Life On Cars highlights of 2013

2013’s been a petrolhead year defined largely by three words for me – Classic Car Weekly.

Thanks largely to landing my dream job in full-time motoring journalism back in April, most of the motoring experiences Life On Cars has encountered have involved blasting into the past in cars which are usually older than I am. This year’s been an incredible automotive adventure, taking me everywhere from the Scottish Highlands to the southern coast of Spain in search of classic car stories. I can reveal, however, that the issue which got Life On Cars readers talking the most this year was rooted firmly in this blog’s home in the North West; the ongoing saga of whether the Woodvale Rally will ever return to RAF Woodvale.

Some of the highlights from a year peppered with petrolhead moments you might be familiar with – others, unless you’re a regular reader of Classic Car Weekly, you probably won’t be. Here are ten of the moments I’m not going to forget in a hurry…

1) Discovering it’s never too cold to drive with the roof down

January is normally a time for wrapping up warm, snuggling up on the sofa and nudging the thermostat into firmly toasty territory. It definitely isn’t the time for heading into a totally deserted corner of the North Wales countryside and dropping the roof on a (much-missed) Mazda MX-5. The temperature, indicating by the mate’s Saab 9-3 following closely behind, was a chilly -1 degrees Celsius.

Not that I cared, because the MX-5 on those roads was a blast. If you’ve got a convertible, wrap up warm, drop the hood, and get out there!

2) Blasting across the New Forest in a Jaguar XK150

Considering it was only my second day at Classic Car Weekly, this was definitely the sort of motoring journalism small boys dream of – a classic Jaguar with lines so fluid you could almost drink them, empty roads to enjoy it on and an incredibly beautiful bit of England to soak up at the same time.

To be honest, I was expecting another Jaguar I drove that same afternoon – the first E-type I’d ever experienced from behind the wheel – to be the highlight, but it was the simpler charms of the older XK I’ll never forget. The howl of the XK straight-six as I nailed it through the New Forest is something that’ll stay with me forever.

3) Listening to this engine

 

Regular readers will already know I’m well acquainted with the charms of the MG BGT. You might also know that – thanks to a childhood spent in the company of old Range Rovers – that I’ll never get tired of listening to the lumbering burble of a Rover V8 engine.

Seeing and hearing the two in the same package for the first time, however, was a treat for the eyeballs and eardrums alike. Hit play on this short video I made, and see what I mean…

4) Finding out the only way is Up!

An ongoing joke at Classic Car Weekly is that I’ve driven the VW Up pool car not just more than anyone else, but probably more than I have my own cars this year!

While I found myself behind the wheel of Wolfsburg’s 1.0 litre wonder for all sorts of trips to cover shows in the North West, for ferrying colleagues to the Goodwood Revival and – for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of – for a slightly mad return trip to Cornwall, I’ve always enjoyed the fizzy personality of VW’s smallest offering.

For every moment its lack of outright oomph, its tiny boot and its impossibly small fuel tank frustrated me, there was another when the bark of its three-cylinder engine and entertaining handling proved utterly captivating. Put it this way – it is the sort of city car that doesn’t feel outclassed on the Cat and Fiddle pass.

5) Finally trading up in the repmobile stakes

This time last year, I was lauding the vaguely indestructible qualities of the 1995 Rover 214SEi, which I bought back in 2010 for just £300, and I’ve been treated to more of the same throughout 2013. While it’s gone everywhere from Peterborough and London to Bristol and North Yorkshire without so much of a whisper of breakdown – and with a bit of newfound fame in Classic Car Weekly.

The increasingly noisy transmission whine and the quietly creeping onset of rot, however, showed that after three years the old dog, which I’d only ever bought for smoking around Southport in, was beginning to feel the strain of its new life of shooting across Britain.

After two final missions, visiting Classics On The Green in Watford and the Severn Valley Railway’s classic car day in Kidderminster, I finally traded up to its thirstier-but-faster replacement – a 2001 Ford Mondeo Ghia X.

Finally, I’d put my money where my mouth was and bought the big saloon I’ve always recommended to anyone who’d listen. It’s superb.

