There seemed to be a disproportionate amount of broken down cars strewn along the A14, leading me to do that mental ‘there but for the grace of Bosch go I’ thing in the hope that it’d prevent me from joining them. Not all of these were the usual 15 year old econoboxes either – a new Jaguar XF seemed to have succumbed to an attack of the vapours in solidarity with its cheaper four wheeled brethren. This situation connected with the knowledge that I had a fresh copy of Octane magazine sitting at home waiting to be read, and left me with the sense of a gap when it comes to life experiences with everyday cars.

It’s easy to find beautifully penned missives about the latest metal on the market, coming from the perspective of a factory fresh loan for the week. We’re also well catered for when it comes to the classics, with plenty of lovingly detailed roadtrips in prime examples of top-flight auction candidates. What about the rest of us though? Where’s our voice? Who speaks out for the bangers, the stopgaps, and the ‘cherished but crap’ cohort?

What if we were to collaborate on a blog that trod the middle ground? I’m thinking in terms of a series of contributions that treat our beloved old nails with the reverence usually reserved for heavenly chariots made of unobtanium and unicorn hooves.  The best they could normally hope for is a point by point lowdown buried twelve pages deep in the dusty archives of a consumer site, and I think they deserve better. What about a few hundred words at a time talking about how it felt to live with a car that, by most measures, most people wouldn’t look twice at? That old Citroen might have been a nail, but it was your nail and you cared for it even though it didn’t show you any loyalty in return.

Stories of real cars in the real world, told lovingly by real people? How about it?

I’m an avid Top Gear fan, and by avid I mean I can provide a voiceover to more or less any episode from the last 15 series since the 2002 relaunch. I never miss an oportunity to watch a repeated favourite, and have often thought that this programme alone justifies my license fee. The more observant among you will be bouncing in your chairs and pointing out that we’re now on series 16 so I’ve missed one – HA!, so much for avid! Not so, and that’s where we begin.

There are plenty of pro/anti TG arguments floating around, many of them not worth the pixels they’re displayed on, but there’s a growing undercurrent among hardcore fans along the lines of ‘it’s not like it used to be’. This is usually a hipster-esque tactic to tell everyone you were there first and thereby attempt to gain some sort of geeky high ground, but it’s rare that cogent and persuasive examples are provided. Tonight’s episode of TG finally brought forth a perfect illustration of where I believe things are going wrong.

Lets look at a classic car challenge from the TG archives – a bona-fide classic and on my ‘must watch’ list when perusing Dave: Italian supercars for less than £10k

Now, this was a gem. We’d all wondered if buying a supercar for Mondeo money was actually possible or just the preserve of pub bores. The lads ended up with a Lamborghini Urraco, a Ferrari 308 GT4 and a not entirely kosher Maserati Merak, and set about a series of everyday challenges:

• Change the oil and plugs
• Drive a set distance on a fixed amount of fuel, avoiding motorways
• A lap of a racing track against a boring modern hatchback
• A dyno test to see how much power had escaped from each car over time
• An attempt to parallel park in a town centre
• Try to get the lowest insurance quote
• Experience the least number of breakdowns

This was a fantastic opportunity for petrolheads to live out their idle ownership fantasies whilst avoiding the associated chaos. We really wanted the cars to work, and were entertained when they refused to do so despite the best efforts of the presenters. It boiled down to three mates larking about in ill-advised Italian nightmares, and having exactly the sort of fun any of us would experience in trying to make a good job out of an obviously bad one. Most of the classic TG cheap car challenges fell into this mould, with the focus resting on how cars and petrolheads gel, and the experiences that arise naturally from doing so.

