The Volkswagen XL1 is more important than you might think

I CAN only conclude David Cameron’s vow to get tough on all those City bankers is finally having an effect.

Why else would Volkswagen launch a car which – as far as I can tell – is designed specifically with them in mind? The rising stars of RBS, HBOS and Lloyds have long had a fascination with flashy German metal, as evidenced by all those Porsche 944 Turbos the Gordon Gekko generation drove in the 1980s and all the Audi R8s which have been lining London’s shinier streets these last few years.

However, all those efforts to get tough on bankers’ bonuses must be having an effect because the latest bit of German exotica to hit Britain’s roads uses a combination of an 800cc diesel engine and an electric motor rather than a whopping great V10. It’s also considerably smaller than a Ford Fiesta, won’t do 100mph and will be comprehensively outdragged at the lights by a diesel Skoda Fabia.

Yet the Volkswagen XL1 costs £98,515, making it more expensive than the BMW M5, the Porsche 911, the Maserati Granturismo and the Jaguar F-type. In essence, it’s a small city car you’d need to be on a Fred Goodwin-esque salary to even contemplate affording – and I still love it.

The XL1, aside from having a wonderfully sci-fi moniker which renders it cool in an instant, is significant because it opens up a whole new front in the long-running war of the supercars. Put simply, it does for MPG what the McLaren F1 and the Bugatti Veyron did for MPH. I’m aware of the irony of blowing the best part of a hundred grand on a car which takes saving money at the pumps to the extreme, but it somehow ekes 282 miles out a gallon. Try doing that in your Ecoboost Focus.


Doing 282mpg would – at the current going rate for diesel - get you from The Champion’s front door to Land’s End for a little over £8, and in a mad miniature two-seater which looks a bit like a Mercedes 300SL Gullwing crossed with something out of The Jetsons. Somehow, I think pursuing the edges of what’s possible with fuel economy has got to be more relevant than the battle to be the first out with a production car that does more than 300mph. In the same way the Jaguar XK120 eventually gave us everyday hatchbacks that could crack 120mph, maybe one day we’ll all be driving cars that do upwards of 200 to a gallon.

The first time I see some City stockbroker type driving an XL1 won’t be a moment of utter contempt. It’ll be quiet respect for someone test-piloting the future.

Fire up the.... Suzuki Swift Sport (again)

THE Suzuki Swift Sport isn't perfect and it's a car of few superlatives, but it is brilliant.

That’s exactly the verdict I reached two years ago when I last drove the Japanese firm’s addictively entertaining junior hot hatch, and just about the only thing I could find to mark it down on was that it lost a little of the Mk1 version’s edge by becoming a little better in just about every other area. It was – and still is – a superb little streetfighter of a car which punches well above its weight.

Why then, the need to test it again?

Put simply, Suzuki has opened doors to anyone previously put off by the sprightliest of the Swifts. In true pocket rocket tradition, the Swift Sport has until very recently only been available as a three-door hatchback, a configuration which benefits its aggressive stance and suits the model’s youthful target market perfectly, but it means plenty of keener drivers with families to look after have had to look elsewhere. That’s why it’s great to see Suzuki finally offering the Sport with the full five-strong compliment of doors, as you can get throughout the rest of the Swift range.

Happily, the £500 translation from three-door to five-door hasn’t affected the aesthetics – true, a five-door is never going to look as single-mindedly sporty, but you still get the deep double grille at the front, a cheeky spoiler, a twin helping of exhausts at the back, and some added practicality in the middle.

Anyone looking for a polished all-round supermini isn’t going to find the Swift perfect –with the best will in the world, it’s starting to show its age – but keen drivers will forgive it because of the consistently smile-inducing way it craves corners and the revvy demeanour of its 1.6 litre, 136bhp engine.

There’s a wonderfully old-school charm to its handling and the whole car begs you to take it by the scruff of its neck and make the most of its petite dimensions. It is, to all extents and purposes, a sort of Greatest Hits compilation of all the best characteristics of the classic hot hatches of the 1980s, and all the more loveable for it.

It’s just that, with a £14,499 price tag, five doors and a very 2014 helping of safety clobber, it’s vaguely sensible too.

Sorry Renault, I can't quite capture the point of the Captur

A MATE of mine has taken leave of his senses. He’s about to blow five thousand of his carefully-earned pounds on a Triumph Stag.