 6) Thundering up Blackpool seafront – in a Chevrolet Corvette

If Blackpool is Britain’s answer to Las Vegas, then surely the ideal classic for experiencing the Illuminations is a big, all American classic with a big V8 and an open roof. Cue a 1980 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, even if getting it to the resort meant conquering left-hand-drive first by thundering across the Pennines from Harrogate to get it there.

It might have had an appetite for Esso’s finest and drive up a cold, rainy seafront involved never venturing past 25mph, but it was the most enjoyable bits of motoring I’ve ever done. Raucous, traditional and just a little bit showy – a bit like Blackpool, then!

7) Driving an Aston Martin for the first time

While it might not have been the car I enjoyed driving most in 2013 – take a bow, Suzuki SC100 ‘Whizzkid’ – there is a certain pub brag factor about getting behind the wheel of an Aston Martin for the first time. Particularly if it’s a Timothy Dalton-era V8 which uses its 5.3 litre V8 to play a never-ending game of tug of war with the horizon. After doing my best not to get distracted by the James Bond connotations, I found myself truly enjoying its burly demeanour and its thunderous engine note. 2013 also saw me driving my first Rolls-Royce.

Maybe 2014 will be the year I finally get to pop my Ferrari cherry?

8) Seeing Life On Cars printed in a national publication

 Since its launch way back in 2009, Life On Cars has been limited to this humble motoring blog, a series of online emagazines and a weekly column in The Champion series of newspapers in the north west. Seeing a column from Yours Truly printed in Classic Car Weekly back in August, then, was a particularly proud moment. It’s also been great to continue contributing my views to The Champion on a weekly basis, even if a lot of the time those reflections have been e-mailed in from deepest Cambridgeshire!

9) Dressing up in a silly outfit at the Goodwood Revival

I already knew the Goodwood Revival is an unashamed nostalgia trip into the high-octane era of motor racing in the Fifties and Sixties. What I didn’t know, however, was how much fun it is, or how seriously the period charm gets taken. Luckily, I’d donned my best tweed in a semi-successful attempt to look like a period newspaper reporter, as you can see from the not-at-all disturbing shot, and spent three days lapping up the best-before-1966 feel of it all.

Weirdly, thanks to the rigours of helping to produce a bumper report on the show, I didn’t see a single race during a weekend of historic motorsport, and yet I still fell in love with the event. In fact, the only thing which ruined it slightly was the minority of visitors who chose to turn up in tracksuits and trainers. Ban them!

 10) Finding out Petrolhead is a universal language, wherever you go

Until now, my passion of taking pictures and chatting to people at car shows has been limited largely to the North West, but this year my show visits have spanned the nation – and further afield. By far and away the bit of being a car nut I love most is chatting to people about the classics they own, and finding out why it is they love the cars they do. It’s a passion which car lovers, whether they’re in the Scottish Higlands, the North West, the heart of London or tranquil towns in the West Country, have all shared.

It even works abroad too, as a trip to Barcelona to cover Auto Retro proved. Even if the people there, while fluent in Petrolhead, had virtually no grasp of English. Ooops!

 Look out for more of David Simister’s motoring mishaps in both Classic Car Weekly and The Champion throughout 2014. Life On Cars wishes both of its readers a happy New Year

Vauxhall launches four new special edition models

VAUXHALL has launched new, more lavishly-equipped versions of no less than four of its models.

The company said this week it has launched the new twists on the Corsa, Astra, Astra GTC and Insignia, called simply the Limited Edition versions, which include up to £2,000 worth of what were previously optional extras as standard.

The cheapest version, based on the Corsa, has a starting price of £8,995. To find out more about the Limited Edition range go to www.vauxhall.co.uk

Seven cars shortlisted for European Car of the Year 2014

SEVEN very different cars have all been shortlisted in a contest to find Europe’s favourite automotive arrival from the past year.

Judges of the European Car of the Year award confirmed this week the Citroen C4 Picasso, Mazda3, Peugeot 308 and Skoda Octavia, which are all family-friendly and focused on value, would be going up against the eco-orientated BMW i3 and Tesla S and the luxurious new Mercedes-Benz S Class.

The winner will be announced at the Geneva Motor Show in March.

Aston Martin and AMG Mercedes confirm engines agreement

ASTON MARTIN has signed an agreement with Mercedes which will see the British sports car using the German firm’s engines in years to come.