Now lets look at the cheap car challenge in this episode – buying BWM E30 convertibles, specifically the 325. The challenges this time were

• Drive a lap of the track, setting a time relative to the car’s modern equivalent
• Ask car thieves to break into them
• Swab them for bodily substances
• Fill them with helium to see if your voice goes funny
• Get them examined by the BMW owners club to ascertain the cost of a full restoration
• Attempt to use them in a stunt display that ends in a slapstick crash after ten seconds

It’s pretty clear where things are going astray. The cars aren’t important, and play second fiddle to gags that simply aren’t funny. There’s none of the wonderful triumph (or not) in the face of adversity that we know and love, and it feels like the interplay between the presenters is a device to lead to the next set-piece. The E30 is considered to be a great drivers car and one that I’m sure many viewers would love to see driven properly, but instead we got slapstick and cheap laughs.

It’s not the first time this series that we’ve seen this. The murdered Albanian, the plummeting VW Beetle, the fatuous ‘serious’ road test of the Yeti that’s now stretching the joke way too far. Even the news features feel less like a bunch of mates talking shop, and more like out of season filler for Comedy Central. We don’t care about any of that nonsense, but we DO care about feeling like those three guys on screen are just like us where we get together and swap stories about our latest nightmarish acquisition.

Top Gear has protected its position for years by explaining that it’s an entertainment show that happens to be about cars, and that was a shrewd move in the burgeoning anti-car climate we’ve suffered recently. The thing is, we all knew it was really a programme about cars that was only entertaining because it’s hard not to be entertained by watching people indulging in their passion, for better or worse. I have the horrible feeling that the boys are now buying into this line a bit too much, and fancy themselves as comedy writers… which they’re not. Top Gear may attract a serious number of people who simply watch it to be entertained, but if the petrolheads are turned off, and consequently DO turn off, then the remainder might not be as large as they’d hope.

The message is simple. Be yourselves, enjoy the cars and let the humour flow from that. It’s one thing to hold up a card saying BRAKE at the end of a straight, but another entirely to need one saying LAUGH at the end of a segment.

…..

Ok, so everyone still here has some interest in engineering, good. I suspect the people who just ran for it might well end up as the subject of this post. We’ll see.

Lets visualise one corner of a simple car suspension system. You have the car body at the top and an axle at the bottom, to which the wheels are affixed. Inbetween these you’ll have a coil spring, usually made of steel. This spring holds the car above the road, compresses over the bumps, and returns the whole affair to the correct height afterwards. Running either through or next to this spring you’ll have a damper, which is essentially a tube full of squishable stuff and a series of baffles to allow it to slosh around at a controlled rate. This soaks up the bumps in conjunction with the springs, and affects how smoothly the car rides by controlling the impacts from the road surface. You may also have an anti-roll bar, which is a long bent piece of metal that’s bolted to the suspension on each side of the axle and fixed with a pivot in the middle of the car. When one wheel takes a big upwards hit, this bar bends and lifts the other wheel by a lesser degree to reduce body roll. Quite barbaric when you think about it.

Ok, so lets see how we might make this better. We can’t do much with the dampers because we already have some slick technology there in the form of self levelling systems, magneto-rheological control mechanisms, etc. We’ll leave those for the moment. The coil springs are quite heavy and also mounted relatively high up, so they raise the car’s centre of gravity in addition to weighing us down. We’ve had coiled springs since around the 15th century,  so they’re about due for an overhaul – lets start by making them out of a lighter material that’s just as strong, and situating them lower down. If we’re careful with our choice of material they may even outlast the original steel coils. I reckon something like a fibre and epoxy composite might work really nicely here, as that’ll be very strong but also light. We can probably mess about with the shape so that it takes up far less room than a coil too. That anti-roll bar is a bit basic as well – the mounting bushes are always a weak spot and the bar can suffer fatigue. It’s be really nice if we could find a way to create an anti-roll effect from our new spring composite suspension, so we can either get rid of the bar or fit a much lighter one that has to work less.

Sounds like a good job. We’ve lowered our centre of gravity, toughened and lightened some major components for a longer lifespan and a big weight saving, made further components unnecessary, and saved space within the bodywork for other stuff. What we’ve done is to invent the composite transverse leaf spring… just as you’d find in a modern Corvette.

