Don't Stop Me Now (10 page)

Inside, things get worse. Yes, there is plenty of space for generously proportioned adults in the back but only because there’s almost no space at all in the front. Those with long legs or a bit of a gut – and I have both – will find the driving position excruciating.

And you should see the quality of the interior trim. I’ve used many metaphors in the past to describe cheap-looking plastic, but none seems to work here. It’s not like it was made from a melted Action Man. It’s not like a video rental box. It’s even worse than a Barnsley market trader’s pakamac.

Now, I was going to explain at this point that such things could be overlooked in a car that costs a pound. But then I found that it’s not a pound at all. The headline-grabbing sticker price is just a deposit. To secure the whole car you will end up paying seven thousand five hundred and seven more pounds. And that looks like one of the biggest jokes in automotive history.

This kind of money would get you a real car, a Fiat Panda with some change. Or a Nissan Micra. Bargain a bit and it would get you a Ford Fiesta 1.25 Finesse, a Renault Clio or a Volkswagen Lupo. In fact, the list of things I’d rather buy with
£
7,508 is endless. It even includes 750,800 penny chews.

I knew it wouldn’t be much cop when the man from the importer asked, incredulously, why on earth I wanted to road-test it. And my expectations fell even further when he telephoned, just 24 hours after the car arrived, to see how I was getting on with it. Car firms rarely do this; it implies they have no confidence in the product.

But, sadly, his nerves didn’t lower my expectations quite far enough, because the Rio was dreadful. Sure, with 1.3 litres under the bonnet you get more cubic capacity than you do from an equivalent Euro car, but as we chaps keep being reminded, size isn’t important. It’s what you do with it that matters. And what Kia does with its 1.3-litre pecker is nothing at all.

The actual performance figures don’t look too bad if you’re used to walking. From 0 to 62 mph takes 14.2 seconds and, in the absence of a headwind, it will crack 100 mph. But not on a hill. I have cycled into Chipping
Norton from my house – once – and didn’t notice any gradient, but the Kia did. And in fifth gear it simply didn’t have enough oomph to overcome gravity.

Then there’s the quality of the power. It comes in lumps, as though the engine mapping were modelled on Monument Valley. One minute you’re on a plateau, then for no obvious reason there’s a burp of torque, followed by a hole the size of the Grand Canyon.

And the noise. Oh my God. You long for the moment when you can cut the din by going into fifth… but when you do, you find yourself on another hill, virtually grinding to a halt.

Mind you, the need to move around at 4 mph is useful because of the way the Rio goes round corners. I haven’t driven a car so inert and with so much body roll since the 1970s. If you have a Hillman Hunter now, you will probably find this acceptable. If you don’t, then you won’t.

Small wonder Kia’s importer in Britain is sponsoring the Pedestrian Association’s Walking Bus scheme. The idea is that parents take it in turns to walk a group, or ‘bus’, of children to their school of a morning.

After three days of being transported in the Rio, my kids thought it was a brilliant idea to walk instead. Even though their school is 18 miles away and it was blowing a gale directly from the Canadian tundra.

So, why is the Kia so bad? Well, typically what happens in an emerging economy is that the government doesn’t want to see its hard-earned cash being squandered on cars and trucks imported from elsewhere. So indigenous car
firms are established and, to protect them, huge import duties are introduced.

Kia went bust when the tiger economies collapsed, and it had to be rescued by Hyundai. As a general rule, this protectionism causes these car firms to flourish. Then, when things are going well, they decide to earn foreign currency… so, hey presto, Kia and Daewoo, Hyundai and Proton – not to forget Perodua and Ssangyong – all end up in Britain. This would be fine; but here in the West our grandparents grew up with the car, whereas in Korea everyone’s grandparents grew up on an ox. In their civil war, which started only 50 or so years ago, the army in the south faced the Russian T34 tanks on horses. As a result a car, any car, is still a novelty.

It’s no surprise to find that over there the Rio is called the SF, which – I’m not joking – stands for Science Fiction. To them, it’s probably as amazing as the Model T Ford was to the Americans 80 years ago.

