Clarkson's Car Years - Family Car 2000

this Mercedes smart car is so tiny that even park it in nose onto the pavement you might think it's very clever but it isn't really I mean designing a small car is easy just means you end up with a small interior this one doesn't even have any back seats yeah it's easy to design a supercar - because you don't have to worry your pretty little head about boot spacer running costs you just have to make it go fast and anyone can do that just put a big engine in it then there's the luxury saloon and what exactly is hard about designing a big car and then nailing some wood to the dashboard a few extra dials and switches bit of extra soundproofing and away you go but a family car now that is almost impossible you see it must be capable of taking all this daddy mummy their three children their Kluber and the dog now you could do this by making the car big but unfortunately it's an overcrowded world so it must be small and it must also be capable of crashing into a concrete block forty miles an hour without causing any injury whatsoever to the people inside this means the family car must be immensely strong with beams and membranes and crossmembers and side impact bars and strengthening material and air bags and that means it ends up being and technically heavy now to move all this weight around means you need more fuel of course you might argue that's a small price to pay but with petrol currently costing around four pounds a gallon it isn't it's a huge price to pay so we won't what these people want from a family car is something that's safe and heavy but also economical and fast they want 35 miles to the gallon a top speed of 115 miles an hour total reliability air conditioning is standard and they absolutely will not pay more than 15,000 pounds for it so what you're complaining about cuz that's exactly what you've got here the Ford Focuses chocolate cake that makes you thin it's a cigarette which cures cancer it's classical literature that's fun to read danny is happier because there's a rally version which gives his wheels some cred the dog is happy because it's on television mummys happy because there's a low load insole for her shopping and because there are three seat belts in the back the children are happy too even the neighbors are happy the focus is cheap economical fast fun to drive small safe handy and spacious it is perfect so why than you almost never see such a car on the school run you see the problem is simple the focus is fine until Victoria here decides that she'd like to bring her friend along and at that precise moment it becomes completely and utterly useless and this means the traditional five-seat family car is no good at all for a family they need something bigger in 1985 Renault Espace was seen as an answer to all our dreams no larger than a normal car but able to seek 7 it was the perfect answer from a country with Catholic ethics on birth control emember the first time I drove one of these things I was just stunned you could have knocked me down with a small pork chop I mean I knew it had a a Renault Fuego chassis and it had an ordinary 2-liter engine but it was just so uncaring to drive the windscreen was so far away you needed binoculars to see if the wipers were working and inside the seats fold in' swiveled and tilted and danced the dance it was in bed it was a conference room it was the future and pretty soon all the other motor manufacturers left under the bandwagon but then people started to say hold on a bit why should I need to have a conference in my car I can have one at the office and will they do I need a bedroom in here I've got one at home peel away the frills and the people carrier could be seen in its true colors it's a ram it's a plastic van with electric windows and that made the whole concept deeply uncool seth has tried to trend if I the people carrier by jazzing it out it's important to remember that no matter how many TV screens they put in the headrests and how big the wheels are the people carrier is just that a people carrier like a bus it isn't desperately practical either not if you're having people over for the weekend you need to stock up on cheese look at this look look look look Wensleydale with blue breeze bouncing over at all parfaits sink that's better got some proper space for for cheap great except for one little problem the seats have to stay in the shop mind you this is where they belong as I pointed out a few years ago on top gear you certainly don't want your children sitting on them sitting right back here I find it hard to relax in this or indeed any other people carrier you see if you get punted up the backside in an ordinary estate car there's a lot of metal behind you to absorb the energy of the impact it's called the crumple zone but in this I'm right up against the tailgate my head is that far from the glass I would be extremely nervous about letting my children sit back here some firms have tried to address this by making their people carriers bigger but it hasn't worked at all the VW Caravelle for example really is a van and so is the Mercedes V Plus then there's the long-wheelbase Chrysler Grand Voyager it's not a van but in a recent safety report it was the only vehicle to score a lot in the front impact test oh dear so to summarize the people carrier can do people and cheese but not the saint they have no street cred there are safety worries they're too unwieldy and I hate all of them except one like most people carry as the Vauxhall Zafira can seat seven with those in the back jammed right up against the rear tailgate but unlike most people carriers it's normal to drive it feels just like the Astra on which it's based not brilliant but not big or bad what makes this car so special is that most of the time it is a five seater with a big boot but when do you need those two extra seats you don't have to go next door and ask big muscley Bob to get them out of the garage for you know what you do is you just press this little I'd the middle bench as far forward as it will go and that way when you open up the tailgate look there they are and even me who's 100% pure fat can get them up that easily they even come look with proper 3-point seatbelts so if this cars so clever and it is how come we aren't seeing them everywhere what's wrong with it yes it's a Vauxhall an 8-track