Now you see where this is going, and why it’s just as well the pub experts left at the start. They’re suffering from a condition I call Clarkson’s Cerebralitis – this is a terrible state of affairs where people listen to Jeremy’s hyperbolic and entertaining statements about a subject, take them as gospel and repeat them to all and sundry as fact. Now, I don’t believe for one minute that Grand Poobah Clarkson understands the complexities of car suspension, but I bet he knows eenough to appreciate that the ‘ox cart’ jibes at the Corvette aren’t really anywhere near the truth. What he’s doing is winding up the fanboys and having a bit of fun with Chevrolet, and that’s all well and good.

Unfortunately we live in a Wikipedia world where checking the facts is someone elses problem. I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve heard Corvettes compared to agricultural machinery from people who couldn’t actually point out the spring if they saw the chassis stripped down, and that’s getting annoying. What worries me even more is that some writers in car magazines have started to use the same analogy, and I’m not sure they’re in a position to assume the readers will see it as humour. This would imply that they too think it’s true, but I’d rather not consider that option.

In short, I have no real love of the Corvette (except possibly some of the big block late ’60s models) but I do appreciate that it has a lot of clever technology and modern features on board. Slating it because of a misplaced understanding of how it handles the rough stuff is like criticising Jean Paul Gaultier for designing clothes because we had that old-hat technology when we were cavemen.

However, a conversation I just overheard on Radio has forced my hand somewhat. One of the aforementioned pop-eyed, patchouli drenched hedgemongers was holding court on the subject of road salting. Apparently the sheer amount of salt we’ve had to use over the last two winters has had a catastrophic effect on roadside trees. His argument hinged on the idea that higher salt concentrations in the soil resulting from road salting prevent the trees from drawing water up because it affects the process of osmosis. Trees are dying, people!

Only as far as I can see, they’re not. I live in the suburbs, travel across the city daily to the other suburbs on the opposite side and make frequent trips across the county, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a dead roadside tree. Our understanding of osmosis is something we take for granted, but there are still differences in opinion over the precise mechanism relating to trees.. or potentially, to the combination of mechanisms. If this was such an issue, why haven’t we heard of it before?

Oh right, yes – he says that apparently there’s some research in America to suggest that road salt is killing trees so we need to sit up and listen. He doesn’t know why other countries that suffer far more snow than us still appear to have trees, nor does he know what the range of alternatives to salt are, how much they might cost, or why we haven’t looked into them so far. All mere details though – we can’t risk losing our trees and so we need to take (some as yet undefined) action right now! As an additional gambit, he revealed that the trend in cold winters is likely to continue. Even the MET office won’t make predictions like that, so I’m wondering what dark and shadowy connections this man has. He then unveiled his chief weapon in the fight against salt – the National Tree Council!

Don’t entertain visions of a parliament populated entirely by wooden and largely immobile lumps that spend a large proportion of the year asleep, because we already have one of those. Instead, picture a public militia made from eight thousand volunteer tree officers spanning the country, to whom you can report any sightings of poorly trees. I imagine that upon receiving such a call they’d rock up with their tree protection kit, comprised of a flask of organic lentil soup, a series of ribbons to tie to prominent branches, and enough stick-on warts for everyone. What happens then is anyone’s guess, and you’re welcome to run with it in the privacy of your own imaginations.

Anyway, Radio 4, with its usual knack of stringing relevent items together, then chose to interview a horticultural type from somewhere in Birmngham about the effect of winter on trees. His response was that cold winters are generally great for trees because they give them a much needed chance to relax and gird their leafy loins for the following spring. Putting all of these variables together, I can only assume that the optimum course of tree hugging action would be to

• Hope for longer, colder winters
• Stop salting the road

Brilliant. The Nobel prize beckons.

We’ll just sweep the economic crashes, frozen pensioners and the increase in fatalities caused by collisions with the same trees we were trying to save under the fairtrade hessian peace carpet.

