current generation, but one of the simplest reasons youngins may not feel inclined to go anywhere or do anything is because getting there is such an exercise in meh. When was the last time you sat in the driver’s seat of a new car, gripped the steering wheel and felt one iota of excitement?