Think about it. The people who designed the Rio got the wheels in the right place and knew how to fit electric windows, but they know nothing of engine refinement or suspension compromises. For Koreans, trying to make a world-class automobile is as hard as us trying to make dog-and-vinegar-flavoured crisps. We wouldn’t know where to start.

So will Kia ever get it right? Well, today the western car firms are technologically advanced, but look where that’s got them. General Motors makes more from financing cars than it does from making them. Fiat is in deep, deep dung, Chrysler has been swallowed up by
Daimler-Benz, and Rover, the last drop of Britain’s once mighty car industry, is teetering on the edge of evaporation. Even Nissan had to merge with Renault, so there was no chance for Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin, all of whom are now under the Ford umbrella. Not that there’s much respite under there, since Ford itself is perilously close to bankruptcy.

Maybe all the Korean firms will come together to form a sort of Korean Leyland. Maybe the whole thing will be brought to its knees by an oriental Led Lobbo. Maybe one day they will make a car every bit as refined and lusty as the Fiat Panda.

Or maybe, just maybe, the problem the western car firms are having is that their cars are just too good, too complicated. In the heat of competition they’ve accelerated their technology to a point that’s way in advance of what the customer needs. I mean, electronic brake distribution; really? What’s that all about then?

So maybe the Kia Rio is actually what the market wants these days: something that’s not very good, but probably good enough.

Sunday 15 February 2004

Mostly, people are bullied for a reason. In interviews, Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted she was bullied because she was gawky, Mel Gibson because he had an American accent at an Australian school, Michelle Pfeiffer because of her big lips, Whitney Houston because she was too white and Anthea Turner because she was too posh. But then she’s from Stoke-on-Trent, and in the Potteries even Fred Dibnah would have similar problems.

I was bullied at school by a chap called Dave and it’s really not hard to work out why. He was a bully and I was the nearest living being when he felt like a workout.

It is my fervent wish that the nurse who calls round to mash his food these days is also a bully. I hope she wees in his pudding.

Sometimes, though, people are bullied for no reason. A friend of mine was at the Edinburgh Festival once, which, so far as I can work out, involved sitting in a pub drinking lots of beer. This meant, inevitably, that pretty soon he rushed off to the lavatory to be sick.

Unfortunately, and I guess we’ve all been there, stomachular reversal is not an event which can be tamed and timed. So it all started to arrive before he made it to the stalls.

At the last moment he shoved the cubicle door open
and vomited extravagantly… all over some poor chap who was in there doing, and minding, his own business.

Without a word my friend slammed the door shut, and then he thought: ‘Oh no. I have just been sick all over someone who is Scottish. He is bound to come out of there and pull my arms off.’ So, confused by drink, he thought he’d better get the first punch in.

With that he opened the door again and, before running away, planted a huge fist in the man’s startled face.

Now put yourself in the shoes of the man in the loo. What if he wasn’t someone who eats piledrivers for relaxation? What if he was simply a poet, up in Edinburgh with his bookish girlfriend for the festival? How do you think he’s going to feel, being punched by a man who’s just vomited into the Y of his trousers and pants? To get some idea of the bewilderment and the sense of persecution, try driving around Britain in one of the new 6-series BMWs.

After a while you’re forced to think: ‘I am sitting here at a road junction with my indicator on and nobody is letting me out. Why does everyone hate me so?’ I think we are genetically programmed to be fearful of BMW drivers in the same way that we are programmed to be just a little bit frightened of Scottish people in pub lavatories. We know that most people above the border are normal, but we’ve all seen
Trainspotting
. ‘Glass’ may have been turned into a verb by the youth of South Yorkshire, but it was turned into a pastime in the bars of Glasgow.

And so it goes on the road. You may be a very good
driver. You may be a caring father who runs a meals-on-wheels service for the old folks at weekends. But if you drive a BMW, you are tarred with the same brush as the berk in the 3-series who thinks the
Highway Code
stopping distances are measured in millimetres.

Two or three times in the 645Ci I was genuinely staggered at the belligerence of other road users when it swung into their peripheral vision. I don’t think I could have had the door shut so firmly on me if I’d had
www.kiddieporn.com
emblazoned on the doors.