I’m a multi-instrumentalist,  and have always believed that musicians should have very diverse musical tastes in order to avoid falling into predictable ruts. You don’t have to necessarily like everything, but just be prepared to listen and see what you can learn. Consequently I have a large and varied collection of music and so I’m able to switch between hugely differing soundtracks on my daily commute. The typical process involves grabbing the autochanger caddy and then spending 15 minutes umm-ing and ahh-ing over the CD racks until I have six discs ready to go. These will typically fall into compatible genres unless I’m trying out new albums, so are a perfect basis for an experiment.

I’ve discovered that the music I take on the road has a dramatic effect on the way I drive and respond to other road users. Nine Inch Nails will tend to increase my average speed by at least 5 miles per hour.. and my peak vocal volume when informing other drivers of their incompetence by around 250%. Metallica tends to create a similar drift in speed but without the supporting decrease in tolerance. This tends to be the case for most of the harder edge of rock, metal and industrial, although I’ve noticed that when it becomes too frantic the effect tails off rapidly; Ministry should have me breaking the sound barrier on the ring road, but curiously results in no real change at all.

Shifting over to dance and electronica generally doesn’t change my speed, but does seem to result in a smoother drive – I attribute this to the consistency of the beat, and maintain that Underworld’s ‘Dirty Epic’ will increase your fuel economy by at least five percent. Again, the ‘more speed = less effect’ rule holds true, with anything by Pendulum or the first Prodigy album hitting BPM levels that you subconsciously know will leave you behind if you try to match the pace. This further strengthens my belief that the burberry crowd only run their stereos at maximum for attention, as they listen to extremely fast music but still drive like knobs.

The quickest way to turn me into a saint on the road is to load the stereo with quality acoustic, ambient or trip hop CDs, give me a nice hot cup of tea and then send me off into the night. Suzanne Vega, Heather Nova, Richard Thompson and the like leave me floating in my own little mobile oasis of calm. Ambient works the same way, although it has to be smooth and consistent; Future Sound of London’s ‘ISDN’ works very well because it sets up a series of very simple grooves that verge on hypnotic, but ‘Dead Cities’ is schizophrenic and so demands constant attention. Classical is a mixed bag because it’s so varied, but I find the problem is more with finding a car stereo that can handle the dynamic range and still fall within my budget. Elgar’s Enigma variations is the classical equivalent of Dead Cities for me, as I discovered when Classic FM played the entire work in one go a few weeks ago – it constantly catches me out as it changes, and even though it’s generally pretty mellow those dynamics don’t make for a relaxing ride. However, Rob Dougan’s ‘Clubbed To Death’ which uses sections of the first movement of Elgar’s work, falls instantly into the mellow camp. Strange, eh?

This all raises some interesting implications. Do the same rules apply to all, and if so what are the consequences? If driving under the influence of Megadeth leads to more speeding offences, how long until we’re not allowed to do so? Should we expect mandatory radio usage in roadworks where councils feed us a stream of whalesong to stop us noticing how much congestion they’re creating? Might insurance companies include questions concerning your musical taste and adjust your premium accordingly?

I always recommend the ‘mellow but uplifting’ route myself, and so to promote a spirit of unity among the nation’s harassed motorists I offer my recommendation for a chilled out 6 disc selection:

• Rob Dougan – Furious Angels
• Kirsty Hawkshaw – O<U>T
• The Album Leaf – In a Safe Place
• Future Sound of London – ISDN
• Lamb – Between Darkness and Wonder
• Underworld – Dubnobasswithmyheadman

That’s not to say it doesn’t sound good, because it does – it’s not particularly characterful but it does have a rough edged rumbly charm, coupled with a pleasant turbocharged descant when you give it the beans. It’s just that you wouldn’t be able to pick it blindfolded from a lineup, which is perhaps to be expected with the proliferation of shared platform engineering from which this particular car sprang. It’s basically a functional four-pot with a party trick, and that’s fine.  This set me thinking about the truly great engine sounds from history, and it occurred to me that they were all flawed in a very specific way.