The company this week formalised a deal which will see it collaborate with AMG, Mercedes’ official tuning and motorsport division, to bring new V8s to the next generation of Aston’s sports cars.

It ends the company’s reliance on the current Ford-developed V12 and the Jaguar-sourced V8.

What car would Father Christmas drive?

AN AD in last week’s Southport Champion apparently solved a motoring mystery. When the job gets too tough for reindeer, Santa uses an Isuzu D-MAX!

Plugs for Japanese pick-up trucks aside, the question of what the world’s best known delivery man would opt for as his choice of wheels is a surprisingly tricky one to call. In fact, the topic occupied a surprising amount of time with my colleagues at the Classic Car WeeklyChristmas dinner the other day. Yep, I know we should get out more.

Personally, I reckon it’s still open to debate. Largely because I doubt Father Christmas would use any form of motorised transport – not even something as surefooted and spacious as the aforementioned D-MAX – for the job of dispatching all the ponies and Sony Xbox Ones to all the boys and girls who’ve been nice and enough coal to heat Sheffield for a month to all the ones who’ve been naughty.

If Father Christmas actually issued Rudolph and his mates their P45s and did his rounds next Tuesday night with a car, said vehicle would have to have Antonov-rivalling levels of room inside for all the presents, and still somehow be light enough to park on a snowy roof without either crashing through the slate tiles onto the mince pies simmering below or sliding off altogether, falling into the street below and landing The Champion the festive scoop of the century. 

I reckon, boys and girls, that the prestigious job of delivering all the presents can only be done using a dozen reindeer and a sleigh endowed with a TARDIS-esque quality. Particularly because the only way I can think of him doing the job automotively depresses me. Father Christmas clattering up your driveway in a battered old Mercedes Sprinter would ruin the magic of Christmas!

If our bearded chum way up north does own a car, I reckon he’d use it for rather more mundane duties. Popping to the Lapland branch of ASDA, perhaps, or running the elves back from the pub on a Friday night.

I quite liked the idea of Father Christmas, if he’s anything like the grumpy Englishman portrayed in the 1991 cartoon, bobbing about in something like an old Triumph Herald, but it stands to reason that he both lives and works at either Lapland or the North Pole, both of which require the use of something a bit sturdier. Something which is comfy enough for a portly bloke who’s getting on a bit, but can still fight its way out of a snowdrift.

Therefore, after much deliberation, I’ve decided that Father Christmas is a Range Rover man. Merry Christmas!

What's it like to drive a Rolls-Royce?

IT WAS a curious conclusion to reach. The best car in the world was a strangely underwhelming one.

There are certain cherries, if you love driving cars, you’ve just got to pop. Burying the throttle on a REALLY powerful car on a private track, for instance – take a bow, Jaguar XKR-S – is one of them, and unleashing an Aston Martin for the first time is another. It’s also true that, as much as I love getting to the nitty gritty of whether the latest supermini is or isn’t worth your hard earned cash, I’m still waiting to fulfil that schoolboy fantasy of getting behind the wheel of Ferrari.

That’s why I had a certain giddy sense of expectation about driving a Rolls-Royce for the first time.

There’s a lot to be said for Crewe’s missiles. It’s true, for instance, that almost every Rolls-Royce is best experienced from the rear, but that’s a goal anyone who makes it to the church on time or the Northern English standup comedy circuit can experience. For me, the real fun was to be had by heading up to the bridge, and setting a course through the countryside in two tonnes of Silver Shadow.

Did I like it? Definitely. Would I, if I were to become Peter Kay’s more successful protégé, like to buy one? Not even slightly, largely because I’d be forever feeling sorry for the chauffeur.

The Rolls-Royce has a dignified lollop to the way it devours straights (well it would, with a 6.2 litre V8 stationed in the drawing room up front) but if so much as suggest a corner it goes all to pieces. In this sense at least, the Roller lives up to its name – if you’re playing at being a Middle East dictator in the rear seats, the feeling of it floating into a corner isn’t especially pleasant, but from the captain’s chair it’s actually verging on frightening.

That said, there is something to be said about having the Spirit of Ecstasy proudly protruding from your bonnet – especially if, like me, you want to indulge your Thunderbirds fixation – and the quality of craftsmanship on what is after all a forty-odd-year-old car buts modern Mercs to shame.