If you currently drive a Jaguar or a Mercedes – or any other type of car, actually – you will find this reasonless bullying hard to stomach, and for that reason alone I’d steer clear of the 645, which to everyone else is the 666.

But of course, if you are a BMW driver, right now you’ll be used to the persecution and you’ll be wanting to know what the new boy is like. So here goes.

First of all, it’s a lot less than you might be expecting. I sort of assumed it was a replacement for the unloved 85oi and would cost, ooh, I don’t know,
£
75,000. But actually it’s a whisker under
£
50,000, and that, for such a big, imposing car with such a big, imposing badge, is good value.

However, we can’t ignore the looks. Most car designers are anonymous souls who labour away in a back room, trying their best to accommodate the wishes of engineers, marketing men and the boss’s wife. Unlike people who design clothes or cook food, we don’t know their names or where they live. Peter Horbury is not Coco Chanel. Walter de’Silva is not Nicole Farhi.

But Chris Bangle, the man who’s reshaped BMW, is different. We know he is American. We know he has a beard. We know he hates journalists. And we know, because there was a story about it in the
Sunday Times
last week, that he has recently been ‘promoted’ and will no longer have his fingers in the pencil case.

He really has created some monsters in his time. The 7-series is weird and the 5 just plain ugly. With the 6 it’s almost as though he was being overseen all the time by more conventional theorists. You can sense his flamboyance in every detail, every angle and every panel, but it’s been suppressed.

Unfortunately, his minders obviously popped outside for a fag when he did the back end, because he went berserk. It’s his maddest work yet, Prokofiev meets Munch in a discordant Munchen blaze of horror in B flat. Certainly, if you were to buy a 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside.

Inside, you sense the hand of Bangle in the quality of materials. Because he’s from America, where Styrofoam is considered to be luxurious, everything has a coarseness to the touch. There is no wood, but if there were you get the impression it would be MDF.

Then there is the driving position. Despite the usual array of adjustments for the seat and the wheel, I never once found a sweet spot where I was truly comfortable. The wheel was either too high or I couldn’t see the dials.

And you do need to keep an eye on your speed,
because, as you’d expect in a 4.4-litre two-door V8 coupé, it doesn’t exactly hang around.

Now I want to make it absolutely plain at this point that the 645Ci is bloody good to drive. With its Vanos this and its variable that, the engine produces a seamless stream of power, and the dynamic-drive suspension teamed with fluctuating-rate steering means the handling is pin-sharp. You’d have to nit-pick to find any dynamic fault with the way this car goes.

And yet, despite everything, I’m afraid I didn’t like it. The problem is that I had no idea what sort of car it’s supposed to be.

In essence it’s a two-door version of the 5-series. So you think coupé. Right. That must be sporty in some way. And it is, but not in the way I was expecting.

It could have been aurally sporty, producing a V8 bellow every time I put my foot down. But it didn’t. The engine is almost completely inaudible 90 per cent of the time and gently hums when it’s asked to work hard.

So perhaps it could be sporty in terms of interior trim. But no. You won’t find body-hugging seats or splashes of carbon fibre in there. It’s just the usual BMW blend of utter functionality, topped off with a satellite navigation system That Does Not Work. Again.

OK then, so it’s a stylish car, a car with discreet good looks (ahem) in which none of the comfort or silence has been lost? No again. Because the ride is firm to the point where it’s almost annoying.

This is silly. If they’re going to give us a hard ride, then go the whole hog and give us exhausts like wheelie bins
and deep Recaro seats. If, on the other hand, they’re going to give us the acoustic signature of a nuclear submarine, then let’s have a comfy ride.

Maybe a car without the optional dynamic-drive system would be better, but one thing’s for sure, the model I tested fell between two stools, trying to play a ballad and thrash metal… at the same time.

If you want a thrilling drive from a car like this, buy a Porsche 911. If you want the last word in comfort, buy a Jaguar XKR. If you want to be abused by the dealer, buy a Mercedes of some sort. And that means the BMW is stuck out there with only one USP.