Genesis – the beginning of a tricky car experiment

JUST the other day I spent rather too long looking longingly at wax jackets in a swanky shop in the Lake District.

Normally I have about as much interest in clothes as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen does in launch control systems and the McLaren 650S but I have a soft spot for wax jackets. Specifically Barbour wax jackets – it just goes with the Range Rover-driving, real ale-swigging, fell walking lifestyle I’ve been brought up with. Which is why I was weighing up whether to throw £250 at what is basically a glorified coat for Countryfile viewers.

The car world has been onto this mawkish obsession with brands and lifestyle – and it knows people like me will happily fork out extra for something because it’s made by Land Rover or BMW rather than Skoda or Dacia.

It’s also why the market for big – but mass-market – cars has pretty much evaporated in the UK. The likes of the Vauxhall Omega and Peugeot 607 have quietly slipped off to the mortal coil while BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and (increasingly over the last 15 years) Audi have lapped up the managing director money. So it was perhaps inevitable I declared back in February the chances of anyone buying a £48,000 Hyundai was virtually non-existent.

But it turns out Hyundai knew this all along – which is why it’s pulling off a trick Toyota managed 20 years ago. A Lexus LS600h is basically what happens when Asda makes its own wax jacket – you might sneer at Asda’s offering, but you might just be tempted by a George one if it’s cheap enough.

That’s why you can now buy a DS (quietly made by Citroën), an Infiniti (a Nissan in all but name), a Vignale (a rejigged, upmarket Mondeo) and if we’re being cruel, an Audi (the emissions scandal has reminded us how that Ingolstadt’s upmarket offerings are laced with cut-price Volkswagen meat).

Hyundai’s plan is to serve up six luxury models completely bereft of the H-word – they will all be sold here as Genesis (ideally with Phil Collins-branded drum brakes). A luxury Hyundai would flop spectacularly, but a luxury Genesis might just do a Lexus and pull it off.

You’ll need £47,995 to take part in Hyundai’s biggest experiment yet, although chances are – given my shopping habits at the moment - I’ll probably spend roughly the same on wax jackets and real ale.

Today’s superminis would make Gordon Gekko envious

IT’S 1986 and you’re that well-off walking stereotype of the moment – the young urban professional. A yuppie, in other words, and you’re proud to admit it.

Naturally, you do what everyone else is doing with their latest big bonus, and wander over to your nearest Mercedes showroom. About an hour later, you emerge with a big smile and a minty fresh 190E on order – and you’ve ticked every single box on the options list.

Fast forward 29 years and it’s paired up with another product of 1986 – me. After a brief test drive you’d have to conclude Stuttgart’s finest ages fares far better than a base-spec Simister of the same vintage, because 124,000 miles later absolutely everything still works perfectly. There is something mind-boggling about how a Mercedes that’s as old as I am still feels like it could do a round trip to the Moon without going wrong.

But in terms of gadgets it’s positively outclassed by even today’s smallest and cheapest offerings. In the same way you now get more computing power in a smartphone than NASA used for its Apollo missions, it’s now possible to get Yuppie-impressing levels of luxury in a Hyundai i20.

Alright, so I cheated a bit – it was the range-topping Premium SE Nav rather than the austerity-spec S – but I was still impressed by how much of a Gadget Show prize giveaway the Koreans have squeezed into their second smallest model. You get satnav, Bluetooth, USB connectivity, a helping of electric everything, anti-lock brakes, cruise control, a top-notch stereo you can operate from the steering wheel and – pause for breath – front AND rear parking sensors. Porsche 944 man would have fainted in disbelief if you’d offered him that lot back in 1986!

There are two truths here. Firstly, that the motoring world has come on to the extent that your brand new supermini is effectively a shrunken LS400, but more importantly that you only have to look to what Gordon Gekko Jr is buying right now to see what the Hyundais and Vauxhalls of 15 years’ time will have.

In-car WiFi, in-built fridges to keep your drinks cool, massaging seats and radar-guided cruise control? It’ll happen one day – and I bet that 190E will still be plodding on too.

A Mercedes-Maybach we can ALL afford

IT MUST be hard being a member of the one per cent.

Not only do you and your colleagues get to chat about Davos every year about how much more money you have than the rest of the globe, but you’ve got car makers catering for your every whim and desire.