A modern day Rolls-Royce, of course, would feel completely different, but to be bluntly honest my first experience of the name synonymous with motoring perfection – the wedding trade’s chariot of choice – didn’t exactly float my motoring boat.

 The best car in the world? That’ll be the Jaguar XJ, then.

Audi S3 now available in saloon form

A HOTTED-up version of the Audi A3 will be offered as a saloon for the first time, it has been announced.

Previously, anyone looking to buy the performance-orientated S3 would have been limited to a three-door hatchback or five door estate, but the company is now offering the 300bhp stormer as a four-door saloon, with prices starting at £33,240.

The S3 saloon will go on sale in March, with an al fresco S3 Cabriolet due to follow later next year.

Walking around the NEC Classic Motor Show? There must be another way

Originally published in Classic Car Weekly, 27 November 2013

Ford goes bigger and bolder for the new Ka

FORD’S Ka looks set to be sold in five-door form for the first time, if a show car unveiled this week is anything to go by.

The company used its European unveiling of the new Mustang to showcase a new hatchback with styling strongly influenced by the current Fiesta and forthcoming Mondeo. It is also significantly larger than both the original Ka, launched in 1996, and its 2008 successor.

Ford has said it is committed to a third generation version of the Ka, but has yet to announce when it will arrive in the UK. 

Nissan LEAF now easier than ever to own

NISSAN is aiming to make ownership of its electric cars a little less shocking with a series of new incentives.

Anyone looking to buy its zero-emissions LEAF hatchback can now recharge their car for free at any of its dealerships, borrow a petrol or diesel car for up to a fortnight if they need one, and get free a European breakdown and recovery package if they get into trouble.

Jim Wright,  Nissan Motor GB's managing director, said: "By making firm promises across five key areas we are tackling head on some of the questions we hear from potential customers when considering electric cars for the first time. These commitments deliver unprecedented levels of support to customers and make the LEAF a practical, desirable and affordable reality for many more motorists.

"The pledge to offer LEAF owners a free diesel or petrol Nissan for up to 14 days a year is particularly revolutionary. It means LEAF drivers can enjoy the many benefits of LEAF ownership, such as running costs of just two pence per mile, on their normal daily commute and then, when they’re going on holiday or have a longer trip to make, borrow a car that’s more appropriate to their journey."

The scheme, called the Nissan CARE-EV Leaf Customer Commitment Scheme, is aimed at helping eco-conscious motorists overcome the uncertainties they face when buying an electric car for the first time.

Nissan has sold the LEAF here since 2011, and earlier this year started building the zero-emissions hatchback at its UK plant in Sunderland.

 

The offer is available at all 205 of Nissan’s dealerships across the UK.

Meanwhile in Russia sets a dangerous UK precedent

HOPE you’ve enjoyed a pleasant week’s motoring, bereft of bumps and scratches. Meanwhile, in Russia, footage of a fishtailing Lada has been uploaded to YouTube for your evening entertainment.

You can’t have failed to notice the sheer quantity of clips being uploaded to YouTube of Russians crashing things, badly filmed by dashcams of family saloons slogging their way through a snowdrift somewhere in Siberia. This compelling concoction of spins, rolls and crashes – think of it as sort of You’ve Been Framed meets Police Camera Action, with added Moscowprofanity – has proven so popular that petrolheads over here now happily use #meanwhileinrussia as a hashtag on Twitter.

If you don’t know what a hashtag is, get your children to fire up YouTube and enjoy someone else’s motoring misfortune to while away a few idle minutes. It is weirdly compelling for the same reason that you’ll always slow down on the motorway to gawp at a car crash.

Yet what worries me isn’t these clips’ weirdly addictive edge. It’s that the things which make them possible – those crude, dashboard-mounted cameras – are becoming increasingly fashionable over here too.

Already I know of one court case which involved a lorry driver whose dashboard camera proved an unfortunate meeting between his cab and motorcyclist wasn’t his fault. As a result of this and the increasing appetite for the insurance companies to have our every movement monitored – black boxes, anyone – dashboard camera sales are booming in the UK. You might even get one under the tree this Christmas.

