Introducing... the Peugeot 306

A SWISS Army knife might have dozens of different gizmos attached to it, but none of them are ever quite as good as a individual tool dedicated to doing that one job alone. For much the same reason, I've always believed in having a couple of different cars than entrusting it to a single set of wheels.

How many motors you have to hand depends on a couple of things - largely the size of your wallet and where you keep them when they're not racking up the miles - but for me, three has always been the right balance. The Life On Cars petrolhead mix has always involved having a classic to take to shows, a hairpin hooligan to enjoy on mountain passes on sunny afternoons, and a workhorse for all the less glamorous - but hugely important - mundane tasks.

For years, I've entrusted the first of those two tasks to the trusty MGB and the fun stuff to two Mazda MX-5s, but I haven't been as lucky at finding something that does the unremarkable remarkably. Four years ago, I bought a Renault 5 for just £100, which for eleven months went everywhere from Dumfries to Stonehenge without so much a whimper of complaint, but ended up getting scrapped when the MoT tester discovered the terminal rot around its D-pillars. Its hastily drafted-in replacement, a Rover 214SEi, spent three years conveying Simister junk to tips across Merseyside, but its increasingly sickly-sounding gearbox eventually drove me to sell it last year for half the £300 I paid for it.

I thought it'd be third time with its replacement - a grand's worth of top-spec Ford Mondeo, which behaved impeccably despite helping me develop an unhealthy obsession with its fuel economy. It was the perfect workhorse to compliment the MGB's nostalgia and the MX-5's love of al fresco adventures - or rather, it would have been had a chap decided not to drive his BMW into the back of it. As a result, I've spent almost all of 2014 relying entirely on two-seater sports cars for just about everything.

That's where this S-reg Peugeot 306 comes in. It is - as eagle-eyed readers might have already spotted - exactly the same 1.9 Diesel which I helped my partner's family buy earlier this year, but having just helped them buy a much newer Ford Fiesta they've been more happy to give me the venerable old Pug for a fraction of the price.

It's done 161,000 miles in 15 years, which might sound like a lot but it's got plenty of history to prove it's been cared for throughout its life. It's also got an absolute gem of an engine counting in its favour - PSA's legendary XUD diesel engine, known for their ability to go on forever providing they've been looked after. Naturally, it's not going to win any concours events any time soon and - being a diesel of the old school - it's a bit agricultural on cold mornings, but it's a small price to pay for a 50mpg family hatchback which costs less than some of my pals spend on a night out.

Is it £150 well spent or an expensive repair waiting to happen? I'd like to think it's the former, but that's one of the fun things with buying and running cars for next to nothing. Either way, it means I can go back to the Classic Car Weekly offices in it and have the option of bringing my mountain bike back in it next time.

Try doing that in an MGB GT!

Volkswagen Golf R: Now available in handy estate form!

VOLKSWAGEN needs to get a move on. The coolest car it’s announced in years won’t be going on sale here until next summer, but I get the feeling it’ll be hot stuff in Lapland almost immediately.

There are no prizes for guessing what the Golf R Estate is – it is, put simply, the fastest hot hatch Volkswagen currently offers, with the added bonus of 605 litres of luggage space. Drop the back seats and that more than doubles, meaning you can cart a couple of cupboards home and still get to 60mph in a shade over five seconds.

Anyone who’s familiar with the Audi RS2, the Skoda Octavia RS Estate or the Volvo 850 T5 will know where I’m going with this one; hotted-up estate cars are MUCH cooler than hot hatchbacks. It’s something to do with an entire genre of car associated with antique dealers and Sunday afternoon schleps to B&Q being able to embarrass hot hatches and – as much as I hate to admit it – small sports cars at the lights.

Fast estates are cool because the boys in blue love ‘em too. One of my earliest and most exciting outings was sitting alongside a traffic officer as he reeled in speeding motorists on the roads of North Wales, and he needed something both quick enough to administer a bloody nose to a Golf GTi and capacious enough to carry a set of traffic cones in the back. His weapon of choice was pretty standard issue to most forces at the time. A Skoda Octavia RS Estate, of course.

If you appreciate bonkers-fast estates, you’ll understand why the prospect of a Golf R Estate is far more enticing than the 300bhp hatchback it’s based on, but I also get the feeling its talents would be perfect for a bloke I know who lives up North.

He works in the delivery business and has a big job coming up next month – a job that requires dropping off a heck of a lot of stuff in a single night. Every single year he insists on doing it the old-fashioned way, but the combination of the new arrival’s grand total of 1,606 litres of loadspace, the sure-footedness of the permanent all-wheel-drive system and the 300bhp shove of the 2.0 litre turbo engine would make it perfect for his line of work.

Make no mistake, I reckon my mate Nick would do well to get a Golf R Estate in his garage.

This year's NEC Classic Motor Show was overwhelming but brilliant

PETER Capaldi probably should have landed his TARDIS in the middle of one of Britain’s biggest car shows last weekend.

The National Exhibition Centre might be all the way down in Birmingham but it’s also one of the few shows outside the North West good enough to draw in petrolheads in significant numbers.

Even though I’ve only just got back from four very long days at the NEC, I’d urge anyone thinking of going next year to start planning now. One of Britain’s biggest car shows, I’ve discovered, has an annoying knack of corrupting time and space.

For starters, even though the venue itself isn’t an inch bigger than it was 12 months ago this year’s show somehow managed to squeeze an extra 100 cars in, almost all of which were bathed in the unsettling orange glow you only seem to get from 1970s tungsten lighting. The show itself was also populated by thousands of humanoid beings trudging between the Ford Anglias and Triumph Dolomites; they looked and sounded human, but plenty of them had an unerring ability to talk for hours on end about kingpins and trunnion bearings. I should know, because I’m one of them.

