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?