Just last week, for instance, one of the world’s biggest car makers launched a limousine perfect for you to stretch your legs while plotting world domination. In the back, there’s 157mm of legroom – more than twice the amount any of its rivals offer – and it’s got more room for your head and elbows too.

The air conditioning system is split into three different zones across the car, and if that’s not enough you can get an electrically-operated, tilting panoramic sunroof as an optional extra. If it gets cold, the windscreen AND the windscreen washer jets are heated to make sure your chauffeur never gets a frosty reception, and he’ll never need fidget with a bootlid because that’s electrically operated too.

You’ll have to agree this is a fine compliment of luxuries, and that’s before I introduce you to the little umbrellas hidden in each of the rear doors so you never get wet when you go shopping. The Mercedes-Maybach 600 Pullman will cost an jaw-dropping £165,000 when it goes on sale this summer. Which is why it’s a mighty good thing you can have all of the little luxuries I’ve just run past you on Skoda’s newest model instead.

The new Skoda Superb is one of the quiet heroes of the motoring world because it’s a luxury car the 99 per cent can enjoy owning. Unlike the Hyundai Genesis I mentioned the other week, it’s not attempting to march in on BMW and Mercedes territory with a similarly-priced offering. Nope, the Superb’s party trick is giving you all the important things you’d want in a luxury car – first class legroom and some gadgets to play with – for a fraction of the price.

It’s a pity its astonishing amounts of legroom, boot space and value for money – expect it to cost between £20,000 and £35,000 – means you’re most likely to experience the Superb when a) your fleet manager assigns you one or b) you get a ride home with your mates in one on a Friday night. It’s also got the words ‘SKODA’ and ‘SUPERB’ on the boot, which means you’ll have to endure lazy journalists digging out The Big Book of Motoring Clichés so they can tell you – just as they did with its two predecessors – about the new Skoda being a ‘superb’ car and how you’ll have to write ‘a cheque to the Czechs’ to get one.

 Forget the jokes, however, because the Superb is offering up a lot of motor for the money. It’s Learjet luxury for EasyJet earnings.

Why the Hyundai Genesis is like Sheffield

BARCELONA’S balmy sunshine, the majestic landscapes of the Scottish Highlands and the fine food of just about anywhere in Northern Italy are all front-runners in the contest to win over my carefully-earned cash.

As summer getaway options go they couldn’t be more different if I tried, but they do all share one thing in common. I’d rather enjoy a fortnight in any of these places then spend my summer holiday in Sheffield.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Sheffield – it’s a fine city that has made many fine contributions to the world, from steel and coal to The Human League and actors notorious for getting killed in every movie role they land. Sheffield is great for all sorts of reasons, but it’s just not somewhere where I’d go looking for a memorable holiday getaway.

Equally, if I got given £47,995 to spend on a luxury car I wouldn’t blow it on a Hyundai. Yet that’s exactly how much the Genesis, the manufacturer’s largest offering ever in the UK, is going to cost.

Let’s get one thing clear; Hyundai makes some great cars. It’s gone from being the makers of the Pony to one of the UK car market’s real success stories, with accomplished players like the i30 family hatchback helping to eat into an increasingly healthy share of the market. It’s a success story, however, founded on value for money. Hyundai is all about price, not prestige.

That’s why offering an executive express with a 3.8 litre V6 driving the rear wheels is either incredibly brave or monumentally misguided. Why, when you can have a BMW or a Mercedes or a Jaguar or an Audi or even – whisper it softly – a Lexus for the same sort of money, would you want to spend nearly fifty grand on a Hyundai?

Countless other car makers have tried – and failed – to crack this nut. Remember the Peugeot 607? Or the Vauxhall Omega, Ford Scorpio, Renault Vel Satis, Honda Legend and Rover 800, for that matter? They were all mass market attempts to break into the luxury motoring stratosphere, and all were defeated by people who want the pub brag factor of a three-pointed star or a leaping cat instead. We Brits are the worst for it – it’s not for nothing the nation that gave the world Keeping Up Appearances and Absolutely Fabulous is the single biggest Audi TT market on the planet.

I would love it if the Hyundai Genesis were so mind-blowingly brilliant it pulled off a Rocky-style underdog victory and gave the German luxury establishment a bloody nose, but I suspect we snobbish Brits will dismiss it simply because it’s an Aldi car with Audi pretentions.

