Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars

The Lexus IS200, fitted with a GPS satellite guidance system, a gizmo of mind-bending sophistication.

Carol’s perfectly pitched to mesh, to

blend, above all not to offend the

turbulent emotions of a guy lost in the

sweltering Palio of the London traffic.

Then imagine your route illuminated by a thick blue line, every revolution of your wheels transmitted—ping—to a satellite transponder, and ping, somewhere in the inky wastes of the heavens a throbbing nose-cone breaks off from transmitting Rupert Murdoch’s ball-by-ball pornography to the people of Zimbabwe and tells your car there are exactly 150 yards to go before a right turn on the New North Road. Yes, that’s you, that blue line inching down that street before your eyes, and you gaze in rapture until—‘Whoa, sorry old fruit, didn’t see you there,’ you say to the weaving, terrified cyclist.

Ahem: that is one disadvantage—the display doesn’t show what else is on your street, and until all vehicles and pedestrians have their own satellite linkups and we can drive about on instruments only, it is as well not to ignore that amazing technological breakthrough—the transparent windscreen. ‘Whoa there’, I say to the cyclist, but thanks to the sensational disc brakes of the Lexus he is unharmed, and shakes his fist in friendly greeting.

‘In 50 yards…’ says Carol, and I think how much I love that use of yards; yes, she’s an imperial measurements sort of girl, Carol—strait-laced but sensuous, firm but tender, like an NHS nurse brusquely fluffing your pillows and then leaning over to take your temperature in fahrenheit, the watch pinned on to her snowy bosom, her ample bosoms…‘In 50 yards,’ says Carol, ‘right turn.’ And then I think, wait a mo…

Hang on, girlie. What do you mean ‘right turn’? How do you know that? This route is, I confess, well-known to me, since after working late in the evening I occasionally catch a cab home. This infrequent habit (expenses department, please note) taught me that to get from Islington to Canary Wharf it is cheapest and quickest to go via Commercial Road, though if you look at the map it appears that you go by Hackney. It costs roughly £11 to go my route, and it costs £14 to go the route the cabbies instinctively set out on.

Now, you would have thought that Carol could merely compute the shortest distance between two points; you’d have thought that like the cabbies, she’d ignore the traffic lights, the mini-roundabouts, the sleeping policemen and go via Hackney, even though it is slower. But no! I think she understands. I think she knows. Farewell A–Zs, you useless maps with the key page always torn out: may you rot in the boot in a compote of baby yoghurt and engine oil. Goodbye all you cabbies who boast of ‘The Knowledge’. Adieu to the time-honoured pelmanism of black-cab drivers, the weeks they spend on bicycles committing the streets of London to their memory: what a devastating rebuke Carol has delivered to their chauvinism.

Farewell A–Zs, you useless maps. Goodbye all you cabbies who boast of ‘The Knowledge’.

She doesn’t raise her voice; she doesn’t hit you with the map; and even if you accidentally hit her with your left hand and turn her off, she soon comes back to life and, with geisha-like deference, excogitates your next move. ‘In half a mile, turn right. Shortly after that, turn left,’ she says. Yes, you ask yourself, was there ever a girl so easy to turn on? ‘Keep left,’ she is saying as we come towards Spitalfields, ‘keep left.’

In fact, there are three forks here. ‘Keep left’, says Carol again, as obstinately as a guide in the old Soviet Union, with brown stockings and suspenders. Now this time, I think, she’s pushing me too far. She can’t be serious.

But such is her prestige by now, so insistent is her voice, that I do as she says. I keep left, and we end up in a one-way system in Hoxton market.

Vital statistics

In May 1999, the IS200 was launched against the BMW 3 series, Audi A4 and C-Class Mercedes.

Engine 2-litre, 250bhp 6-cylinder with 6-speed manual gearbox Top speed 134mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 9.5 secs Price (1999) from £20,500

A rubbish van is very slowly loading up. We are stranded outside the Aquarius nightclub and on the beer-splashed pavement, where the morning rays are starting to bring out the best of last night’s vomit, the tough eggs are looking appraisingly at Carol and me. Get us out of this one then, Carol, I say; and maybe there was something sneery in my voice, because after that she never quite recovered her form.

We do eventually make it to Canary Wharf, after I scrape an alloy hub (sorry folks) in Hoxton. But as soon as we approach the Tower of Doom, she says, ‘Do a U-turn as soon as possible.’ I swear. That’s exactly what she says. ‘Do a U-turn as soon as possible.’ Isn’t that spooky? What does she know? And who can say she does not have my best interests in her lonely metal heart?

Big Boris and the small Smart car made a great double act…well, his

builders and the Camden clampers thought they were a funny pair

LITTLE AND LARGE (#u5d6a7515-d9ea-5b05-b281-844d808d2221)

Big Boris and the small Smart car made a great ouble act…well, his builders and the Camden clampers

thought they were a funny pair

You know, that Smart car could not have turned up at a better time, tactically speaking. The kitchen had no floor and wiring dangled pathetically from the walls where the stove and other vital appliances awaited installation. In our supposedly wonderful new sitting-room the fireplaces were gashes in the wall, from where there leaked increasing quantities of black dust which made the children cough. Every morning, about a dozen builders would turn up, spread their tins of dhal, chapati and okra across the lunar surface of the floor, and then begin an interminable, ruminative feast.

‘Smart?’ I spat. ‘What’s so smart about a machine you can’t turn on?’