badge in a cd-rom world however rather than drift away from the people carrier back toward the family hatchback mothers have started to swarm in tightly organized groups of two hundred thousand or so toward the four-wheel drive off-road car really and truly it's hard to think of a more inappropriate selection of family cars than this this is what off-roaders were built to do not this if you trace the four-wheel-drive country cars family history you end up here the Wills Jeep it even formed the basis of the original Land Rover but it was Land Rover on their own who went on to create the spark the car that took off road is out of the mud and put them into Knightsbridge the Range Rover vogue was the first to marry chunky go anywhere ability with ballgown luxury and style it unlocked the floodgates and soon there was a river of Steel outside every school playground in sw3 and then after the school runs some of them head off to take up more space than is strictly necessary in the gym carpark you see them at the supermarket - and this is madness if everyone in London change their off-roaders for something smaller the length of every Jam would be harmed at a stroke and think of the fuel savings okay what I'm doing now is a very simple test I'm filling this 4.6 liter Range Rover Vogue se up to the brim with petrol hold on a sec I mean right think you'll agree this is now full yes now what I'm going to do is take it for a little Drive then we're going to come back and fill it up again and we'll see just how many miles to the gallon this thing is actually doing alright all I have to do now is zero the trip there we go and we're ready let's on road you I love driving Range Rovers and I've never actually been able to put my finger on why I mean yes it's got a high driving position but lots of cars have that yes it's got a big v8 lots of cars have one of those it's got one but so what so's a Jag I think really it's a it's a combination of everything up a knowledge a surefire knowledge that you're Inuk salute best of the best now this thing is fuel-injected and you might think that the fuel injectors are like three hypodermic needles delivering neat quantities of atomized fuel into the cylinders well they're not what you need to do is think more in terms of eight burly Flyman squirting the petrol in through their hoses okay now I've been driving around for a couple of hours in the sort of stop-start city traffic that you get when you have taking the kids to school or going to work and I've done 41.7 miles and what I'm going to do now is fill it up the brim again little brim it so it's all just spurting out that's going to be come on let's go that's it twenty point eight five liters and now we have to do the maths okay that's twenty point eight five liters now we'll convert that from euro babble into English by dividing it by four point five four six equals four point five eight gallons and make a note of that pour point five eight six four gallons okey doke now then we did 41 point seven miles divided by four point five eight six four miles to the gallon coming up everybody know nine miles to the gallon I tell you people who have off-road cars are stupid and man they should be driven from the roads and birched to within an inch of their lives off-road cars are dark antisocial and idiotic and the people who drive them are fools this is mine it's a four liter 24 valve six cylinder two and a half ton what's the word monster well I need an off-roader because where I live the routes into town are so congested that the best way to score is down here night bye have you go exploiting the right to roam can save 20 minutes a day and that's worthwhile but more important than this is the safety there's the sort of vehicle that if somebody hits you you you'd be very confident that's trapped in here you know you wouldn't be hurt it helps on a country lane is being at home and that's nice means you can look down on lesser mortals in their ordinary cars but it means that the off-roader has to have a high center of gravity and that's not so nice if you need to take emergency action on a motorway it's more likely to rollover than a normal car and then we are braking or rather we don't so all things considered the off-road car is not good at avoiding accidents what however it's very good at is dealing with them once they happen in a crash with a normal car as you can see the off-roader is clearly the place to be four-wheel drive cars then alike nuclear weapons if one person has one men for protection so must everyone else horrified at the thought well don't worry you don't have to change yourself for the railings at Land Rover's Factory just wait til petrol hits seven pounds a gallon then see how many they sell so what have we establish so far well we know that the ordinary family saloon doesn't really work we know that the people carrier is impractical that the off-roader is really expensive and that the Zafira is a voxel so where does this leave us well I'm delighted to say it leaves us better off than we could possibly have imagined this matte car designed by a group of people who seemingly never met is called the fit multiply it's four inches shorter than the hatchback on which it's based but crucially it's five inches wider this means that the space inside the six on two rows of three and that means there are no seats in the boot which is therefore big enough for things as a piece of straightforward logical thinking it's a masterpiece daddy's happy because it cost thirteen thousand mummys happy because she doesn't have to put the kids in the crumple zone the children are happy because it's got a mad dash and the dogs happy because it's on television again but best of all Victoria's friend can go to she doesn't have to stay at home and eat worms funny isn't it that this is the only prediction about life in the year 2000 that's actually come to pass without live on pills and we don't where Baker file suits but we do have to drive around in a car that looks completely bonkers stay right here UK TV people is driving into the fast lane with some seriously entertaining and high-speed motoring history Clarkson's car is next

Channel: Iain P.

Views: 869,884

Rating: 4.8757377 out of 5

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Id: A1cjguZgWEM

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2013