Are you going on holiday to Sheffield this year? I rest my case.

What's it like to drive a Rolls-Royce?

IT WAS a curious conclusion to reach. The best car in the world was a strangely underwhelming one.

There are certain cherries, if you love driving cars, you’ve just got to pop. Burying the throttle on a REALLY powerful car on a private track, for instance – take a bow, Jaguar XKR-S – is one of them, and unleashing an Aston Martin for the first time is another. It’s also true that, as much as I love getting to the nitty gritty of whether the latest supermini is or isn’t worth your hard earned cash, I’m still waiting to fulfil that schoolboy fantasy of getting behind the wheel of Ferrari.

That’s why I had a certain giddy sense of expectation about driving a Rolls-Royce for the first time.

There’s a lot to be said for Crewe’s missiles. It’s true, for instance, that almost every Rolls-Royce is best experienced from the rear, but that’s a goal anyone who makes it to the church on time or the Northern English standup comedy circuit can experience. For me, the real fun was to be had by heading up to the bridge, and setting a course through the countryside in two tonnes of Silver Shadow.

Did I like it? Definitely. Would I, if I were to become Peter Kay’s more successful protégé, like to buy one? Not even slightly, largely because I’d be forever feeling sorry for the chauffeur.

The Rolls-Royce has a dignified lollop to the way it devours straights (well it would, with a 6.2 litre V8 stationed in the drawing room up front) but if so much as suggest a corner it goes all to pieces. In this sense at least, the Roller lives up to its name – if you’re playing at being a Middle East dictator in the rear seats, the feeling of it floating into a corner isn’t especially pleasant, but from the captain’s chair it’s actually verging on frightening.

That said, there is something to be said about having the Spirit of Ecstasy proudly protruding from your bonnet – especially if, like me, you want to indulge your Thunderbirds fixation – and the quality of craftsmanship on what is after all a forty-odd-year-old car buts modern Mercs to shame.

A modern day Rolls-Royce, of course, would feel completely different, but to be bluntly honest my first experience of the name synonymous with motoring perfection – the wedding trade’s chariot of choice – didn’t exactly float my motoring boat.

 The best car in the world? That’ll be the Jaguar XJ, then.

Fire up the... Citroen DS5

IN the unlikely event I get asked to design a luxury car, the Citroen DS5 is probably not too far off what I'd come up with.

Surely what you want in a plushly trimmed motor is plenty of space, some clever gadgets, a comfy ride, and an interior which, while clearly cosseting, shows where a bit of thought's gone into it? Unfortunately, sales of luxury cars suggest you want sportiness and a blue-chip image instead. The best selling luxury car for this sort of outlay is BMW's 3-Series.

So what do you get if you're a middle management type and you plump for Paris over Munich, or Ingolstadt or Stuttgart for that matter? Well, you get the world's first diesel-hybrid system, and a clever one it is too; while a turbodiesel, in the case of the range-topper I tested one with 2.0 litres and 163bhp at its disposal, struts its stuff at the front end, an electric motor offers a helping hand by sending some eco-friendly oomph to the back wheels. Not only does it offer you the benefits of four wheel drive at this time of year, but it keeps things eco-friendly and, as far as the taxman's concerned, cheap to run too.

Yet what really grabs you with the DS5 is the interior. Fans of the smaller, strikingly good DS3 will find themselves in familiar territory, with the same attention to detail with the materials and use of colour but with the added flair of buttons in the roof, Boeing 747-style. It's also far roomier than any of its immediate executive car rivals, thanks to Citroen shunning the saloon norm and going for a sleek hatchback instead.

Admittedly, it's not got the same grin factor to its handling as the smaller DS3 but that's not what this luxury lounger's about - if you do a lot of motorway work and value comfort over thrills, I'd struggle to find another premium offering that does the job as comfortably.

Hand on heart, I couldn't recommend the range-topping DSport versions - not when it's straying close to Jag XF territory - but the mid-range DStyle, which Citroen reckon are going to be the biggest sellers, have got a lot going for them.

As published in The Champion on December 6, 2012

Jaguar builds a speedboat

EVER wondered what would happen if let Jaguar's style gurus loose on a speedboat rather than a car?

