A menace to cyclists, cars, even low-flying aircraft
EVERY lunchtime on Radio 2 Jeremy Vine hosts a talkshow in which the “motorist” is portrayed as a swivel-eyed, testosterone-fuelled speed freak with the social conscience of a tiger and a total disregard for the wellbeing of others.
There was a debate recently on the show about pelican crossings and how elderly people are not given enough time to reach the other side of the road before the lights go green. Vine said that when an elderly lady is marooned in the middle of the road and the lights go green for traffic, motorists start to rev their engines. Really? What motorists do this? I have been driving for 36 years and not once have I ever been tempted to rev my engine to encourage an old woman to get a bloody move on. What’s more, I’ve never heard anyone else do it either. The idea that an adult would do such a thing is preposterous.
Later in the show they were going to be discussing bicycles and why, in London alone, in the past month seven million cyclists have been killed by motorists on purpose. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to that because at no point would anyone say: “If you’re going to put thousands of bicycles on the streets of London it is inevitable that some of them are going to be squished.” That would be the voice of reason. And that isn’t allowed in Vineworld.
There is, however, one Vine discussion topic that is worth the time of day. The new-found fondness people have for SUVs. There are two types of off-road car. There’s an off- road car that is designed to go off road. A Range Rover, for instance. And then you have off-road cars that are not designed to go off road. These are called SUVs and they annoy me.
I look at everyone in their Honda CR-Vs and their BMW X3s and their Audi Q3s and I think: “Are you all mad?” An estate or hatchback costs less to buy and less to run and is nicer to drive, more comfortable and just as practical. But it doesn’t take up so much bloody space.
Now things are getting completely out of hand, because Audi has decided that what the world really needs is another fast SUV. And so welcome to the car you see this morning: the SQ5, the fastest-accelerating diesel SUV of them all.
First things first: it’s not fast. If Audi had really wanted it to blister tarmac and earn its own slot on Jeremy Vine, the company would have given it a big petrol V8. But instead it has a twin-turbo diesel unit that is made to sound fast by the fitting of a speaker to the exhaust system.
Furthermore, if Audi had been serious about making it a high-riding modern-day take on the old quattro, it would have entrusted the suspension alterations to its inhouse performance division. But it didn’t. It simply added some fat tyres and lowered the suspension and left it at that. You read that right. It lowered the suspension. So Audi made a car that was jacked up to suit the weird new trend. And then to capitalise still further on that trend, it lowered it again.
Oh, it’s not completely horrid to drive. It zooms along with a fair degree of urgency, and the compromise between ride and handling isn’t bad at all. Inside? Well, the back bench slithers backwards and forwards — a nice touch — but you don’t get sat-nav as standard. The worst thing, however, is the visibility. The pillars, the headrests and the door mirrors all seem to conspire to make everything outside disappear. You could easily run over a cyclist and simply not know it had happened.
No. Motorists get a bad-enough press as it is, without driving around in cars such as this. I drove it for one day. And then went to Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, to get away from it. I’ll come back when it’s gone.