While the idea behind them has an appeal – film your drive to work, so you can prove it was the prat in the Audi A3 who drove into your front bumper at 40mph – I can’t help but wonder if we’re unintentionally creating Channel Four’s next comedy series for them, free of charge.

At the moment at least, there’s precious little to prevent these clips escaping into cyberspace, where spotty teenagers will be able to compile them into amusing ten minute videos, which will amuse office workers in Moscow endlessly. The clips will be just as morbidly compelling, but with fewer errant Ladas involved. Being involved in a crash, for whatever reason, is frightening enough, but knowing it’ll sit on YouTube for the rest of eternity or be forever repeated on Britain’s Best Car Crashes is something else altogether.

Meanwhile in Russia, for now, has a certain crude ring to it, but Meanwhile in Formby is a scarier prospect altogether.

Yamaha MOTIV.e - a terrible name for a promising car

YOU couldn’t make it up. That simplest of ideas – the small, unpretentious car – might be about to be saved by two of the fastest names in motoring.

The first, Yamaha, you’ll be familiar with. Provided you’re not an aficionado of the company’s musical instruments, the name will probably spring to mind most immediately as the makers of mentalist superbikes, although they’ve actually made more of a contribution to the car world than you might expect. 

If you drive a Ford with a Zetec badge on the back, it means your car’s humble engine got flown halfway around the world so the Japanese firm’s boffins could fiddle with it and make it far more rev-happy than it really ought to have been. Well, at least it was until Ford’s marketing boys got in the act and decided ‘Zetec’ was a trim level, rather than a badge of honour to say your hatchback’s humble engine had been tuned by superbike experts.

The second name, Gordon Murray, will either mean absolutely nothing or get your inner car nut immediately excited. He’s a South African car lover who moved to Britain in his early twenties, and having blessed the F1 world with his expertise than turned his technical know-how to making a string of supercars. Put simply, he is the brains behind the McLaren F1 and the Mercedes-Benz SLR.

What connects the dots? Well, you might remember reading about Gordon Murray’s efforts to almost single-handedly reinvent the way small cars are made. The end result, the T25, was so small you could fit three ofthem into a parking space, but it wasn’t a production car in the conventional sense.

It was a more a sort of open invitation to the car world, and Yamaha’s the first company to take him up on it.

The end result, the MOTIV.e, might have a terrible name but it looks fantastic, with lithe lines that make it stand out a mile from the blobby superminis which dominate the showrooms today. While there’s no word on it being a production model just yet, the prospect of being able to drive to work every morning in a car designed by an F1 genius and finished off by a group of superbike experts does have a certain appeal to it.

All Yamaha need to do now is whip the MOTIV.e’s electric motor out and drop in the 180bhp screamer from the R1. Now THAT would be a small car worth writing home about…

Are you ready for a Europe-friendly Ford Mustang?

Ford’s Mustang will celebrate its impending 50^th anniversary with something a little special next month – the first ever version of the car designed with European motoring in mind.

While British drivers have long been able to buy the all-American coupe by having one imported from the States, Ford has announced they will unveil a new generation of the car next Thursday (December 5) which will be officially offered for sale across Europefor the first time.

Jim Farley, Ford's global vice president of marketing, sales and service, said: “Mustang has come to be much more than just a car for its legions of fans spanning the globe from New Zealand to Iceland and Shanghai to Berlin.

“When you experience Mustang, it ignites a sense of optimism and independence that inspires us all. We have kicked off the countdown to the all-new Ford Mustang – with a new design, greater refinement, performance and innovative new technologies, Mustang is ready for the next 50 years."

Mustang fans can go to www.mustanginspires.com to find out about the new car - and to immerse themselves in nostalgic tales from 50 years of its predecessors.

It's all over for the Life On Cars Rover

Click the image to see a larger version of the feature. Article reproduced from the November 13th edition of Classic Car Weekly. All rights reserved.

The new MINI and Miley Cyrus are more alike than you might think

THE new MINI and the singing brat from the Disney Channel, Miley Cyrus, have more in common than you might think.

Connoisseurs of pop culture might have raised an eyebrow when the Hannah Montana star strode confidently onto the stage at the MTV Video Awards, dressed in a skin-coloured bikini, and proceeded to treat the entire world to the most cringeworthy four minutes of television yet devised. Yes, Miss Montana’s sold millions of MP3s and singlehandedly invented something called ‘twirking’ as a result, but the world has been left a poorer place in her wake.