‘How much longer?’ we begged Bishi, the foreman with fascinating holes in the gristly parts of his ears. ‘How long?’ we wheezed with plaster-coated lungs, two weeks after the deadline had elapsed.

And Bishi the builder would grin, scratch his perforated ears and announce that, ‘Brickie has not turned up!’ And as for the skein of tangled pipes that presently served as the bathroom, it all depended on the plumber. Where was the plumber? ‘Plumber is thinking,’ said the foreman, and invited us to imagine his colleague cross-legged at home, meditating on the precise angle of the overflow.

One dark hour before dawn, shivering under the duvet, I suddenly grasped the game of Bishi and Co. What was it about this sadistic go-slow? They doubted me, that’s what it was.

They looked at me and saw a mere hack, a drudge who churns out articles by hand—a manual labourer! With their keen sense of caste, of hierarchy, they doubted—entirely reasonably, I may say—that I would be good for the final £30,000. And that was why they passed the brinjal pickle and delayed the completion of our brushed-concrete kitchen floor; and that was why they had put off finishing the patio. They wanted to see the colour of my money!

The cheek! Of course we had the money. It was just a flow thing. The dosh was backed up in some blocked U-bend in Barclays, Reading, waiting for a touch of the spanner from my Premier Service personal banker who, like the plumber, was presumably ‘thinking’.

All I needed, it hit me, was a sign; a concrete and eloquent testimony to my wealth and station in life.

And that very morning, just as Bishi and Co arrived, a liveried huissier from the offices of Smart Car UK was to be seen in our street. ‘Acha!’ they exclaimed, as they drank in the glossy cuboid with all the rapt attention of the crowd on the Bombay maidan when Pakistan have six to win and an over in hand.

‘It is a Mercedes!’ moaned Bishi. ‘Mercedes!’ hissed the number two man. And as the word was passed down the line to the Painter, Tile Man, Concrete Mixer, Plumber (for it was he) and Brickie (he, too), I could feel my stock rising by the second, like some air conditioning company on the Delhi Bourse.

Quite forgetting their hectic timetable, the builders stayed to watch; if only to satisfy themselves that the machine was really mine.

Expertly locating the door handle among the eezigrip Swatch-designed panels—which can be mixed and matched from a range of upbeat pastel tones—I got in. Soon the admiring faces of the builders were lost to view. Not that the car had moved anywhere. The windows, though, were slightly steaming up as I tried and tried to find the ignition. Through the mist of the glorified goldfish bowl I could now sense that they knew this was not my car.

‘Smart?’ I spat, jabbing the key at every orifice in the fascia.‘What’s so smart about a machine you can’t even turn on?’ The central concept of Smart, according to the bumf, is ‘simplicity’. At Mercedes HQ in Dortmund, logicians with high, papery foreheads and lozenge-shaped spectacles have, in a fit of Freudian ecstasy, taken Car back to its infancy. The result is that everything is chunky and rounded in easy-wipe, vomit-resistant Fisher-Price plastic.

Vital statistics

The Smart Car was launched in 1998 as the ultimate city runabout.

Engine 600cc, 6-speed manual gearbox, 3 cylinders Top speed 87mph Acceleration 0–40mph in 6.5 secs Price (1999) from £8,499

At the very best, this is either a Kiddikar or a girlie car. It would be absolutely fine, I was thinking, if you were an It girl with a brace of topiary-tailed poodles in the back seat—or if you were proposing to drive it accidentally-on-purpose into Prince William’s South of France swimming pool.

In fact, I seem to remember Peter Purves driving just such a car in my 1974 BluePeter Annual. He drove it to Paris and I have it in my head that he parked it sideways on the Champs-Elysées—exactly the sort of stunt the Smart can pull. And here I was, a quarter of a century later, the Peter Purves of GQ magazine, and I couldn’t turn the bloody thing on.

Until at once, with a savage downwards jab at the key like a bad-tempered two-year-old, I accidentally found the right hole; by the handbrake for some reason (‘Natürlich,Gottlob! What is starting but the opposite of stopping?’) and vroom!

A colleague from GQ believes the car is like a motorbike with four wheels. ‘There is nothing that can beat it away from the lights,’ he says. That must depend, I think, on who is at the controls. I do not think that I would have been beaten by an old woman in a bath chair as we kangarooed away from the lights on Liverpool Road. But you should not rule it out.

Once I’d sussed out the Play Station-style, automatic six-speed gearbox, a vague sense of fun started to take over. I cannot pretend that I tested my colleague’s assertion that it can reach 90mph, certainly not on the route between Islington and the Spectator’s offices in Holborn. But if, like me, you rather like left-hand drive, and believe that the so-called motoring authorities encourage an aversion in the hope of deterring the ripped-off British public from buying cheaper cars from the continent; and if you think you might rather enjoy weaving around in a souped-up 600cc beer crate, then you might be a Smart kind of guy or gal.

Everything in the Mercedes is chunky

and rounded, in easy-wipe, vomit-

resistant Fisher-Price plastic.

You might enjoy squeezing its rump into a space no larger than a bath mat; though I should warn you that its charm has not yet penetrated the traffic wardens of Camden. First they clamped it. Then they just removed it—gone; tossed, perhaps, like a Dinky toy into some municipal cupboard.

There’s no car smart enough to get itself out of that one. When I got home, on foot, Bishi and Co were tactful enough not to bring the matter up.