Forget the emissions tests – it’s the real world that matters for Volkswagen

SOMETHING weird has been happening at office water coolers and in crowded bars across the North West. People – some of whom have no interest in cars at all – have been chatting in serious tones about diesel Volkswagens.

As boring topics go it’s up there with mortgages and washing machines – yet it seems to have relegated the Premier League, Strictly and whoever Katie Hopkins is offending this week firmly into ‘Oh, by the way’ territory. Even the tabloids are it. The Sun splashed ‘WE ARE FUMING’ across its outraged front page in response to Europe’s biggest car maker flunking the emissions entry exams.

What happens next will involve lots of American lawyers, hefty fines and some rather panicky German businessmen holding board meetings – but I wouldn’t rush to stick the Golf up for sale. Today’s derv-burners are still far cleaner and leaner than smokey old clatterers like my 17-year-old Peugeot 306 – I love its ability to eke 55 miles out of every gallon, but in emissions terms a new VW would run rings around it.

What’s far more important about the VW scandal is that it finally throws a spotlight on the testing regimes used for new cars – almost all of which are complete cobblers. It’s all very well slamming a car company for coming up with software that can get a car through emissions test, but the real problem is the test itself.

The tests used for cars sold in this country fail to take account of the 57.3 million square miles of land on this planet that isn’t inside an EU or manufacturer testing lab – the real world, where you and I and all those other pesky motorists live. None of us have the luxury of getting 76mpg and artificially low emissions in hermetically sealed, optimised conditions. We’re all getting a fraction of that in rush hour congestion on the A59, which is why I’m forever getting complaints off people who can’t match their car’s claimed MPG and why I’m not surprised the reality of VW’s diesel offerings is nowhere near what the lab testers said. It’s complete nonsense.

What’s needed is a revolution in how new cars are tested – a test that happens in the real world, where car makers can’t effectively cheat their way through and in which you and I end up looking at realistic emissions and MPG figures when weighing up whether to plump for a Polo over a Fiesta.

We’ve been doing it with independently adjudicated safety tests for ages – your new family hatch is nowhere in the showrooms these days without a full wad of Euro NCAP stars.

Now what we need is a proper, independent organisation to finally banish the bull from new car emissions and fuel economy figures. Perhaps VW’s inevitable fines could pay for it.

Porsche's unlikely tip for saving the planet

AS NOBLE callings go saving the planet isn’t exactly glamorous. Sorting out recyclables from household rubbish, paying 5p for shopping bags and sticking solar panels on your roof isn’t exactly the stuff of dreams.

Happily, this worthy-but-dull drive to keep the environmentalists happy needn’t extend to driving itself. As long as you’ve got a spare £76,412 lying down the back of the sofa it’s now entirely possible to help save the planet – by buying a turbocharged Porsche 911.

In fact, buying a turbocharged sports car is now the ONLY option you’ve got if you want a brand new 911 (which, I suspect, most of you do). There are all sorts of complicated explanations for why turbochargers are beneficial but the end result is a sort of automotive alchemy where weedy engines can be persuaded to work harder than bigger, heavier ones.

Anyone who went to school in the Eighties will already have learned from their bedroom walls that Porsche knows a fair bit about using turbos to eke a little extra out of the 911. In fact you’ll be pleased to learn that even in the latest model range there’ll be a proper 911 Turbo. Turbochargers went on to make Formula One cars unfeasibly fast (until they were banned) and flame-spitting rally cars a bit too tricky to handle, and in the 1990s your diesel hatchback wasn’t complete without one. Unlike hybrids and electric cars, turbocharging has instant petrolhead currency too. For anyone who disagrees, I present the Volvo T5, the Audi Quattro, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the Mitsubishi Evo.

But this time Porsche’s been clever. It’s used turbochargers as an excuse to make the 911’s engines smaller and – here’s the important bit – more efficient and kinder to the environment. Where the outgoing Carrera had a 3.4-litre flat six, this one makes do with just three litres, and you’ll get more to the gallon too. It’s essentially the same trick Honda’s pulled off with its diesel offerings – swapping a 2.2-litre engine for an equally gutsy 1.6-litre – and the magic ingredient that makes Ford’s paperweight of an Ecoboost engine work is the hoofing great turbocharger it’s married to.

So there you have it – you can tell your Greenpeace pals that the new 911 is entirely sensible as green-minded purchases go. Just don’t tell them it’s 20bhp more powerful and seven seconds quicker around the Nürburgring or you’re stuffed.

Coincidentally this is Life On Cars' 911th post. Spooky or what?

Why I love the unloved Allegro

THERE are plenty of great cars I don’t particularly like. Yet it takes a different sort of topsy-turvy logic altogether to like what’s widely regarded as Britain’s worst car.

If you’re the sort of armchair car critic who’s had their idea of what constitutes a rubbish car cemented through a lifetime of Jeremy Clarkson DVDs then you might as well click away now. If on the other hand you’re prepared to give even motoring’s worst offenders a fair trial, then you’ll be shocked by the verdict.