All of which leads me nicely to the third generation MINI. Which, like Miley, will be a storming sales success but never be quite as fondly as remembered as what went before.

It’s a debate BMW – the MINI’s German masters, don’t forget – have prompted themselves, by picturing the 2014 model next to not only its 2006 and 2001 predecessors, but also the brilliant, Alec Issigonis-penned original of 1959 vintage. While it’s bordering on the cliché to point out how much bigger the modern MINIs are compared to the 1959 car, it’s entirely fair game to point out that the latest version is bloated compared to even its Noughties predecessors, being longer, wider and taller. It’s also not especially pretty either, considering how much – and I admit it grudgingly, as a classic Mini fan – I like the lines of the 2001 MINI.

The 2014 offering might well be fantastically good fun to drive or unflinchingly reliable – in the same way Miley might make a mean cup of tea or be a dab hand at Scrabble – but compared to what’s been before it’s an opportunity for something innovative and exciting missed in a bid to hit the top of the charts. The new MINI, like the new Miley, could have offered us something genuinely interesting that moves the game on, but what we’ve got is more of the same, just a bit uglier.

Personally, I prefer my small cars to be a bit more like Lily Allen, with a bit more beauty and intellectual depth thrown in. The revised Citroen C1, in other words.

300bhp in a Volkswagen Golf!

VOLKSWAGEN has announced prices for the most powerful production Golf ever this week.

 Prices for the range-topping Golf R, which offers up no less than 300bhp in the familiar hatchback package, start at £29,900 for the three-door version, and £30,555 for the five-door model.

While VW is keen to point out that the new R is a little lighter - all of 46kg - and more economical than its predecessor, the good news for keen drivers is that it rides lower and punches harder than the current Golf GTi, and allows anyone keen on their track days to fully disengage the hot hatch's armada of electronic stability systems.

While the top speed is limited to 155mph, the run to sixty depends entirely on which of the two gearboxes you go for - in the old fashioned manual, it's 5.3 seconds, but you can shave a further four tenths off if you go for the double-clutch DSG system.

To find out more about the new model, which uses an uprated version of the GTI’s engine and a Haldex four wheel drive system, go online to www.volkswagen.co.uk

Online auctions are a used car nightmare

SECONDHAND Rovers are about as desirable as secondhand socks. That’s one of two lessons I’ve learned this week. 

The other’s a bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to flogging cars. It’s the third occasion I’ve cast my net into the deep, murky waters of cyberspace, and it’s the third time that the only catch I’ve landed are buyers who prove to be a nightmare.Why did I ever abandon the calm waters of The Southport Champion’s classifieds? 

This sorry story started on a still summer’s afternoon, when my trusty old Rover sailed through its third MOT. Yet even I knew the old dog couldn’t last forever, as the increasingly noisy gearbox in particular proved. With that in mind I put her up for sale, sure that a Rover fan out there somewhere – and I know, because I am one – would want to give it a good home.

I might as well have been flogging a pair of Victor Meldrew’s old Y-fronts, as it turned out. The classic car people, despite my best pleas, were unmoved by a cheap Rover, while a stint on a Facebook forum specialising solely in cars for less than £500 attracted precisely zero enquiries. As the weeks drew on and the prospect of the insurance running out loomed, I turned to the dark side and listed it on an online auction site. 

It sold in less than ten minutes, but I was about to relearn a valuable lesson. In online auctions, you have to deal with whichever punter puts up the money first. 

Any noble thoughts of the Rover “going to a good home” quickly vanished – this was a guy who didn’t want to pick up the car tomorrow, but “tomoz”. Or rather, it would have been had “tomoz” not been a day that constantly got moved back to suit his schedule. Eventually, a car breaker from Brum showed up a week later – and was completely disinterested in the pile of paperwork I’d spent three years accumulating. All he wanted to do was get his dirt-cheap car onto the back of his low-loader. 

The chap got his car and I got my money, but I couldn’t help but recall the bloke who refused to buy a scooter from me years ago because a scratch was bigger in real life than he’d interpreted it to be in the pictures, or the man who spent ages playing a hugely stressful game of will-he-won’t-he over whether to buy my MX-5. The internet is great for all sorts of things, but it’s also full of idiots who want automotive perfection for less than £500, and will happily throw all the grief your way if they don’t get it. 

