Instrumentalism #03:- Renault 9/11 Electronic

I have been fascinated by this car for pretty much all my life. Or, well, since I was five, anyway. I was walking back home from some kind of mundane shopping exercise or somesuch, and a car being driven by one of her friends drew level and offered us a lift. It was a tedious car, bland beyond any kind of recall in the future, or it would have been had the dashboard not completely hypnotised me.

Please remember, I was 5. That's my excuse.

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The BMW 640d Vs Human Emotion

This isn't a review. Far from it. In a review I like to be relevant and objective, making like-for-like comparisons and reporting what I find. This is more of a an essay. A screed. A manifesto on what I like in a car. As such; prepare to go absolutely miles off topic.

So,  let's establish that everything Jeremy Clarkson wrote about the BMW 640d in the Sunday Times is pretty well bang-on. Yeah, it's blisteringly quick, quiet, smooth-riding and technologically accomplished. In terms of being a car, save for the fact that it only has two doors, it's one of the more complete cars I've ever driven. Where the current real-world sliding scale of vehicle adequacy is aligned, the 640 scores heavily in the "as good as it needs to be" sector of the dial. It's not perfect; I'm not sure any car is. But it doesn't fall down in any specific area. It's terrific.

And it's about as far from what I want in a car as I can possibly imagine.

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Fleet Review; '98 Audi A4; 'til death us do part?

At the dealership where I work there is rarely a shortage of interesting, cheap old tat coming in as part-exchange, and a lot of it (this old Jag, for instance) is extremely tempting. I actually ended up buying this  Alfa but even that failed to persuade me out of the Audi and I soon sold it on again. The problem is, the Audi has been by far the most faithful car I've ever owned. I bought it, ten years old and with 51k miles on the clock, for a thousand quid. It came in as part-trade against a Mercedes SLK I sold to a retired doctor and, I have to say, I think I got a better deal than she did.

But what led to me keeping it for three years? Why have I not even considered selling up and moving on, when there are so many great, cheap cars out there? 

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Driven #28:- Nissan GT-R Black Edition

The weekend so far had seen me driving sensibly further and further North, on well trodden roads, delivering an E63 AMG to its excited new owner.

It was 16:30 when I was finally ready to leave Edinburgh. Although I could feel weariness creeping up on me I knew that there was at least 500 miles to cover before bedtime and I was anxious to get behind the wheel. Some of my impatience and urge to hit the road may have been because my steed for the return journey took the form of an ’09 Nissan GT-R Black Edition.

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Driven #18:- 335d SE

The turbocharged, go-faster Volvo 850T-5 caused something of a stir on its release in the early nineties. For a start, it was a Volvo, and Volvo were more associated with ever-so-sensible brick shaped cars best suited for carrying elderly people and antiques. Then there was the power, the modernity, the fact that the car represented totally new ground for the staid old firm. Then, in ’94, Volvo took the 850 racing in the British Touring Car Championship. And, as if looking to take the piss totally, the combatant they fielded was an estate car.

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Driven #5;- BMW Z4 sDrive35i

This article has since been republished in an updated form on www.hooniverse.com

Once upon a time, BMW was very good at preserving its principles. The famously stubborn brand said it "would never sell a front wheel drive car", a promise first rescinded by using the MINI brand as a workaround, and the more brazenly with the MINI-base 2 Series Active Tourer. For a long while, there "would never be a turbocharged M car", owing to the fear of corrupting throttle response sharpness - though that fear, it turn out, was later quashed by twin-blown engines in the most recent M3 and M5.

BMW also once strenuously denied they’d ever put a folding hard-top on a Z4. A sports car didn’t need one, they said. With the 3-Series they had held off from folding hardtops until they found a way of packaging one effectively without it ruining the weight distribution. 
 They finally managed, but you have to assume that they worked some kind of witchcraft to fit one on the E89 Z4 without exchanging the original's no-frills premium for no-thrills tedium.

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Just Another Saab Story

I have photos somewhere, I know I do, of my old Saab 9000. I loved that car, I loved its effortlessness, its total lack of brand stigma. I even loved its anaemic old two-litre non-turbocharged four cylinder engine. Yes, it was slower than the moon rising, but it was always with a pleasant, Saabey woofle from the exhaust as it dragged me down the road. This week I came awfully close to renewing myself as Pilot of a car Born From Jets.

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You Snooze, You Lose [/cliché]

It sat there quietly on the forecourt. Understated in grey, with only its mulitude of scoops, vents and holes demarking it as anything special. And the Turbo badge on the back. Yes, we have here a Porsche 911 Turbo, a 2006 model.

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