ROBERT COUCHER

The Driver

Idon’t drive modern cars very often and when I do they tend to be of the performance variety because you lot don’t want to read about family saloons in these pages. But commuting tools have come on in leaps and bounds over the last decades, to the point where their existence is about to end. As we know, the open road offers true freedom, the promise of man and machine being at one. Except that it doesn’t anymore. Those beautifully crafted car ads you see on television, where a chiselled young man, who forgot to shave yesterday, enjoys a totally deserted mountain road in some gizmo-laden modern, are extremely hard to realise unless you get up very early.

These days our roads are clogged, congested and closely monitored, so motoring freedom at speed is difficult to achieve. I’ve just returned from a ‘blast’ across Europe to the Swiss Alps in a modern SUV and, indeed, it was very good (but not as good as an Airbus 340) and it dispatched the 700-mile journey with ease. Once through the Eurotunnel and onto the French péage network, the challenge was to keep the car moving as slowly and legally as possible. Set the cruise control to 80mph and just sit there. Obviously the vast majority of modern cars are capable of cruising safely at much higher velocities but the French police have become draconian, especially if your car is British registered. The term ‘ blast’ is an exaggeration as you can’t really drive quickly anymore, unless at a track day or motor sports event.

So this cruise involved thrumming along at a boring pace. I now know why manufacturers fill their cars with electronic toys. It gives us something to play with as a distraction to the monotony of trundling down a grey motorway for hours on end. It turns out the best game by far, in a modern car, is trying to get the computer’s instant fuel-consumption readings down as low as you can. Powering up hills is agony as the reading of around 44mpg on the flat plummets to 24mpg up easy gradients.

Modern automotive engineers have quietened vehicles incredibly effectively but, as most now follow the German school of thinking whereby road cars, SUVs, limos and easy riders must be hard and fast around the otherworldly Nordschleife at the Nürburgring, tyre noise is often surprisingly noticeable and overly firm suspension means cars still crash unnecessarily. The Rolls-Royce Phantom is best at resisting all this macho pretence but the Citroën C6 is almost as good. Now, that’s a refined boulevardier you want for French roads.

Motor vehicles have been refined towards impending extinction. Supercars aside, most cars don’t really have an exhaust note anymore, which is a good thing because everyday transportation should be as unobtrusive as possible. The commuter market, sensibly, now wants quiet cars and there’s nothing so quiet as electric power. Ever-evolving electric cars are amazing: near-silent, refined, loaded with torque and amusing to drive, and it seems they are the future.

British politicians have just announced the banning of sales of cars that are solely petrol or diesel powered from 2040, which is going to be a challenging policy to implement. Already, latest figures show that diesel sales have plunged by 15%, so what will happen to residual values? And the car plants and parts suppliers that provide employment?

Bear in mind the environmental damage being exacted by the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries for these cars; and we’d better get a wriggle-on building plenty of nuclear power plants to charge them up. At a cost of around £20 billion each, we’ll need about seven, PDQ.

And let’s hope that vintage and classic cars retain the dispensation to be freely used, so keeping the £5-billion UK historic car industry alive. There are just 750,000 classic cars in the UK out of the total car park of 31 million and most are only used occasionally. Research shows that 1.3 million people in the UK have ridden a horse in the last 12 months – generally not to work – so fingers crossed that the small number of our ‘green’ vehicles will be safe to enjoy, knowing that making a new vehicle creates as much pollution as driving it does.

The best vehicle for long-distance trips (apart from that Airbus) cannot yet be a fully electric Tesla, as range anxiety is even more nerve-wracking than the fear of running on petrol fumes. The answer has to be a 1930s Roll-Royce Phantom II Continental, the only concession being the fitment of aftermarket electric power steering. Stylish motoring at an indicated 80mph, and the Royce Continental doesn’t have an instant fuel consumption readout to distract you from the Grand Tour. Robert grew up with classic cars, and has owned a Lancia Aurelia B20GT, Alfa Romeo Giulietta and Porsche 356C. He currently uses his properly sorted 1955 Jaguar XK140 as his daily driver, and is a founding editor of this magazine.

‘THE BEST VEHICLE FOR LONG TRIPS HAS TO BE A 1930S ROLLS-ROYCE, WITH ADDED ELECTRIC POWER STEERING’