Most car interiors are still in the dark ages

THAT demented artist of Fast Show Fame, Johnny Nice Painter, would have had a field day with the latest hatchback I’ve driven.

My abiding memory of the Audi A1 a colleague and I had the pleasure of piloting wasn’t that we had the delicious irony of driving an A1 car along the A1 road, or that it suffered from having a particularly dim-witted automatic which forever wanted to change up. No, it was that once you’d clambered inside absolutely everything – dashboard, floors, seats, even the headling along the roof – was black. Black! Black! Black like the dark that envelopes us all!

Comically challenged painters aside, the A1’s unrelenting sea of blackness does raise a question which has longed irked me about today’s cars. Why are almost all of them various shades of black and grey?

Ingolstadt’s smallest offering is by no means the worst offender – I’ve driven countless cars, usually German hatchbacks, which offer the owner an interior which is virtually indestructible but with all the flair and colour of a prison cell in Dresden. It’s as though the VW Group’s chief designers invited Joy Division, Morrissey and LS Lowry to create a car interior which would perfectly encapsulate the steely industrial feel of Manchester on a grey Monday morning, and have – save for a few chrome flourishes in recent years – stuck with it.

Is there some unwritten rule that car interiors have to be crushingly dull, so that drivers are forced to look at the (equally grey) road instead? It’s got to stop. There are a few rare flickers of light in the car cabin world – step forward, Fiat 500 – but it seems ludicrous that you can specify pretty much any interior colour you like at B&Q and fifty shades of grey at BMW.

Surely, in today’s era of Grand Designs and trendy hotel rooms, we deserve to be able to go into a car showroom and pick out whichever pastel shades please us most? For what it’s worth, I reckon it would make us happier drivers, and a happy driver is a safe one.

I know lots of people – including one chap who enjoyed a four hour commute every day - who spend very nearly as much time in the car as they do in the house. Would you decorate your living room to look like the inside of the new Volkswagen Golf?

Nope, neither would I.

Why buy the new Audi TT when the original is so cheap?

CONTRARY to what most pub experts might tell you over a pint, the world, as a general rule of thumb, is getting better rather than worse.

It’s heartening to note, for instance, that smallpox has been eliminated, we can all now communicate instantaneously using internet-enabled smartphones, and that platform shoes, Party Seven and outdoor toilets are all but a distant memory. In fact, just about the only things I can think of that have gone backwards in the past 15 years are the speed jet airliners can cross the Atlantic (a call to bring back Concorde) and the battery life of mobile phones (a call to bring back, ahem, the Nokia 3310).

Oh, and the Audi TT. Largely because I reckon the new one has lost touch with what made the original such a hit.

The third generation of Audi’s swoopy coupé has just been unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, and I’ve no doubt that it’s faster, more refined and safer than the two which preceded it on suburban driveways up and down the land. It’s also likely to register more prominently on my petrolhead radar if it’s any more involving to drive, but – to my mind at least – it misses the point completely because it looks so similar to the one it replaces. The new TT will, I’ve no doubt, be parked on every street by the end of the year, but you’ll no longer be granting it a cheeky second glance when you walk past.

Yet all the attention being given to the new TT means you might have missed one of the motoring world’s worst-kept secrets. The TT that’s most likely to be a classic car in a decade’s time, the wonderfully Bauhaus original version, is an undisputable bargain right now.

Peruse the classifieds and there are stacks of first generation TTs there for the taking, with the one you want – the 225bhp quattro coupe in metallic silver – starting at around two grand. 

Admittedly, you can also pick up early Mercedes SLKs, long-legged BMW Z3s and – if you try really hard – Porsche Boxsters for the same sort of money and they’ll be a lot more fun to drive, but there is something about the original TT’s shape and attention to detail which will still be turning heads in years to come.

So you can spend the thick end of £30,000 on an Audi TT which no one will bat an eyelid at, or you can have the head-turning original for a tenth of the price. Which would you go for?

New classic car show for Liverpool

PETROLHEADS are being urged to back a new charity car show taking place in Liverpool later this Spring.

The Woodlands Hospice Liverpool Motor Show, which takes place on 25 May, will feature more than 60 of the latest models, and displays of classic cars.

The show be held at Croxteth Hall Park (Croxteth Hall Lane, Liverpool L12 0HB) on 25^th May 2014 from 12noon to approximately 5pm. Any proceeds from the event, which is free to enter, will go towards helping the Woodlands Hospice Charitable Trust.

For more information about the show call Neil on 0151 529 2640.

The MINI Countryman isn't as bad as everyone makes out

I GET the feeling this particular article is going to be an expensive one.

The trouble is, I’ve ended up spending three days in a car which everyone loves to hate. In order to dissuade me from being too nice about it, my friends have used Facebook to set up a £10-per-compliment fines system, payable next time I see them in the pub.

A tricky call when the car in question is the MINI Countryman.

It’s one of a trio of jacked-up, off-roader-esque diesel hatchbacks (or ‘crossovers’ in automotive marketing speak) I’ve had the privilege to try out lately, with my weekend in the most massive MINI of them all coming after stints in Honda’s latest CR-V and Volkswagen’s Tiguan. It’s probably worth tackling the rather bloated, retro elephant in the room first; the MINI is, to my mind at least, the ugliest of the three.

I didn’t like the styling when I roadtested it forThe Champion three years ago and it still doesn’t look great now – it’s not that it’s a ridiculously oversized retro pastiche of the original Mini, but that, compared to the Honda and VW it just seems a bit blobby and ill defined. Perhaps as a conscious result of how it looks, the boot is also noticeably smaller than most of its rivals too.

Sadly, I don’t get a tenner back for every time I’m critical of the Countryman, so a few callous comments about its styling aren’t going to help me. Annoyingly, there are quite a few things the Countryman has in its favour.

The interior, for instance, is far more imaginative than anything else in its class, and if you’ve spent a lifetime on the M6 being bored by the relentless sea of grey trim and unassuming buttons in most modern motors then you’ll love the MINI’s rocker switches, lashings of chrome and the silly, pizza dish-sized speedo.

It’s also quiet at speed, rides superbly, is more than roomy enough for you and four of your average-sized chums, and it comes with the same feeling of sturdiness you’d expect from a car masterminded by BMW.

What you might not be expecting – and I definitely wasn’t until I ventured off the motorway and onto the quiet country lanes criss-crossing Cheshire – is that the MINI Cooper D Countryman handles and steers so much better than any of its chief rivals. There is, I begrudgingly admit, a faint whiff of Nineties hot hatch about the way it chews up corners, and a confidence-inspiring finesse to the steering I genuinely wasn’t expecting.

Given twenty grand it’s not the crossover I’d go for – that’d still be the Skoda Yeti – but the Countryman is far better than my mates give it credit for.

Mates who, by my reckoning, I now owe roughly £80. Oops.