When you’re attempting to explain what makes a car worth having, you tend to look at how well the various parts work. We want the chassis to ride well but still react quickly under pressure. We want the steering to be sharp and communicative but remain stable when you’re not pushing on. When we talk about engines we want them to be smooth, efficient, powerful, and responsive – all good traits – but then we also want a characterful engine note. When you think about it, that character usually implies something not quite perfect – whether it’s the off-beat grumble of a classic V8 or the hollow woofle of a flat six, these are sounds that are incompatible with the technological ideal. A perfectly efficient engine would make no noise at all, as noise is a negative side effect of combustion and represents lost energy. The ‘perfect’ engine would remain stationary under power, run cold, convert every drop of fuel into motion, and be silent. I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

When you think about it, we like to feel the motion of the engine because it offers subliminal feedback on the state of play under the bonnet. We use the exhaust note as both a guide and a reward when stretching further into the red, and the heat stops our fingers dropping off in December. What we demand from an engine, then, is imperfection. Drive a Toyota Camry for an example of an engine that is closer to perfect by these measures than almost all of the alternatives, and you’ll understand why this is no bad thing. I know that my engine has rough and smooth days, and that the variety of demands for power from countless hidden subsystems mean that even turning on the heated rear screen may affect the performance in some infinitessimal way. I know that a cold day will raise a different reaction from the turbo to a hot day, and that it’s more likely to be grumbly outside the bottom end of the powerband if it’s particularly damp. These are flaws, yes, but knowing them and finding ways to work with them is part of the joy of driving the car.

So we’re ok with the idea of imperfection, but what deviations tick all the boxes? The common wisdom is that a classic V8 represents the holy grail of rackets, and I find that hard to disagree with – the sound of a massive blown mill popping and belching under violent compression is both magnificent and a little bit frightening, and so it should be to prevent the unwary from taking liberties. Some point to the wailing V6 units bestowed upon Alfas of old – again, good call. The humble inline four – as is mine – gets short shrift for being characterless and dull.

Really?

Have you ever heard a BDA equipped Escort yowling through a night-time rally stage at full chat? In fact, sticking with the theme of rally, most of the all-time classic noises were emitted from just four pots. The Lancia Delta, Ford RS200, Peugeot 206 T16, Renault R5 Turbo, Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Evo all made do with four-bangers. Only the Metro 6R4 (V6) and Audi Quattro (Inline 5)  bucked the trend. Ok, so the great Ferrari V8s and V12s were fantastic, Lamborghini V12s are raucous and mildly insane and Porsche flat sixes are odd but strangely addictive, but I think some of the most evocative, and accessible, noises in motoring have come from the humble four.

Oh, partway through the last paragraph something else occurred to me. BMW make a modern V8 that’s slick and punchy without grumbling, and a brilliant inline 3 litre six that’s smoother than a greased weasel and won’t pierce your eardrums above 4000 revs. They take the things we want, and couple them effortlessly with the things we need. I’m not sure anyone else does.

Mud plugging monsters such as the Unimog, the Viking and anything by Oshkosh are cool because they’re so brutal and single minded, but the more road going variety seem to be conspicuously out-of-place – more so as they adopt a widening range of shiny trinkets. There’s one vehicle that until recently seemed to buck this trend, and that’s the humble Land Rover Defender. It may be ugly and extremely spartan inside but it has character and grit and that’s something I always appreciate.

As as result I was extremely happy to be given the chance to take one of these beasties off road at All Terrain Services‘ training centre in Rutland. This is a custom made facility sharing land with a golf club in this tiny county to the east of Leicestershire, catering for fun stuff as well as more serious driver training. Even the approach along a very broken driveway suggests that one is not in for a gentle ride – something the assorted golfists would doubtless find amusing, although their choice of apparel always led me to question their sense of humour anyway, but I digress.

