Andrew Frankel: Car enthusiasts love to drive — even if it’s 800 miles in a Dacia Duster

First job of the new year? Drive a Dacia Duster from Wales to Belgium and back to attend the AGM of the Car of the Year jury on which I sit. Eight hundred miles in 36 hours and I didn’t mind one bit.

The point about true car enthusiasts lost on so many who either are not, or merely think that they are, is that we just love to drive, and if we happen to be driving something exciting that’s merely a very welcome bonus.

I can remember setting out to prove this point a few years ago when I did one of those traditional supercar drive stories – all plunging mountain roads and craggy vistas – with the only twist being it was in what was then Britain’s cheapest car, which happened to be another Dacia called a Sandero.

And my view is that so long as you’re making progress and there’s nothing actively infuriating about the car, that’s enough. You may not be writing about it in your memoirs, but you’ll have a perfectly pleasant time doing it. And so I did all over again in the Duster.

I was irked slightly by the rock-hard door moulding where my right elbow rested, the absence of even a bass and treble control for the very mediocre stereo and the way the four-speed (yes) automatic transmission would make the engine yell along even quite gentle motorway inclines, but there was far more about it I liked. The seats were excellent as was the visibility; the ride was more than good enough and when the weather got truly filthy with sleet, snow and driving rain, it never looked like deviating from my chosen path. I was almost sad to see it go.

“The Duster’s seats were excellent and the ride was more than good enough”

I am writing this, as I do so much of my output, seven miles above the surface of the planet. I’m on one of British Airways’ smart new A350 wide-bodied jets and have just put down The Economist in which there was a story about how aircraft are recycled. Many planes go to the scrapper before their time because modern aircraft are so much more efficient than those they are replacing. And it quoted this very aircraft as using fully 25% less fuel than its predecessors. Which got me thinking.

The A350 replaced the A340 and is different in two significant ways, one obvious, one not. The former is that it has two engines rather than four, the latter that its body is made largely from carbon fibre. I love aircraft like this and the rival Boeing 787 because the strength of their fuselages means they can be pressurised to a lower altitude than aluminium machines, which means less jet lag for you and me. Airlines, however, love them because they are light. An A350-1000 has a maximum take-off weight of 319,000kg, the figure for the closest equivalent A340 – the 600 model – is 368,000kg despite similar passenger carrying capacity. The A350 consumes 2.9 litres of fuel per 100km per passenger compared to the older aircraft’s 4.1 litres.

To me this is extraordinary progress and the reason is simple: airlines pay for the fuel in their aircraft, not passengers whose ticket price doesn’t change whether the plane on which they’re travelling is a 20-year-old gas guzzler or was delivered last week. And fuel is by far the largest cost of any airline. But it also says to me that cars are getting heavier and more wasteful of the world’s resources because there’s insufficient incentive for them to be made lighter. Most customers neither know nor care what their car weighs. I’m not saying for a moment that all cars should be made from carbon fibre as that would be clearly ridiculous, but I have no doubt that almost every modern car could be far lighter than it is if it were worth the manufacturer’s while to make it so. And until someone does make it worthwhile, heavier they will become. A tax on kerbweight? I don’t like the idea but it may be that, ultimately, is the only thing that will turn this ship around.

And if I may now be allowed to completely contradict myself, I spent Christmas in the company of one of Bentley’s new hybridised Continental GTs, all nearly 2.5 tonnes of it. The weather was not kind, and anything else similarly exotic would have had a rather quiet time of it. But with its effortless torque, four-wheel drive and vault-like interior I used it as my daily regardless. I was reminded once more that however much you may enjoy driving a car in fine conditions, if you’d rather not when it was foul, that’s a whole lot of use you’re not getting out of it. In the Bentley that never looked likely to be a problem.

Can this year really be the 30th anniversary of McLaren’s extraordinary and to date only win at Le Mans? I was there, as I have been for the majority of them since 1988, and I still rank it among the finest spectacles I’ve witnessed. It had it all: the McLaren F1 that was never designed to race, the short-development programme, the last-minute entry by a car owned by the factory but apparently not a factory car, appalling weather conditions in which no F1 had ever raced, the transmissions that were never meant to go the distance, the last-gasp heartbreak for the Harrods car, the resurgent Andretti Courage threatening a win of historic proportion and the eventual victory of a car that was never meant to be in the race. Vintage stuff.

Porsche Macan 4 electric 

Review

Gives the Turbo a run for its money 
Recently I reviewed the electric Macan Turbo and concluded I’d probably get on better with the lighter, simpler, cheaper entry level car. I can now confirm this. The Macan 4 still puts over 400bhp under your foot, still hits 62mph in a blink more than 5sec, but costs over £25,000 less.
Verdict: Feels more ‘real’ than the Turbo.

‘New Polo’ is on its way

Coming Soon

ID.2 could be a new beginning for VW
The ID.2 will aim to be to the ID.3 what the Polo has always been to the Golf. But the ID.3 is a whole lot better now than it used to be but I suspect it’ll be the ID.2 that shows what a chastened VW can really achieve. I have a hunch this may mark the company’s reset after a torrid 10 years.

Jag looks back to XJ pomp

Insider News

After the re-branding, the hard work begins… 
Staff at Jaguar working on the new electric car heralded by that relaunch have been treated to a day driving its classic models. There was a favourite, in terms of what a new Jag should feel like: the XJ coupé, from which the Broadspeed XJ12 racer, above, was developed. A grand tourer but with a sporting edge. Sounds good to me.