Some things are better done the old-fashioned way. Flogging cars is one of them.

The new Nissan Qashqai

A NEW version of one of Nissan’s biggest sellers will go on sale across the UK in February, it has been announced.

The second generation Qashqai looks similar to the outgoing model but is longer, lower and wider, and will come with a choice of either two-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive.

UK prices and specifications for the Qashqai will be announced closer to its launch on February 1.

Find out more about the latest Qashqai at Nissan's UK website.

Have yourself a motoring little Christmas

 

You can help a care home in Southport by opting to send your friends Christmas cards with a petrolhead twist.

Automotive charity BEN has launched a new range of cards which feature classic cars and help raise money for a variety of good causes, including Alexandra House, based on Lord Street.

To find out more about BEN’s Christmas cards go online to ben.admiralcharitycards.org

It's okay to be an anorak. Just not one who likes cars

THE press guru for the London to Brighton Veteran Run gave me a reflective glimpse.

He’d just regaled me with an impressive list of details about a 1903 De Dion Bouton, who owned it and what stage it was at in the world’s oldest motoring event, but it came with an observation.

“You just can’t be an anorak in this day and age.”

Au contraire, as Del Boy might say, and here’s why. I’ve long reckoned that it’s perfectly acceptable to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of something – in fact, it’ll even impress your mates – but it’s got to be the right subject. Unfortunately, that subject isn’t cars.

Anyone who remembers going to school with me will recall I was (and still am) a relentless automotive anorak. Even at the tender age of ten, I could bore my classmates rigid with the differences between a Land Rover Series I and a Series II, before cheering them up with some amusing anecdotes about how TVR employed the managing director’s dog as one of their chief stylists. If you’ve ever wondered why the Chimaera’s indicator surrounds have a touch of Pedigree Chum about them, that’s why.

Luckily, I’ve grown up among a nationwide fraternity of car nuts, and every weekend thousands of us, up and down the land, get together and talk shop. In the case of the Blackpool Classic Car Show, which I went to the other weekend, it was genuinely uplifting to trade facts and banter with hundreds of other enthusiasts.

But the truth about anoraks only hit me as I was leaving Blackpool, and encountered not hundreds, but thousands of people who took their anorak-ness to such levels that they wore white and blue shirts to commemorate it. Their passion was something called Blackburn Rovers.

All of these people, and their counterparts across the country, are anoraks. They can, to a lesser or greater extent, share with you an encyclopaedic knowledge of who a group of sportsmen are, who their opponents are, and how much they’re likely to be worth during a fevered period of activity known only to me as “the transfer window”.

It’s also absolutely fine to share every known fact about Britain’s biggest passion with your friends – whether they’re interested in it or not – in the pub, particularly if it’s one which insists on having Sky Sports News on in the background.

My point to my veteran car guru friend, a week later, was a simple one. It’s fine to be an anorak. It just helps if your specialist subject is football.

Stop Suzuki if you've heard this one before

 

There's something just a tad familiar about one of the new concept cars Suzuki is showing off at this month's Tokyo Motor Show.

The X-Lander, which uses a 1.3 litre hybrid engine mated to the four-wheel-drive system of the company's venerable Jimny off-roader (which, incidentally, we can't believe is still on sale after 15 years either!) is being described by the company as being "like a fusion of off-road power and mechanical precision".

However, its formula of two seats in a cockpit open to the elements, a small-to-non-existent boot and faintly Toytown-esque styling seem more than just a little bit reminiscent of a certain sales flop offered by the company back in the dark days of the mid Nineties.

X-90, anyone?

The sinister conspiracy of the That's Not A Classic Club

Originally published in Classic Car Weekly, 23 October 2013

Top safety ratings for four new cars

FOUR new arrivals at showrooms across the north west have all been given a coveted European safety rating.

Crash test experts at the Euro NCAP programme have confirmed the new Jeep Cherokee, Mercedes-Benz CLA, Suzuki SX-4 and Peugeot 2008 have all been awarded its highest rating of five stars – good news for anyone thinking of buying one.

To find out how your car performed in the tests go to to the Euro NCAP website.