The unmistakable sound of a torquey diesel mated to a stone age powertrain heralds the arrival of our extremely genial trainer Gilly, piloting a white Defender 110 – the stalwart of the off road scene, and the prime choice for anyone who needs to lug sheep up 45 degree hills. Jumping in reveals that this one has leather seats – oh, such excess – but in all other respects is a fine example of the solid, trusty, rough-as-a-badger’s-bum Landie we’ve come to know and love. A quick trundle up the access path and we’re stationary in a field facing a wide array of slightly worrying hills, banks and bombholes. Gilly runs through the function of the low/high range shifter with its all conquering diff lock position, explains a little about how the power transfer works, drops it into low range and then sets off towards the nearest bank.. and straight up it at a troubling angle. As the axles twist, the wheels spin in mid-air, and we go precisely nowhere Gilly suggests that we try the diff lock. A quick tap sideways on the magical shift lever results in a solid THUNK from somewhere amidships, and all of a sudden we’re doing a creditable impression of a mountain goat, up and over the edge. With this setting engaged the power is divided 50/50 between the front and rear axles, so you’ll always have at least one wheel powered on each.

The engine is running at relatively high revs even though we’re only trundling at a snails pace – such is the wonder of low range – so Gilly backs off, hauls the wheel around and trundles towards what can only be described as the edge of the world. Where one would expect to see a slow roll-off into a dip there is precisely nothing. I feel it impolite to point this out, so just double check my seatbelt and try to think of some good last words. Gilly suddenly remembers to ask if she’s mentioned ‘thumbs up’, and holds both of hers aloft to reveal that one is at a noticeably different angle to the other. This, she says, is  a warning to keep them outside of the steering wheel in case the vehicle hits an obstruction and the wheel is wrenched from your grip. Ah.

Fortunately (or not, as the case may turn out to be) there’s little time to reflect on this as we’re now about to plunge into oblivion. Only it doesn’t quite work out like that. Gilly has her feet off the pedals and our Landie is simply crawling forwards over the edge with the speed and force of continental drift. As the wheels hook over, the beast just keeps rolling using its own engine braking to take us safely down to the bottom. With little time to consider this, Gilly builds the revs back up and we begin the scramble up the other side of the hole in which we’ve found ourselves.. which is at least the equal of the slope we’ve just tackled. It’s as if the world has suddenly rotated around to leave us on the flat. This is a serious piece of kit and shows absolutely no sign of being flustered or stressed – I doubt I could even climb up this slope. Gilly mentions that a colleague likes the maxim ‘if you can’t walk it, don’t drive it’ but she gleefully reveals that she doesn’t agree, and suddenly jams on the brakes.

We’re now stopped halfway up a hill and the engine has stalled. Believe me, it took some doing as well – torque is not in short supply here. Gilly wanted to demonstrate how to get out of a hill stall while we had the chance; she stomps on the footbrake (‘the handbrake won’t hold two tons on just the back wheels, so we don’t trust it’), engages reverse, releases the clutch and brake so we’re held stationary in gear and then fires up the ignition. With no fuss whatsoever we’re now gently bimbling backwards at the same rate at which we climbed. Gilly waits until we’re partly up the other slope to get the weight behind the direction of travel, grabs first and then guns it up the hill again and out into bright sunlight. By now I’m absolutely sold on this thing. It may be agricultural and have fewer home comforts than Guantanamo Bay, but the way it makes absolute mincemeat of amazing terrain without so much as a raised eyebrow simply beggars belief. I want a go.

The driving position is surprisingly comfortable, with a great view of that bluff bonnet festooned with stamped out kick plates. It’s a bit of a stretch to the gearstick, and the feel of the shift has more in common with a broomstick, but no matter. Brake, clutch, low range, first gear, ignition, handbrake off, find the biting point and slowly release the brake – the torque in this gear range sets us off nice and smoothly with no need to use the throttle. Gilly starts to call out directions using the various markers strung around the course as guides, and we’re soon ducking and diving, scrambling up mind boggling inclines, skirting banks at angles that suggest we’re about to fall over sideways and generally thumbing our noses at physics. We also get to try a few little set pieces, such as a precise scramble across a pair of log rails designed to mimic a makeshift canyon crossing and a trek along a gully cut with alternating left and right potholes designed to twist the axles in opposite directions. Once the diff lock is engaged, we might as well be pulling into the driveway after a gentle cruise home – our trusty steed simply plods along oblivious to the chaos below its wheels.