I’ve just spent the past three days hoofing about in an Austin Allegro – and I really enjoyed it.

It’s fashionable to give the poor old Allegro a kicking. In the past couple of years the tabloids have picked up on at least three surveys naming and shaming it as Britain’s worst car, in 2012 a Tory peer likened a poorly thought-out Government policy to one and Jeremy Clarkson could only think of the Morris Marina when looking for cars he hated more. In fact, I nearly joined them when a 1.1-litre Series 3 Allegro left me stranded on the M11 a couple of months ago.

So I wasn’t expecting much when a colleague chucked me the keys to his pride and joy – a V-registered Allegro 1.3 in a fantastically Seventies shade of brown with beige seats. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting to fire faithfully into life every time I tried to start it. Surely British Leyland relics from the decade that brought you the three day week and Terry and June aren’t supposed to do that?

Nor was I expecting it to go and steer in a genuinely entertaining way. I know from the 1.1-litre car I borrowed a few months ago that to drive they feel a bit like a Mini that ate all the pies, but this 1.3-litre car had just enough extra oomph to overcome the podge. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but the right Allegro is a fun car to drive!

What’s more, it has room for five, the interior’s light and airy because its window pillars are so much thinner than today’s hatchbacks, and if you look hard enough you can still pick decent ones up for under a grand. Just about the only downsides are the lack of a hatchback – bizarrely, the logic was that giving it one would harm sales of the Austin Maxi – and looks that I think are cute and distinctive but most people hate.

So the world’s worst car is actually not all that bad. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!

The MoT changes are encouraging a generation of careless motorists

GEORGE OSBORNE has some great news if you're thinking of buying a new car. What used to be a three-year period of grace away from the MoT testers is now four years.

Just think – buy a new Nissan Note tomorrow and it'll long after England have narrowly lost out at a penalty shootout somewhere near Moscow that you’ll have to check your car’s roadworthiness.

Naturally, the Government’s line is that it’ll save you somewhere in the region of £50 and is therefore good for the economy, but look between the motoring world’s faultlines and you’ll find plenty of people who aren’t exactly over the moon at the announcement.

I punted the proposals at a group of motorists who tend to take the MoT quite seriously – classic car owners – and they gave the idea of brand new cars spending an extra year on the roads with no legally binding checks a distinctly cool reception.

The main thing that got the Triumph Spitfire fans into a lather was the idea of cars having an extra 12 months to wear out their tyres while doing a million miles an hour on the outside lane of the M62. While some of them proposed basing the test around mileage instead, another one put it simply by saying: ‘My MoT tester fails more three-year-old cars than anything else. Sometimes with a list of faults so long it won't fit on the page.’

For me, the problem isn’t with your car – it’s with all those people who neither know nor care about what makes their set of wheels roadworthy. I’ve lost count of the number of two-year-old cars that have lights that don’t work, bits hanging off them and light accident damage that clearly hasn’t been repaired. Normally, it’s down to the police to reel ‘em in for not being roadworthy – and we all know that force budgets have been slashed in another move endorsed by Cameron’s Britain.

The nightmare scenario – and I hope it never comes to this – is a generation of cars maintained on the cheap with all sorts of nasty niggles not being unearthed by MoT testers. You – if you’re reading this column and therefore like cars – get it. The ones I worry about are people who don’t realise their Fiesta is handling like a 1950s Wolseley because it’s got bald tyres and think a cambelt is a garment they’ve seen the PM’s wife wearing in the Mail on Sunday. The sort of people who check their oil about as regularly as they write Christmas cards.

It’s these people you see driving nearly new cars that look and sound like escapees from an episode of Only Fools and Horses. Sorry George, but you’ve let them off the hook for another year.

We build replicas of sports cars - why not hot hatches?

NOSTALGIA’S a funny thing. I doubt the ‘good old days’ really are as marvellous as their supporters make out, but bringing bygone eras back to life is big business.

You already know you can go out and buy a Volkswagen Beetle, a Fiat 500 and a MINI – all of which are a heck of a lot easier to live with than their 1965 equivalents – but you’d be surprised at how many people make a living out of giving you an even more hardcore hit of nostalgia.

That’s why Triumph will sell you a Bonneville that to casual motorcycle fans looks and feels almost exactly like something that lapped the TT circuit half a century ago, managing directors hitch up Airstream caravans to the back of their Range Rover Sports and tickets to the Goodwood Revival sell out in half a femtosecond. Even the politicians are it – Jeremy Corbyn reckons 60% of us would rather railways were state-owned, like they were in the good old days.

Naturally, there are plenty of car companies who’ll sell you a slice of the sort of nostalgia where it’s got to feel as well as look the part. You’d think Morgan would have this niche pretty much to itself – there are caves with primitive paintings of the Plus 4 etched onto their walls – but there are also companies who will sell you replicas of Jaguar XK120s and importers you can source you a brand new Lada Niva straight from Russia – 18 years after it officially disappeared from the nation’s showrooms.