Followers of automotive folklore will happily bore you rigid with stories about why this Seventies convertible has a home-brewed V8 with a habit of overheating, a body with a penchant for rot in places you wouldn’t imagine possible and a reputation for raiding your bank balance if you buy a bad ‘un. However, I understand said mate’s obsession with the Stag completely because it ticks all three boxes of what I look for in a car. It looks fantastic, makes a great noise and it's a pleasure to drive.

In an idealist, bedroom-wall-poster sort of way all cars would satisfy this holy trinity of petrolhead perfection. However, I’m a grown up so I’ve developed an alternative checklist for cars that aren’t Triumph Stags – normal cars on normal roads need to look passably nice, but more importantly drive in a sensibly pleasing way and have an interior that’s bearable on long journeys.

That’s why a weekend with one of Renault’s latest offerings left me with more questions than it answered, because it didn't really tick any of the boxes.

I was actually quietly excited when a Captur arrived on the driveway, particularly because my dad – for reasons I’m still not sure – insisted on calling it the much more menacing-sounding “Raptor”. It’s an important car for the French firm because it’s a crossover – a sort-of hatchback-meets-off-roader, once you translate the word from Marketing back into English. Given Renault’s links with Nissan, who conquered the crossover kingdom with the Qashqai and Juke, I was keen to see if some of the Japanese cars’ sparkle had rubbed off on their Gallic cousin.

Yet after 300 miles on just about every type of road imaginable, I couldn’t quite capture the essence of the Captur.

What Renault appears to have done is taken the Clio, a car which is great because it’s small, pretty and quite nice to drive, and made it bigger, uglier and not very nice to drive. There’s plenty of room for you and four passengers in the cabin, but the boot space, at 455 litres, just isn’t enough to carry all their clobber. The 90bhp 1.5 DCi engine in the version I tested was smooth and quick enough on paper, with the dash to 60mph being dealt with in 12.6 seconds, but in the real world it just didn’t feel lively enough.

All of that, however, pales into insignificance with the biggest question the Captur asks. Why would you spend the best part of £12,000 on a car which has – and I choose my words carefully – a truly nasty interior? It’s well equipped and festooned with airbags, which is great, but the last time I saw plastics that cheap was in a branch of Woolworth’s. The steering wheel, in particular, has a scratchy texture which makes sliding it through your palms an unpleasant experience.

Don’t get me wrong; Renault makes some great cars, including a hatchback that’s usefully bigger than the Clio. It’s called the Megane.  

Fire up the... Dacia Sandero 1.2 Access

THE Nokia 3310 is one of the world’s best selling mobile phones.

There was a time when everybody seemed to have one, and in a way I miss its simple, unpretentious charms. Why spend a fortune on a slick, 4G-guided piece of smartphone technology which can shoot movie footage and let you play Angry Birds simultaneously which you need to charge up every few hours? What was wrong with a cheap, no-frills phone which does nothing other than call your mum and text your mates, but lasted four days on a single charge and was practically indestructible? 

The same argument goes for cars too – there are far too many motors these days with radar-guided cruise control and iPod connectivity, but not nearly enough which offer the four-wheels-and-a-roof simplicity plenty of today’s recession ravaged drivers are looking for.

Which is where Dacia’s £5,995 entry-level Sandero – drumroll please, Britain’s cheapest new car – steps in.

For your fiver short of six grand it’ll have to be the base Access version, which manages to contradict Henry Ford by coming in any colour you like as long as it’s white, with some black bumpers and 15-inch steel wheels to let passers by know you’ve opted for this Nokia 3310 of cars.

Not surprisingly, it’s deliberately deprived of many of the luxuries you’d expect from a new hatchback in 2014, with the windows firmly of the wind-up variety and the cheap, plastic dashboard lacking the plethora of buttons you’d get in most other supermini offerings. However, you really can’t deny that in terms of offering a brand new and reasonably well built family car for as little as possible it hits a bullseye; the days of Britain’s cheapest new car being badly thrown together Eastern Bloc obscurities are long gone. 

The  Sandero masters offering four seats, four doors a roof and reliability but little else besides. The 75bhp 1.2 litre petrol engine, for instance, isn’t especially refined and feels gutless compared to other offerings of its size. There is an innate ability hidden within the Renault-engineered hatchback’s handling, but the harshness of the noise and vibrations mean it’s not something you’d particularly enjoy using on a longer journey.

More worryingly, I’m not even convinced that it particularly excels at being value for money. Throw in even basic equipment you’d get as standard elsewhere and the price quickly stacks up – for the sake of an extended warranty, a spare wheel and a CD player the Sandero I tested became a £6,245 car – and heavy depreciation means most of the money you save initially is unlikely to be recouped when you sell up. That’s before you get to the intelligent question of warranty, because while Kia’s entry-level Picanto might cost two grand more than the Sandero, you get a far more modern design with a seven year warranty as standard.