All too soon, the session is over. I clamber down out of the 110, take a good step back and feel I’m seeing it with a new pair of eyes. This is truly the king of off roaders – a noble, honest servant with a placid demeanor, yet fire in its belly and balls of steel. It’s a truly magnificent creature and I now fully understand why you’d want to own one despite its apparent shortcomings.

The simple truth is that those shortcomings are only an issue if you try to make it do something it simply wasn’t designed to do. This is not a shopping car, it wasn’t built to take the kids to school, and it won’t enjoy a 300 mile motorway trek on the way to your holiday home. You’d be absolutely barking to have one of these as your daily driver because the harshness will drive you spare. However, if you find yourself stuck out in inhospitable terrain and you can request one vehicle to trek out and carry you back to safety, you’d be mad to hope for anything else. The humble Land Rover isn’t just a vehicle – it’s a calling, capable of affirming your life and then saving it ten minutes later when you’ve run out of ideas.

Oh, and I also understand now why Landie fanciers poke such scorn at soft roaders. To paraphrase the Cat from Red Dwarf – ‘you either got it, or you don’t.. and you guys.. you ain’t even close’

I remember a couple of years ago, helping a friend to change a blown main beam bulb in his car and having an absolute pig of a time. You couldn’t possibly get your hand in there because of a series of important hoses, so the only answer seemed to be to take the entire light unit out.. only you couldn’t easily do that either because the lower screws were obcured by the aforementioned hoses and part of the wiring loom. If you did manage to get the light out you’d realise it would be completely out of alignment when you put it back in because it used the mounting screws to adjust the aim. I remember a similar feature on a TV show where an AA man was called in to change the bulb on a particular Megane and took almost three quarters of an hour to do it. You could take it back to the garage, but then you’d be paying the garage labour rate and that’ll turn out to be a very expensive bulb change.

We’ve probably all come across bulbs like this, not to mention inaccessable oil filters, hard to reach spark plugs, difficult hoses and the like. Basuically the sort of things you might reasonably expect to change more than once throughout the life of the car. The cynic would suggest that car companies would like you to go back to them for these jobs because they take their hourly rate for all work, no matter how laborious. Simple + drawn out = easy money. At one time I’d have agreed, but I think a lot of the blame should be apportioned differently because the character of the nation is changing. We used to be a country of fixers, known for our resourcefulness – witness any old copy of The Gadget Annual from the 50s, packed with tips on how to repair and build things around the house – but now we simply moan and throw things away. This plays right into the hands of the service departments and the hateful ‘extended warranty’ brigade, who know that they don’t have to create a product serviceable through the long term because we tend to treat things as disposable.

Cars though.. how many people do you know who treat their car as a white good, chucking it away after three years once it requires extra pesky paperwork? Unless you have an Al somewhere in your surname and a holiday home in Abu Dhabi, probably not many. The car is the second most expensive item most people will buy, and you’d be gutted if you had to rebuild half your house if a lightbulb blew in the kitchen.

The problem is that we’ve downed spanners in order to become them instead, and large companies know this. Car makers are used to modularity in vehicles nowadays, and so you’d imagine that it would be possible to design parts that cen be reused in multiple places with a minimum of fuss. I’m sure it is, only what would be the point? We’ll still buy the things because we don’t really have much choice – the major manufacturers form what Scott Adams would term a Confuseopoly, or a group of companies who quietly collude to keep the market divided among them by making it as hard as possible to understand what they do or how their products work. In all honesty it doesn’t really matter if we do pick ourselves up and head for the toolbox – what matters is that we’re of the mindset where we might, as that may be enough of a threat.

