My daughter has just bought her first car. Ordinarily this would be no big deal. All daughters buy a first car at some point. But the daughter I’m talking about is only 10 years old.
She did the right thing: saved her pocket money, pretended to believe in the tooth fairy and hoarded cheques from her grandmother until she had £50. Enough to buy an M-registered Ford Fiesta 1.3 with a radio that doesn’t work, no MoT, wind-down windows and the ultimate 1980s luxury — a lift-out sunshine roof.
Of course, when the time comes, she’ll be able to part-exchange it and get £2,000 from Cash Gordon but until then she’ll be using it in our paddock. Getting all the “need for speed” out of her system so that when she’s old enough to go on the roads, she won’t end up in a tree or, like her dad, on television, endlessly going round corners, shouting.
Obviously, the job of teaching her how to drive it fell to me, but before we could actually set off, we had to have a lesson in how to get an M-registered Ford Fiesta going. This involves a lot of looking under the stairs and in all the kitchen cabinets, shouting: “Where are the bloody jump leads?”
Soon, though, as the poor child’s enthusiasm waned, we had the bonnet up and the leads connected and we were treated to the unmistakable sound of a starter motor clicking uselessly. “This is your first lesson, darling. All jump leads, no matter how much you spend, don’t work.”
We were therefore faced with the prospect of a bump start. And there’s a dilemma if ever you’ve seen one. Do you put a 10-year-old child, who has never driven a car, in the driving seat and do the pushing yourself? Or do you get behind the wheel and expect her to push a ton of metal?
In fact, what you do is go back to shouting at the jump leads and making sparks until eventually, usually after about three hours, the little Ford’s rusty old 1.3 will cough into life.
And so it begins. “Right, sweetheart. I want you to let your foot off the clutch pedal very smoothly and very slowly while keeping the revs up with the throttle pedal. Okay. Okay. That’s good. Oh, never mind. You’ve stalled. Doesn’t matter, darling. Don’t cry. Everyone stalls when they first learn. Just turn the key and let’s start again …”
But, of course, we couldn’t start again because the battery was still flat. Which meant I had to charge it up, which is why I spent an hour last bank holiday Monday driving round and round our paddock in a £50 Ford Fiesta.
God, it was fun. I pounded my way round so often that soon a circuit began to form in the long grass, and then, as I pounded some more, I started to experiment with the handbrake and the apexes … and the stopwatch.
My daughter, I’m afraid, learnt nothing at all during this time. She just sat in the passenger seat, bouncing. But I learnt, once again, that anything with an internal combustion engine gives you just the biggest adrenaline rush when you remove it from the clutches of the authorities. Behaving yourself in a Ferrari simply cannot be as much of a laugh as running wild in a small half-broken Ford in a field full of buttercups.
Once, I spent two weeks in an upmarket hotel, dining three times a day on exotic seafood in unusual sauces. It was great. But by the time the holiday ended, I wanted a cauliflower. I wanted a chicken leg, cold with some sandwich spread. I would have torn out my own eyes for a poached egg on toast.
What’s more, exotic cars, with their flappy paddles and their five-way traction control systems and their switchable throttle responses, have a habit of masking the purity of the simple internal combustion that lies within. I feel this with the 6-series BMW and the Mercedes CL especially. The basic ingredients might be fresh and superb but all you ever taste is the electronic sauce.
That old Ford Fiesta and the freedom of a paddock rekindled the love I have for cars and the need to get back to basics. So let me introduce you to the subject of this morning’s missive: the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
Obviously, this is a very stupid name. Urban Cruiser makes it sounds like a predatory homosexual, stalking inner-city lavatories at night in search of some George Michaelism. The test car I drove reinforced this by being purple.
Whatever, it is designed for the city —and that’s stupid too. Because, in my experience, urbanites go to work on a bus or the Tube and then use their car to go somewhere far away at the weekend. And, trust me on this, the Urban Cruiser is not going to get you very far at all before you are overcome by a need to step outside and commit suicide.
The problem is the 1.3-litre engine, which develops such a small amount of power that by the time you reach the end of the motorway slip road you are doing only 56mph — the same speed as all the trucks on the inside lane. Which means you are faced with a choice: pull out and be crushed, or brake and spend the rest of your life sitting there waiting for the 200-mile gap this car needs to pull out safely. It’s idiotically slow. Dangerously slow.
It also suffers from the same problems that afflicted the Citroën C3 Picasso that I didn’t like on these pages a few weeks ago. In short, it’s a normal little hatchback with a boxy body dumped on top. What’s the point? Unless you have a job delivering hat stands.
You end up with something that has the same number of seats but is worse to drive, more thirsty and slower than the small car on which it’s based. The Yaris, in this case.
And here’s the clincher. The Urban Cruiser, with no sat nav and pleblon seats, costs £14,500. That makes it more expensive — much more expensive — than a Mini or the normal Yaris, which isn’t exactly bargain basement in the first place.
And yet, perhaps because I was in the mood for some broad beans in a parsley sauce, rather than a boned pigeon in a reduction of some kind, I rather enjoyed my time with the Cruiser.
The optional satellite navigation system was easy to use, the trim felt durable and there were seven airbags to help out if I hit a bus shelter. What’s more, the bonnet is designed to be soft and comfy if it crashes into a person, and even the wiper bracket is designed to disintegrate if it comes into contact with the skull of someone who had been a pedestrian until he was launched into the air by the duvet draped over the engine.
Mind you, a better and even more comfortable way of not being hurt by this car is simply to stroll out of its way.
From behind the wheel, things are better still. If you join motorways at their source rather than via a slip road and if you avoid built-up areas, where people laugh openly at the name, it is possible to enjoy this car. It steers nicely and bounces like a small dog when pushed.