The prospect of having a brand new car on your drive for less than six grand might sound pretty tempting, but I’m struggling to make the sums add up.

Don't miss out on the Lydiate Classic Car Show

CLASSIC car fans are being urged to help raise cash for charity by heading to a show in Lydiate next month.

The team behind the Lydiate Classic Car Show said this year’s event will take place at the parish hall between 10am and 4pm on Sunday, July 6. The bustling one-day event, which helps to raise much-needed funds for Cancer Research UK, attracts scores of classic cars from across the North West.

Ben Spears, one of the event's organisers, told Life On Cars: "It's the largest charity car show in the Merseyside and West Lancashire area, it has the cheapest entrance fee, and it's got a great atmosphere because there's no competition or snobbery, just lots of likeminded enthusiasts looking at each others' cars.

"It's an old school show for true petrol heads, and every car and owner and visitor is a winner for supporting a great cause."

The show which costs £2 to attend and has room for 200 cars, is open to all makes and model of classic car and motorbike.

All funds raised by the event will go towards helping Cancer Research UK - so far, the show has aready raised more than £10,000 for the charity. If you're interested in getting involved, send an email to classiccar@cheerful.com

My MGB: to restore or not to restore?

YOU’D think with all the hours of online research, pub-based debating and burying my head in obscure books that I’ve got a dissertation to hand in. 

Yet in some ways, the question I’ve got to answer at some point this summer is actually even more challenging. What ought I to do with a tatty old classic car which I’ve developed an unfortunate attachment to? 

It’s a question that’s been vexing me ever since my four-wheeled companion emerged from the MOT station back in March. Regular readers might remember my classic car, an MGB GT which arrived at the Simister household four years ago on the back of a trailer after spending at least a decade hidden away on a farm in the Lake District. Since then, it’s been on all sorts of adventures, plodding to car shows across the North West, parading past Blenheim Palace on a classic car rally and – on a day I’d actually rather forget – being thrashed to within an inch of its life around a track by race ace Barrie ‘Whizzo’ Williams. 

It’s also – considering I bought it for just £200 – had quite a lot of love, time and money lavished upon it over the past few years. Yet as I discovered during its last trip to the MOT station back in March, it still isn’t enough. 

In short, I’m looking down the barrel of an MGB restoration that’ll almost certainly cost more than the finished product’s worth. 

While the bits that make the old girl go, stop and steer have long since been sorted out, leaving me with a car that at least drives in the wonderfully analogue, old-school way an MG should, the repair bill for sorting out the rot that’s slowly eating away at its wings, sills and valances looks set to run into the thousands. 

So the million dollar question – well, the six-to-eight grand question to be truthful – is whether I should.

I’ve met chaps at shows who’ve happily spent the price of a brand new Fiesta on transforming their tatty old classics into gleaming show winners, used them sparingly for a few years, and then sold them on for half their outgoings. Despite my best Man Maths (if you’ve ever tried to justify buying or restoring an old piece of automotive tat despite the complaints of a cynical wife or girlfriend, you’ll know what I mean) I’m not sure if I can bring myself to do the same. 

Put simply – would you throw thousands of pounds at a tatty old car or spend the same amount on a tidy Triumph Spitfire, a cheap TVR or a gleaming Peugeot 205 GTI? Answers on a postcard to the usual  address.

This 4C-engined Alfa Romeo Giulietta might not be the fastest hot hatch, but it is the coolest

A NEW hatchback which shares the same heart as Alfa Romeo’s 4C sports car will go on sale later this summer.

The Quadrifoglio Verde – or Cloverleaf, roughly translated into English – version of the Giulietta shares the same 240bhp engine as the mid-engined sports car tested last week by Life On Cars, but offers it in a more practical, five-door hatchback package.

The Italian manufacturer said of its latest hot hatch: "Under the bonnet lies a thoroughbred Alfa Romeo power-plant: The all-aluminium engine first seen in the Alfa Romeo 4C supercar. The four-cylinder, direct-injection, 1750 Turbo Petrol engine delivers 240hp at 5,750rpm and 250lb/ft (340Nm) of torque between 2,000 and 4,000rpm with 80 percent available from just 1,800rpm.

"In addition to the 1750 Turbo Petrol engine, the state-of-the-art, six-speed ALFA TCT twin dry clutch transmission has also been inherited from the Alfa Romeo 4C supercar. While the adoption of ALFA TCT as standard ensures more comfortable and relaxing day-to-day use, it also translates into a more exciting drive when the mood takes the drive."