Yet I reckon the specialists are missing a trick. There are lots of companies who are fulfilling the pent-up nostalgia of people who want a classic British sports car that happens to be brand new – take the Caterham Seven – but what about the thousands of us who spent their youth pulling hot hatches out of hedges?

In the past few weeks I’ve driven the Ford Fiesta and the Volkswagen Golf in the lithe MkI guises their late 1970s creators intended, and they handle and steer so much more crisply than their modern day equivalents. Today’s hot hatches are brilliant, but even a modern day Fiesta ST doesn’t have the flyweight fun factor of the old XR2.

If you can buy what’s effectively a showroom fresh Jaguar XK120 or a brand new Lotus Seven, why can’t you get a brand new Fiesta XR2 or Clio Williams? The teenagers who grew up with Sam Fox rather than Diana Dors are going to want their nostalgia hit soon enough – and it’s hot hatches, not sports cars, they grew up with.

Kit car builders of Britain – consider the gauntlet laid down!

So long Chrysler, and thanks for the Lancias

THE THREE cars might as well have been coffin nails. That’s the total sum of what Chrysler sold across the UK last month – a distant final blip on the sales chart of a brand that’s been axed yet again.

You might have missed that this emblem of American motoring got quietly deleted from the showrooms earlier this year, which is why the three Chryslers sold last month would’ve been dealers clearing out the last hangers-on now that British sales have effectively stopped. In effect, these three sales are a bit like fingernails that keep briefly growing even after your heart’s ticked its final beat.

It doesn’t take an automotive coroner to deliver the verdict – what was behind a terminal sales slump was a quartet of not terribly relevant models, two of which were Italian offerings masquerading under an all-American badge. Pop across the Channel and the Delta – actually deleted here last year on account of its dire sales figures – and Ypsilon are better known as Lancias. I’ve argued before they should have been known as Lancias here too because they’d appeal to people who grew up driving them on Sega Rally, but apparently every time someone mentions the L-word an entire retirement home groans with tired tales about rusty Betas and engines falling out.

Chrysler’s other two models are rather more American but even less relevant. I love the 300C’s moodiness and mean proportions – it’s like a Rover P5 that’s been kicked out of school for smoking behind the bike sheds – but its high running costs don’t really chime with a Britain reeling from spending cuts. It’s the same story with the Grand Voyager. In a world full of Renault Scenics and Vauxhall Zafiras we only need one truly massive people carrier – and it’s the Ford Galaxy. So poor Chrysler was stuck with four models nobody really wanted.

But here’s the thing. Sales of sister brand Jeep are up nearly 60% compared to this time last year, and parent firm Fiat is going from strength to strength, having just introduced a new version of the 500. Whether it’s a rugged-looking off-roader with real world running costs (the Renegade) or a cutesy city car every twenty-something girl falls in love with (no prizes for guessing that one), both sell relevant cars people want to buy.

The days of cheap-as-chips Neons, Voyagers dominating the school run and Vipers being plastered across bedroom walls seem a very long time ago.

Ormskirk MotorFest - how hard can it be judging a concours?

SIMON Cowell has it easy on The X Factor. At least he gets some easy dud entrants to kick out of the proceedings on his annual – and inevitable – pop juggernaut as it thunders towards the Christmas number one.

I reckon I got assigned a far trickier task at this year's Ormskirk MotorFest. One that involved making some even tougher choices, even if it didn’t involve breaking the dreams of any teenage girls desperate to be the next Pixie Lott.

At this year's event I got given the task of judging the classic cars entered into the event’s new Concours D’Elegance – a sort of automotive Crufts for people who pamper and polish their pride and joy rather than using it for late night jaunts to the nearest 24-hour supermarket for some scones and a bottle of washing up liquid.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only showgoer who spotted the irony – someone who owns a slightly shabby MGB and this year entered the MotorFest in a Range Rover that still needs a bit of bodywork attention was being asked to judge cars on their tidiness.

Happily, my co-judge was motorsport historian (and MotorFest commentator) Neville Hay. You’d like Neville – not only has he got a wicked sense of humour and is never short of an anecdote, but he’s probably forgotten more about old cars than I’ve learned. Yet the task was still unenviable. If every car in a field is in wonderful condition and has been doted on by its owner for years on end, how on earth do you go about picking a winner?

We both agreed a mission statement - in the same way a Crufts prizewinner that doesn’t get to go out digging holes and chasing sticks isn’t really on, we wanted to avoid the show queens that get trailered to events and give the prize to a nice car owned by someone who enjoys it in the real world.

Even then, we ended up picking nits to separate the truly brilliant cars from the merely great ones, docking points off for the sort of scuffs most motorists don’t give a stuff about. In the end a single point split the winner from the car that came second – it really was that close.

It really ought to have been a bit like a primary school sports day where everybody won a prize, but in the end we gave it to Graham Postlethwaite’s virtually immaculate Rover P5B Coupé. Even in a contest packed with prizeworthy motors it was a deserving winner.

The cheque should land on my doormat by Friday. Only joking…

Read more about the Ormskirk MotorFest in this week's issue of Classic Car Weekly - published 9 September 2015.