I was wondering what would happen if a car company said ‘ok, we’ve built this car specifically to be serviceable. It drives as well as any of our others, it looks good, it’s practical and reliable, but when you want us to repair something the labour costs and disruption to you will be minimal because you don’t want the hassle and expense, and we don’t want the bad feeling. Consequently we’ve made sure all the major user serviceable parts are easy to reach, and we’ve used parts that we know will last for the rest.’

They’d lose money in servicing, yes, but I get the feeling they’d more than make up for that in sales, both new and used (as the cars would hold their value for longer because of their perceived longevity). The brand would gain the associations of fair play and honesty, and the owner would feel as if their purchase was more an investment than a financial disaster waiting to happen. This approach has been tried and tested for years with high quality watches where they’re designed to be owned, maintained and passed on, and I’d love to think that someone like Jaguar would choose to adopt these values; this would bring back the promise of well cared-for historic big cats for future generations to appreciate.

Thing is we’re fickle. We’ll ooh and ahh over the pretty shinies instead of the honest workhorses, despite their relative fragility and lack of stamina. That’s probably why the first company to do this will be a joyless shopping box builder from the far east with nothing to lose in terms of desirability, and a great concept will be lost forever. We get what we deserve.

When I picked up the Octavia RS at the top of the page I was pleased to see that the back tyres were nearly new, the spare was just as good and the front tyres only had a couple of hundred miles on them. Decent tyres for this thing run at about a hundred quid per corner so it’s not an expense you want on top of the purchase. The tyres fitted to the front were a brand and model I hadn’t heard of before – Nankang NS-2 – although I was informed that they’re made by Yokohama. They certainly appeared to have a performance oriented tread pattern and seemed impressively grippy on the trip home.

Because I’m the naturally curious sort I decided to have a quick look around the internet to see if people had posted any reviews of them, and found a lot of surprisingly positive comments. Some of these originated in german performance car magazines, where they reported that the NS-2 had grip levels very nearly as high as the benchmark Toyos or Contis. Members of various car forums reported astonishing levels of grip, quiet running and a very hard-wearing compond. Great, I thought, might be worth looking out for theese when replacement time arrives.

Then I drove them in the wet.

Have you ever seen a dog trying to do a full speed u-turn on a lino floor? Dunk its paws into butter then put the lino on a hill and you’d be close to recreating the feel of an NS-2 on a soggy roundabout. These tyres have no lateral grip whatsoever in the wet and will suddenly break traction with a sickening lurch at 20mph. Straight line grip isn’t much better, leaving you driving onto roundabouts like a nonagenarian librarian in case you spin up both wheels and end up sitting halfway across the lane like a slightly embarrassed pudding. Only yesterday I left a wet roundabout (forwards, fortunately..) at around 30mph, accelerated up through third gear and as I approached 4000 revs both wheels started to scrabble along in a straight line. If I might have to brake in a hurry I need to leave more space than I would in a teensy, non-ABS citycar running on skinny 14s.

I’m not suite sure under what conditions the magazines run their tests, or what sort of superhuman drivers exist on your average car forum, but I can guarantee that nothing I could do to manage those NS-2s in the rain made the slightest bit of difference. The simple fact is that they quietly toss a coin for every metre you travel at over 20mph and the moment it comes up tails they’ll start looking out for a hedge. I have no doubt that under some circumstances, some decent budget brands can be more than appropriate for the vehicle they end up on and the circumstances under which it’s driven. If you have anything more than a motorised eggwhisk under then bonnet however, or see corners as a fun way of getting to the next fast bit, you’re better off either spending the extra or just breaking your own legs in the comfort of your own home to save time later

Thus ends the grump. If anyone has any all-weather recommendations based on personal experience for tyres to fit 205/50 x17 W then I’d be interested to hear them.

This is a rat rod..

This is NOT a rat rod..

You can’t pick ‘n’ mix cool. Now stop being silly.