Worst of all, however, is that by depriving you of natural light and overloading you with cars to look at the NEC Classic Motor Show completely screws with your perception of time. The show’s eleven halls had the ability to shrink entire ten-hour days into what felt like twenty minutes, and then to spew out all that vacant time into the period you spend queuing for a Subway meal deal outside. 

Three days to look at 1,800 cars in even the briefest of detail just isn’t enough, which is why if you’re planning on going next year – and if you love cars, you really should – get booking those hotel rooms rather than in 11 months’ time. No matter how blistered your feet end up after wandering around those halls, it’s worth it because of what you get to see.

Despite time and space being utterly warped in this alien, orange-tinged landscape I managed to find plenty of cars to fall in love with. There was, for instance, a one-off Rover P6 rebodied by Zagato, a Ford Capri convertible – a car Ford itself never actually produced – and an utterly wonderful Maserati Sebring I desperately wanted to just drive off the stand and take home. 

Best of all, however, was an unrestored Jaguar XK120, which I could have bought had the NEC’s distortive qualities somehow expanded the tenner in my pocket to £57,000. Maybe next year!

Why the perfect winter car is a hot topic

I SHOULD go to London more than twice a year. Largely because if I did I’d quickly learn that - even in November – tube stations are no places for wearing a wax jacket.

It was slightly surreal wiping the sweat from my brow on the platform at Oxford Circus, contemplating as I waited for my connection to King’s Cross how it could be so hot and humid when I knew just thirty seconds upwards people were buttoning up their coats and popping up their brollies. Never at 8am on a November morning had I wished I’d been wearing shorts!

Sweltering tube stations aside, however, we as a species have got wearing the right clobber for the right conditions nailed. You don’t have to be Ray Mears to work out that wandering up Skiddaw on a snowy morning in a t-shirt isn’t a bright idea, in much the same way that disembarking from Ryanair’s finest at Barcelona is going to be jolly uncomfortable if you’re wearing a woolly hat and a scarf. The same, I’ve long reckoned, goes for cars.

That’s why I’m currently in the process of adding the four-wheeled equivalent of a wax jacket to my motoring wardrobe. For the first time in my motoring career I’ve ended up with the scenario where both my vehicles are what you could call summer cars; rear-wheel-drive two seater sports cars, which are about as suited to chilly commutes as sandals are. What I need, then, is a winter car.

A summer car and a winter car are much better than entrusting everything all year around to just one set of wheels, largely because you can afford to have something fine-tuned to each rather than one blunter instrument which isn’t really ideal for either.

My housemate reckons his Saab 9000 is the winter car, partly because it was developed in Sweden – where they know thing or two about cold mornings – and partly because it has a heater more powerful than Simon Cowell’s influence on The X Factor. Having driven it several time and realised it has to channel upwards of 200bhp onto winter’s slippery roads using its front wheels alone, I’d disagree.

The perfect winter car, I’d wager, would have to be four-wheel-drive to deal with all that treacherous tarmac, quick enough to get you to your destination before the sun sets at 4pm, comfortable enough to ease the winter blues, reliable enough not to let you down first thing on an icy morning AND equipped with a stupendously powerful heater.

In other words the Audi A4 - which means I’ve recommended a car I've never really had much time for. Maybe the heat on the tube’s been getting to me!

The new Jeep that's secretly a small Fiat

GREAT THINGS happen when America and Italy get into bed together.

How else do you explain Spaghetti Westerns, deep pan pizzas and The Godfather Part II? It gets even more special as soon as cars are involved – how else do you explain the Ferrari 250 GT Spyder California – so it was probably only a matter of time before Fiat’s transatlantic tie-up with Chrysler finally came up with the goods.

That’s because the latest unbelievably rugged offering from Jeep is, if you peel away all the Action Man packaging, basically the four-wheel-drive Fiat 500X unveiled earlier this year.

In fact, it’s more than that; because it’s built around the underpinnings developed by Fiat for its small cars (the company’s imaginatively-titled ‘Small’ platform) the new Jeep Renegade is also a distant relation to the Fiat Punto, the Alfa Romeo MiTo and – by virtue of the firm’s previous infatuations with General Motors  - the Vauxhall Adam.

The fact the Jeep Renegade manages to do the motoring equivalent melting down a Barbie doll, putting it back together and flogging it on a second time as a G.I Joe action figure is all down what the car industry called platform sharing. Ever wondered why a Volkswagen Golf and a SEAT Leon feel strangely similar to drive, or why the Toyota Aygo and the Peugeot 108 have the same vigour for small, twisty roads? It’s because under the skin they’re basically the same.

In the new Renegade’s case, it’s a bit like Fiat taking two pizzas and lavishing them with radically different toppings – olives and pineapples for the Fiat 500X, and every red meat imaginable for the muscular, macho Jeep. It’s great news for the car makers because they can sell the same basic product to two completely different sets of people.

Would I ever buy a slightly bloated version of the Fiat 500 that’s then been given four-wheel-drive to remove it even further from the 1950s micro marvel it roughly apes? No. Chances are, however, that I would buy something that looks a bit like the Jeep Cherokees which were all the rage here a decade or so ago, but shrunk down to make it more manageable in a Britain where petrol costs £1.30 a litre.

After what feels like an eternity of being treated to blobbily-proportioned family hatchbacks which only vaguely resemble off-roaders, it’s great that Fiat’s small car know-how has finally given Jeep the chance to make something which actually looks the part.

Fingers crossed it’s as good off the road as it’s Fiat-developed siblings are on it.