Well wonder no more because the shapely creation you see here, designed to help plug the launch of the not-exactly-ungainly XF Sportbrake, is what they've come up with. It's called the Concept Speedboat and is apparently inspired by the likes of Jaguar's original XJ6 of 1968.

Ian Callum, Jaguar's director of design and the man behind Jaguar's XF and XK, Nissan's R390 GT racer and the Aston DB7, said: “The Concept Speedboat looks powerful. It follows, in so many ways, the idea of a traditional speedboat but with the sleek and fast characteristics that you would expect from a Jaguar car.

“I hope our design inspires people to think about our products in a much broader sense, especially in lifestyle and enjoyment.  I have always had a passion to create such an object and it seemed fitting that we relate this to a lifestyle vehicle such as the Jaguar XF Sportbrake.  The two sit together perfectly.”

I, for one, think it looks fabulous. Jaguar, being a car company rather than a boat builder, has no plans to make a production version.

Maybe someone at Sunseeker should give them a ring?

Owning a Jaguar XJR is a stupid idea, no matter how cheap the insurance

THE woman from Confused sounded a bit, well, confused. When would I be interested in taking up insurance on a supercharged V8 Jaguar?

It's very nearly November, which in the Life On Cars household means enduring the expensive ordeal of insuring both a £300 Rover and a Mazda MX-5 at roughly the same time. With each year of driving around and not claiming for the cost of a crumpled heap of metal in a hedge my insurance has got a little bit cheaper, but I'm still paying more the cost of a year's insurance for the ancient Rover than the cost of the car itself.
Slightly depressed by that realisation, I turned to that opium of car enthusiasts, eBay, and immediately came up with a far more suitable banger. All 3.2 litres of a Jaguar XJ8, and mine for £750. I very nearly headed for the Buy It Now button, but then I clocked the wheelarch rot and a service history with more gaps than a jeans shop. So I moved on to the next offering.

Big mistake - I'd found a tidy T-reg Jaguar XJR, which back in the day would have set golfers back a cool £51,000 but was here, in the great Arthur Daley forecourt of cyberspace, for £1,750. True, it had 124,000 miles on the clock but it looked to be in good nick, and the thought of having 370bhp at my leather-lined, wood-trimmed disposal seemed tempting enough to look past the prospect of getting less than 20 to the gallon. It is, Jag people will know, a fabulous car; refined and graceful enough to wear the Big Cat badge with pride, but blessed with a 4.0 litre V8, beefy alloy wheels and sports trim and suspension for added zestfulness. Petrolhead heaven, basically.

Drunk with delight, I idiotically went to an insurance comparision website to find out how much it'd cost a twentysomething male working in journalism - which in insurance terms is about as dangerous a profession as they come - to make sure it was beyond my aspirations of automotive avarice. It wasn't. Someone as hamfisted as me could insure Coventry's finest, fully comp, for a shade over a grand, which unlike the Rover is less than the car itself cost.

I woke up the following morning and knocked the idea on the head, having realised in the cold light of day that having a supercharged Jag outside the house would be a stupid, expensive idea.

The only problem is, the insurance companies keep ringing me up now and suggesting otherwise!

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article included a picture of the special edition XJR 100 rather than the standard XJR. This has since been amended.

Fire up the... BMW 3-Series

THE problem with BMW's 3-Series is you don't really need to read a road test to decide whether one should take pride of place on your driveway. It's simple; you either want one or you don't.

That's why I thought I'd start this week not with the car, but Coldplay. Every couple of years, they release an album which goes straight to the top of the sales charts with almost crashing inevitability, and - being someone who doesn't want to follow the herd - you do your absolute darndest not to buy a copy. Then you hear one of the tracks on the radio and you realise, as much as you hate them for it, that they've recorded an absolute belter. Again. If Coldplay made a car, they'd make a 3-Series. That's why it now outsells both Ford's Mondeo and Vauxhall's Insignia.

You don't need me to tell you then that this sixth-generation car is larger than the old one, a little lighter and - this being 2012 - kinder to the environment too. In time you'll be able to buy it as a coupe, a cabriolet and a Touring estate, but chances are it'll be this saloon version you'll be seeing on driveways up and down the land in the next few months.