While it's not the fastest hot hatch on the market or the most powerful - the new SEAT Leon Cupra offers up a pulverising 280bhp, while Volkswagen's Golf R closes in on 300bhp - the prospect of an charismatic Italian hatchback with an engine developed with a mid-engined supercar in miniature in mind does have a certain cool factor from the off.

The fastest Giulietta yet will cost £28,120 when it goes on sale across the UK next month.

It's not the car that Google will use to transform modern motoring

ONE of the biggest developments in modern motoring comes courtesy of some Americans and the indisputable giant of the internet. Yet it’s probably not the one you’re expecting.

Chances are, you’ll probably have caught sight of Google’s driverless car by now, and already made your mind up. Even though I love getting behind the wheel and chatting excitedly about very non-Google topics like steering and handling, the idea of having a car that takes the really mundane aspects of motoring out of the equation does have a certain appeal.

It’s a shame Google have made what’s obviously meant to be a serious contender for the future of cars look like a weird cross between a Fiat 500 and something out of an episode of Pokémon, but that’s not the biggest problem the company faces. Every other Friday night, I already take part in a car-sharing scheme which takes the driving out of the equation; I use my smartphone to summon a car, and within five minutes a Vauxhall Vectra pulls up outside, ready to whisk me to a destination of my choosing for a small fee. Google’s boffins should try it sometime. It’s brilliant!

In all seriousness, though, I reckon Google was at the centre of a far more important automotive development earlier this year, and it went largely unreported. Back in January, a San Diego woman was taken to court for driving while watching a television; it’s just that the “television” in question was her Google Glass, a set of hi-tech spectacles straight from the imagination of Gerry Anderson, which allow you to overlay virtual information over what your eyes are seeing.

In the end, the case was dropped but it nearly prompted the worrying precedent of seeing the computerised eyepiece being banned as a motoring aid (which, in the UK, it still could be). Google Glass, for now at least, has the potential to be far more useful to you or I as a visual aid while driving, using its sophisticated augmented reality to remind of the speed limit or show you where that elusive right turn up the road actually is.

Obviously, its use as an automotive tool would have to be strictly controlled in order to prevent carefree drivers from watching reruns of Fawlty Towers while on the move, but I seriously do believe that Google glasses are far more relevant to real world motoring than Google cars are.

I look forward, in true Tomorrow’s World style, to being proven completely wrong in five years’ time.

Fire up the... Alfa Romeo 4C

YOU know as soon as you sink into the 4C’s leather-lined bucket seats that it isn’t like Alfa’s other offerings.

True, this slice of Italian exotica might share the same turbocharged 1.8 litre engine that you’ll find in the range-topping versions of the family-friendly Giulietta, but it’s been tuned to 240bhp. It’s also mid-engined, rear-wheel-drive and offers up room for you and just one of your friends in its snug cockpit, making it feel more like a Ferrari that shrunk in the wash!

The first thing you’ll notice when clambering in through the 4C’s curves is that it’s left-hand-drive, but don’t let that put you off if you’re in the lucky position of being able to afford one of the Milan manufacturer’s most striking offerings in years. It’s very similar to the cheaper Lotus Elise in terms of its size, and layout, and while its supercar-esque haunches make the 4C initially feel wider than it really is it soon shrinks around you and inspires plenty of confidence.

With the carbonfibre-clothed 4C weighing just 895kg, Alfa didn’t bother with power steering, and it’s all the better for it. Its low centre of gravity and light weight means this car thrives on tight, twisty roads, entertaining you with its feel and handling and utterly charming you with the charismatic howl from the engine and the whoosh of the turbocharger when you press on. The double clutch gearbox, operated from paddles mounted on the steering wheel, is also a joy to use, and you’re soon left in doubt the 4C is a truly special set of wheels to drive.

In fact, the only real letdown is that the interior doesn’t wow you in the way that wonderfully curvaceous exterior does – anyone familiar with the Giulietta or MiTo will feel instantly at home, but when you’re driving it’ll be other motorists appreciating the aesthetics most.

It might also seem expensive – particularly because the particular test car I drove came with a handling pack, costing an extra £3,500 on top of the £45,000 starting price. Think of it as a shrunken Ferrari, however, and it suddenly makes sense.

The 4C has the looks, the presence and the noise fit for any Italian supercar – it just happens to cost the quarter of the price of a 458 Italia. Count me in!