Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars. Boris Johnson
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the risk of being party-political, it demonstrates why we need a new approach to government in this country (cue Tory cheers, Labour groans, etc).
Before I am lynched by anxious parents, may I point out that all these safety measures can have perverse consequences, not least that they have made cars much heavier. We are all, myself included, much fatter than we were in 1983; in fact, 22 per cent of us are obese. The steel frames of our cars must therefore be ever chunkier and more rigid to carry our vast butts, and we also have six airbags and side impact protection systems and roll bars and crash frames and new extra-thick shatterproof glass, and not forgetting the extra buckles needed for those booster seats.
So our cars, like our people, are getting fatter and fatter. In 1991 a Honda Civic weighed 2,127lbs; it now weighs 2,877lbs. The little old Mini Cooper (pre-2000) weighed a mere 1,500lbs, and the new one porks on to the scales at 2,314lbs. The Golf GTI has been on such a binge diet of hi-cal safety devices that it has put on 234lbs in the last five years. The result of this automotive obesity is of course a ludicrous circularity. The engines need extra sound-deadening equipment to hush the noise of the engines struggling with the burden of all that sound-deadening equipment.
Take, by contrast, the Fiat 128 Italian Stallion, a vehicle that did not afford the driver a notable sense of security. It had one seat belt, a long liquorice strap with no inertia reel, which you could wrap cosily around both driver and passenger, and which would do no good in a crash but would fool a policeman. You could push the car back and forth with one hand, and its entire body shell could probably have been composed of the same amount of steel that goes into one crumple-proof Mercedes bonnet. But if the occupants of the Fiat were aware that their machine was no tank, the occupants of other cars—and pedestrians—were at much less risk from the Stallion than they are at risk from its equivalents today.
If Leo and I had reversed at that speed in a modern car, there would have been a much louder thump and a much longer tinkle, and any occupants of the only other car in the district might even have had whiplash.
So we come to the eternal law of unintended consequences. By making cars safer, we seem to have made them more dangerous, yet no politician in his right mind is going to stand up and call for fewer safety features. No one is going to suggest that booster seats should be optional, though they plainly should be. So who is there left to speak for liberty?
Business? Industry? Don’t make me laugh. Industry depends completely on regulation, because it makes the market, and for dominant firms it is always a good idea to encourage regulation that your smaller rivals will find expensive and difficult to obey.
The best and most hopeful thing we can say is that the human spirit is infinitely ingenious, and there will always be a struggle between the desire for individual freedom and the state’s desire for control. The history of warfare teaches us that one technical advance will be met with a response. As the sword produced the shield, and the clamp produced the angle-grinder, so the speed camera produces the fuzzbuster and those handy cans of spray-on mud for the number plates, and the challenge of the Lib Dem road hump is met with the proliferation of mums driving colossal tractor-wheeled 4x4s through the streets of London.
Whatever new measures they come up with to punish the car for its carbon emissions—new taxes, journey restrictions, black boxes—I am completely confident that technology will supply the answer.
The scientists I meet tell me we really are on the brink of something miraculous, in the form of a working hydrogen fuel cell.
After more than a century of global dominance, the fossil fuel-based internal combustion engine is nearing the end. But not the car; oh no, the car will go on—but with exhaust fumes as sweet and inoffensive as a baby’s breath and with a tread as silent as velvet.
And you and I will joyfully buy the wonderful new machines, clean and silent as snow.
And each with a red flag before them as a warning to the deaf.
In the meantime, it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce some of the finest, fastest and most fantastic machines on the road. It is an all-star line-up, assembled from across the globe, and though the car is now a cosmopolitan creation—like the honey in Waitrose—each marque still somehow breathes its national particularity.
We have the best of Germany, Japan, America, Italy, and as I flip down the list I am stunned to see how many British cars there are. It is a comment on our habit of national self-deprecation that you probably didn’t even realise that Britain now has more independent car manufacturers than any other country on earth.
That’s right: us, the Brits, the people whose technical know-how is supposed to be dying, and whose automobile industry was brought to its knees by Red Robbo and the Morris Marina and the Austin Allegro. It is astonishing to see how many British cars there are at the top end of the market, and how various they are.
The reader may sometimes wish that I hadn’t anthropomorphised or hippomorphised or indeed gynaecomorphised these machines so often, but all I can say is that is how they felt to me at the time. They all have their specialities, and each has its virtues and fallibility.
I have done my best, anyway, to convey the enormous fun they have given me, and if my tone is now verging on the wistful it is because it is late April, and getting hotter and hotter. Soon the summer will be here, and the yammering terror of global warming will be on every front page.
In a few short years, I predict, these fossil-fuel-powered internal combustion engines will be museum pieces, and we will trace our hands down their motionless flanks with the reverence of those who love steam engines.
So here they are in their natural state—alive, wild, and still legally available. Feast your eyes while you can.
Being overtaken by a lady driver in a little car triggered a crisis of virility in our motoring writer. Luckily, help was at hand from Alfa Romeo’s new
156 Selespeed.
She was blonde. She was beautiful. She was driving some poxy little Citroën or Peugeot thing with enormous speed and confidence. And she had just overtaken me on the inside of the A24 on the way to Dorking. And let me tell you, I wasn’t having it.
Because if there is one thing calculated to make the testosterone sloosh in your ears like the echoing sea and the red mist of war descend over your eyes, it’s being treated as though you were an old woman by a young woman. Especially when you are behind the wheel of an Alfa Romeo.
As I watched her rear waggle ahead of me, I quietly breathed the battle cry of the Alfista. My fingers found the electronic Selespeed gear buttons, positioned right there on the steering wheel like the buttons on a Formula One machine—or, indeed, like the zappers on an F-15E Strike Eagle, as used over Serbia to release the smart bombs and send them into Slobba’s sock drawer—and click, my thumb depressed the left-hand button, marked with a minus sign.
And somewhere in front of me, in less than one and a half seconds, though I cannot vouch for the technical accuracy of the terms, the cormthrusters actuated the crabbing-pins. And, at precisely the moment I ordained, the machine changed down to third with the kind of throaty roar one might expect from a Turin stadium when Juventus equalise against Lazio.
‘Avanti!’ I hissed. ‘Prestissimo!’ Then click with the thumb, down to second. The car howled out of the Leatherhead roundabout like a quark from a cyclotron and, with her bobbing number plate now in my sights, the whole endocrine orchestra said: ‘Go. Take.’ You can’t be dissed by some blonde in a 305.
As I watched her rear waggle ahead
of me, I quietly breathed the battle
cry of the Alfista.
The electronic Selespeed gear buttons, positioned on the steering wheel like the buttons on a Formula One machine or