Driving

Any loser can drive a posh car but it takes real character to drive a crap one. If a sports car is a penis extension, then a rust-bucket screams Big Dick Energy. Even, or especially, if you are a woman. I picked up my own crap car, a 2007-plate Nissan X-trail, five years ago because I moved to the countryside and needed a workhorse to replace my previous car, a Honda CR-V, which I’d bought for £500. Prior to this I had a Volkswagen Type 2, which cost £18,000, but every time you turned the key in the engine you still had to hold your breath.  My Nissan looks like it has just been in a fight – and lost. The heating has gone. The seat covers are ripped. The sunroof jams. The battery light flickers on and off like it’s trying to communicate in Morse code.

If OPM had released an antithetical response to their 2000 magnum opus ‘Heaven Is a Halfpipe’, I’m certain it would have been called ‘Hell Is a British Service Station’. Had this song been made, I think it would have gone a little something like this: ‘If I die before I wake / I’ll spend eternity in a Welcome Break / ’Cause right now on earth, I can’t do jack / I’m at a service station and my tyre’s flat / Now hell would be a Roadchef / With a Costa bacon bap / And hell would be the toilets / After a curry at Watford Gap.’ Admittedly, the lyrics could do with some workshopping, but you get the point.

A few weeks ago, I was driving four of my children to school in my tinny, battered Toyota. We were running late – as per usual – and were speeding – or, rather, chuntering – down a particularly treacherous road. Of all the questionable surfaces in my area of rural Essex, this one is notorious: marked by a huge pothole the size of Snoopy the dog’s head, which bleeds into a smaller, gloopier crater. As I was trying to navigate it, however, a large shadow zoomed into sight in my rear-view mirror. With a jolt and a tremendous bang, it pushed me, my family and my poor, beaten-up Toyota into the crater. Who would be so sadistic as to do such a thing, you may wonder? Was it a vengeful ex? A drunk driver? Another parent running late and pushed from road rage to road insanity?

No one is quite sure who invented the phrase ‘the shock of the new’. It may have been the American writer Harold Rosenberg back in the 1960s. Alternatively, it may have been the late, great Australian intellectual Robert Hughes, who used it as a title for a TV series. Whatever the answer, the phrase aptly captures a very human moment: when you encounter something so strangely and profoundly innovative you experience a visceral, emotional jolt. Those two thinkers applied the phrase to modern art, to the first jarring encounter with impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. But it can also be applied, perhaps more appositely, to the first encounter with remarkable technology. Technology, in the famous vision of Arthur C.

Most of the time cheating is frowned upon, but a quarter of all driving tests in Britain are now taken in automatic cars and apparently that’s fine. The trend is only set to continue, too, as more and more people pretend to care about the environment to take advantage of this loophole and obtain a driving licence without the slightest concept of clutch control. It’s absolutely outrageous, not to mention completely unfair. I spent hundreds of pounds being taught to drive properly, in a manual, only passing on my second attempt, because mastering a gearstick is hard. Copping out and taking your test in a glorified fairground dodgem isn’t just shameful, it’s basically fraud. No matter what it says on your certificate, you can’t drive, you can just steer and brake.

There’s something about motorway service stations that seems to encourage the very worst in human behaviour. They’re places where no doubt usually responsible members of society have long decided that it’s permissible to drop semi-industrial amounts of litter on to the verges, urinate all over the toilet floor and belch with impunity while queuing up for a Whopper at Burger King. For me, it was the full-to-the-brim child’s nappy that someone had left on a chair in the revolting ‘sit down café’ at a services near Preston that made me decide that I would never set foot in a Welcome Break, Moto or Roadchef ever again. I’m lucky; I have a bladder that can tolerate journeys of four or five hours by car. My fiancée, however, is not equipped with such sturdiness.

Ask my friends and family and they’ll tell you: I am an electric car bore. I’m not a gushing enthusiast. I’m more the negative kind of EV dullard. I can’t stop telling people about the horror of driving these wretched things. I'm really not like this about other subjects, or indeed about life. I’m generally pretty positive and optimistic. But I have an EV. I rely on it to get me from A to B, at all hours, in all weather conditions, and perhaps, heaven forbid, even at short notice. You might not be surprised to hear that my electric car is sorely deficient in doing all these things. Let’s start at the dreaded beginning. I came upon my EV through the company car scheme at work.

There were a couple of moments where this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed might’ve been a little dicey. Day three of the four-day extravaganza, on Saturday, was cancelled due to 50mph winds. That may not sound all that alarming, but the ‘central feature’ at the Festival of Speed amounted to nearly 100 tonnes of steel sculpture soaring eight storeys over Goodwood House – seat of the Duke of Richmond since the 17th century – with typically several thousand petrolheads picnicking below. It also included six valuable Porsches hovering just below the clouds, and with the public told to stay away there was still every chance His Grace might suffer a Blaupunkt 962 stuck in his roof. The steel sculpture over Goodwood House [PA] The Goodwood hillclimb takes place on a 1.

My year of motoring tourism didn’t begin auspiciously. Early on the morning of New Year’s Eve, in downtown Dieppe, I looked out of the window of our rented apartment with its magnificent view of the Église Saint-Jacques, painted by the likes of Pissarro and Sickert, and noticed that our car had disappeared.  What followed over the next three hours was a journey of discovery – of the government offices and gendarmeries of the historic maritime town (on foot, in the rain), by which process I was eventually informed that my car was now residing in a secure pound on an industrial estate some five kilometres out of town.  I tried to get a taxi there. Eventually I found a rank by the harbour with three cabs, but they were driverless. I rang the number on one of them.

As a motorcyclist, I’m used to hearing complaints about loud exhausts. Plenty of bikers revel in the roar of their motor – after all, a powerful engine is one of the main appeals of motorbiking. But for anyone living near a busy road, the sound of revving can be thoroughly stressful. Most people who spend time in towns or cities will have jumped at the distinctive noise of a tailpipe backfire, a couple of short explosive bursts that can sound like gunshots, or the drone of a clearly illegal exhaust note. The idea that someone has modified their car or motorbike to give the rest of us a fright is downright infuriating. One suspects that it is mostly a young male thing: adolescent drivers shouting ‘look at me!’ in the most juvenile way.

The Volkswagen ID Buzz is a pretty car, though so innocent-seeming you would forgive it anything. It succeeds the equally pretty T2 campervan, the Betty Boop of 1950s vehicles. The T2 was so convincing – cars, like everything, vary in charisma – it is one of the most famous vehicles in the world, so much so that I can’t think of one without seeing Don Draper’s face. Iconic is a stupid word, but the T2 was iconic, and in testament you will pay £20,000 for the bones of one, though you shouldn’t. I should have waited for Exeter and topped up at Bristol, as the delivery driver counselled, but I wanted a McDonald’s as much as you can ever want a McDonald’s But life is renewal, and here is the Buzz, which charms me. (I wonder if the name is supposed to invoke insect life.

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.