Even if the new 3-Series is awful it'll be parked on driveways up and down the land in six months time but - and it's a verdict I deliver grudgingly, through gritted teeth - it's really, really good. The styling, inside and outside, is still a little bland for my liking and at £28,000 for the 320D Efficient Dynamics version I tried it's not especially cheap either, but once you get in it's an absolute delight to drive. It's not just that it feels agile and well balanced, but all the controls are exactly where you'd instinctively expect them to be, and feel as though though they could withstand years of abuse. It's comfy too - an Audi this agile would land you an appointment with your osteopath, but in the 3-Series, even motorway speeds, progress is quiet and unruffled.

In this corner of the motoring marketplace the badge is just as important as the car it's glued onto, and I know full well that if you want a new 3-Series you're going to buy one anyway. It's good to know, though, that there is substance to back up the gravitas that blue-and-white propeller brings.

The new Mondeo will have to be unbelievably brilliant to coax buyers out of their Beemers. Watch this space...

Are big cars better than small ones?

THE Citroen DS5, for all its clever hybrid tech and avantgarde styling, is a big car. Which is exactly why the company's PR man reckoned I wouldn't like it.

He put it to me, as he handed me the keys for the French firm's largest and most luxurious twist on its DS range yet, that I'm a small car sort of person. Having clocked the tiny sports car I'd turned up in and read my various pieces singing the praises of the original Mini, the Renault 5 and the Suzuki Swift Sport, he suggested the DS5 was just too much car for me to love.

But there are plenty of bigger beasts - motoring's plus size models, in Daily Mail speak - I've developed a soft spot for. The Jeep Grand Cherokee, for starters, might be the size of my first student flat but it's got a charm to its character and plenty of comfort, while Jag's XF is all the executive saloon you could ever ask for.

Meanwhile, the largest motor of any kind I've driven, Ford's Transit, has a no-nonsense sort of vibe to it and a deftness of handling something of its size really shouldn't. I like it a lot. Equally, there's plenty of petite offerings that haven't floated my boat - Vauxhall's Corsa, despite being one of the best selling cars in Britain, being the prime candidate. I know loads you have got one and no doubt love it, but for my money the Fiesta, the Polo and now Peugeot's new 208 will run rings around it when quality, packaging and handling come into play. But, by and large, smaller, leaner cars are better than full fat ones, and I think the car makers no know it.

Why else would the new Range Rover have shaved half a tonne - that's a whole Caterham Seven in other words - off the weight of its predecessor? By contrast, the Land Rover Defender is a big car, but crucially, it's not an inch bigger or heavier than the nation's farmers need it to be.

The other thing everybody seems to forget is that you can make cars ever larger but the roads of Britain, save for a radical new Coalition iniative, will always remain the same size. Worth remembering when you're struggling to thread one of today's more bloated hatchbacks down a typical British B road. It's not the size that matters. It's how you use it.

All of which brings me back to the DS5, which I actually rather like. Keep an eye out for Life On Cars roadtest to find out why.

Can you guess this smartly styled saloon?

THE sharply-crafted snout suggests a new BMW. The way the chrome-lipped windows meet the waistline has more than a hint of Lexus. And you’d be forgiven for mistaking that pert rear end for an Audi A5‘s.

But, believe it or not, this new arrival isn’t a BMW, Merc, Audi, Lexus or Jag. Despite having all the hallmarks of the luxury car establishment, this executive car contender comes from rather humbler origins.

It is a Kia.

The K9 - stop sniggering, Doctor Who fans - is the Korean company’s first ever rear-wheel-drive car, and while it’s obvious to see what they’ve been inspired by it also shows just how confident the firm’s become in recent years.

Mr Soon-Nam Lee, Director of Kia’s Overseas Marketing Group, said: “K9 is our first rear-wheel drive sedan, created without compromise in its design, driving performance and new technologies.

“K9 sets a whole new level of standards and values in the large sedan segment, and its design will be another Kia demonstration of our brand’s power to surprise.”

It’s just a shame that while the company’s clearly feeling confident it’s not yet ballsy enough to bring it to us Brits, who are some of the most notoriously brand-obsessed car buyers anywhere in the world. While I’ve no doubt Kia will sell shedloads of K9s in its home markets, how would it perform in a nation where the BMW 3-Series now outsells the Ford Mondeo?


While there aren’t any plans to sell the K9 anywhere in Europe, it does prove one thing. Never let it be said that the Korean car industry can’t come up with a good looking car!