Unlike AJAC, I do not attend
ritzy, champagne-drenched, Michelin-starred, club-class car
launches at exotic hotels in sun-kissed, faraway places. I’m not being
holier than thou here.
I’d love to eat a swan at Mazda’s expense and spend my life licking the
goose fat from the
hand that feeds me, but I simply don’t have the time.
This means I never get the chance
to meet the people who design the cars I drive or the people who are charged
with selling them. In one important way, this is a good thing. When I review
a car, I am unable to visualise the man
who sweated into the night to make it possible.
So I can be as rude as I like because I don’t have to worry about upsetting
him.
However, there is a downside.
Because I don’t meet the engineers or sit through the two-hour-long technical
press
conferences, I am less well informed than my colleagues. And less well
fed, for that matter.
And so, because I approached
the new Ford Ka in a state of blissful ignorance, I was expecting a very
great deal.
I assumed it would be a funky, small and cheap alternative to the new Ford
Fiesta, a car that does everything very
well whether you’re on the road, at the shopping centre or taking part in
a beach assault with the Royal Marines.
Almost immediately, however,
I began to dislike the Ka very much. First of all, the styling’s not quite
right.
The door — and I apologise to the faceless man who made it — doesn’t seem
to sit very happily with the lines
of the profile. And the wheel arches look as though they were going to be
flared but someone dropped the original
clay model from a fork-lift truck and they got squashed.
Inside, there are problems too,
including ridiculously hard seats that someone — whom I’ve never met — at
Ford
thinks are a good idea. Worst of all, though, is the driving position.
The steering wheel, which adjusts for height but
not reach, is too far away and, even on its highest setting, too low down.
And the clutch pedal is far
too close to the centre console. A small foot rest has been provided inside
the
aforementioned console but the only way you can actually get your foot
in there properly is if you saw it off.
Then I began the test drive
and things got worse. Because the old Ka looked like a teapot, you didn’t
expect it to
be very fast. And it’s the same story with the Toyota iQ. That looks like
an urban runaround, but the new Ka does not.
It looks like a normal car; a Fiesta that’s shrunk slightly in the wash.
Which is why I was expecting it to be able to get
up a hill. Which in fifth it often could not. Sometimes I had a problem
in fourth.
Even on level ground things
are far from rosy because at anything above 50 the whole car really does
start to feel loose
and disconnected, a problem that was amplified by a graunching front nearside
brake disc.
Often I found myself doing 40, at which speed following drivers became
impatient and started to overtake in silly places.
Then it went dark and as a result
I discovered the new Ka’s biggest problem.
It’s a whopper.
A proper full-sized elephant in the wardrobe.
A genuine, bona fide reason all on its own for buying something else.
The headlights are absolutely useless. For seeing where you are going,
a Hallowe’en pumpkin would be better.
I did a test. I drove at the
speed at which I could safely stop in the distance visible in the light from
those miserable
candles. And it was 18mph. Any faster and I was having to rely on crossed
fingers that there was nothing
out there in the gloom.
The only solution was to drive
on full high beam, which was a) little better and b) just bright enough for
oncoming
motorists to retaliate, making me even more blind than if I’d stayed on
dipped.
Of course, not having been at
the press launch, I didn’t understand any of this. So I tiptoed along, with
my heart beating
like broken plumbing, wondering how on earth Ford could possibly have got
it all so wrong.
Vauxhall? Yes. Kia? For sure. But Ford? No way.
Ford makes good cars these days. Some of them border on greatness. So finding
that it’s got one this wrong is
like going out for dinner at a Marco Pierre White restaurant and being
served a plate of spaghetti.
Here’s the thing, though. Subsequent
investigation revealed that Ford hasn’t got the Ka wrong at all because
despite the Ford badge, despite the Ford styling and despite the Ford fixtures
and fittings, this car, actually,
is a Fiat 500. It has the same basic structure and the same engine. It’s
even built in the same factory, in Poland.
The fact that it’s come out
of the joint venture so wrong demonstrates two things. First, that the Fiat
500 must
be a fairly bad car as well, but neither I nor anyone else has noticed
because it’s so lovely to look at and so
delightful to own. And, second, that we’re all doomed.
Obviously, Ford would have wanted
to develop its own small car. Asking its engineers to reclothe a Fiat rather
than asking them to design their own baby from the ground up is like asking
Stella McCartney to sew some
new buttons on a Burton suit. No one becomes an engineer in a car company
so they can spend their life
filing the word “Fiat” off components and writing “Ford” on them instead.
The only reason a company would
do this is to save money. It gets a new car for a fraction of the cost of
designing
one itself. The problem is, the new car we are asked to buy simply isn’t
as good as it could have been.
Or good-looking enough to mask the faults.
Worse, because every car company
must now save money — great, big, fat lumps of it — almost all automotive
development is going to stop. We’re already seeing this with new propulsion
ideas. Most people accept that in the
fullness of time, cars will have to be powered with hydrogen, but developing
the fuel cells necessary to make the
technology work is fantastically complicated, and this, in an accountant’s
mind, means ruinously expensive.
As a result, car makers are
simply launching much simpler, much cheaper and almost completely useless
conventional
battery-powered cars instead. Or idiotic hybrids that make owners feel
smug and organic but move the human race
about 3000 miles in the wrong direction.
The upshot is that when the oil does start to run out, we as a species will be completely unprepared.
And that’s what’s given me an
idea. At present most governments in the world seem to agree that the only
way
out of the financial hole is to print money and throw this at various state
projects. Unfortunately, because we are
governed by fools and madmen, the projects they have in mind are street
hockey outreach co-co-ordinators
and ethnic watchdogs who will ensure the unemployment lines accurately
reflect the nation’s ethnic diversity.
You can see this is idiotic.
We all can. So why not give the money instead to British engineering firms,
which
would use it, under close supervision to make sure they didn’t employ any
health-and-safety people or ethnicity
czars, to get the hydrogen fuel cell working on a practical everyday level?
Maybe we could team up with
Iceland, partly because — heaven knows — we owe the Icelanders a lot and
partly
because they have enough geothermal power to make hydrogen cheaply. I can
see no flaws with my idea at all.
It pleases the global-warmingists because it spells an end for carbon-based
fossil fuels; it pleases me because I
get a whole new range of extremely powerful cars to play with; and, best
of all, it puts us back where we belong —
on the prow of HMS Progress.
If we don’t do this, we will
emerge from the financial crisis only to discover that because of a lack
of oil all the lights
have gone out.
And this is going to be a big problem if you have a Ka. Because you simply
won’t be able to see where you’re going.
The Clarksometer
ENGINE 1242cc, four cylinders
POWER 68bhp @ 5500rpm
TORQUE 76 lb ft @ 3000rpm
TRANSMISSION Five-speed manual
FUEL 55.4mpg (combined)
ACCELERATION 0-60mph: 13.1sec
TOP SPEED 99mph
C$18,000
VERDICT OK for Fiat; frightful for Ford
RATING 
