Clarkson's Car Years - Family Car 2000

Interesting Interesting, this Mercedes smart car is so small that you can park it upside down on the pavement. You might think he's very smart, but he's really not. I mean, designing a small car is easy, it just means you end up with a small interior. It doesn't even have back seats, yeah, it's also easy to design a super car because you don't have to worry about boot space or running BSS, you just have to make it go fast and anyone can do it, just put it on. a big engine, then there's the luxury sedan and how hard it is to design a big car and then stick some wood in the dash, some extra dials and switches, some extra soundproofing and that's it, but a

family

car, that's it.

It's almost impossible, you see, you must be able to carry all this dad, mom, their three children, their clubber and the dog. Now you could do this by making the car big, but unfortunately it's an overcrowded world so it needs to be small and it also needs to be able to hit a concrete block at 40 mph without causing any harm to the people inside, this means that the

family

car has to be immensely strong with beams, membranes, cross members, side impact bars, reinforcing material and airbags, and that means it ends up being incredibly heavy. Now, moving all this weight means you need more fuel, of course, you could argue that's a small price to pay, but as petrol currently costs around £4 a gallon, it's not, it's a huge price to pay, so we won't do what these people What they want from a family car is something that is safe and heavy, but also economical and fast.

They want 35m per gallon, a top speed of 115m per hour, total reliability, air conditioning is standard and they won't pay more than £5,000 for it, so what? You complain because that's exactly what you have here Ford Focus It's a chocolate cake that makes you slim It's a cigarette that cures cancer It's classic literature that's fun to read Dad is happy because there's a rally version that gives it some credibility to its wheels the dog is happy because it is on television mom is happy because there is a low load cell for her purchases and because there are three seat belts in the back the children are also happy even the neighbors are happy the approach is cheap economical fast fun to drive small safe practical and spacious, it's perfect, so why then do you almost never see a car like this on the way to school?

You see, the problem is simple, the approach is fine until Victoria decides she would like to take her friend and at that very moment it becomes completely and utterly useless and this means that the traditional five-seat family car is of no use to a family. They need something bigger. In 1985, the Renault Espass was seen as the answer to all our dreams. It is no bigger than a normal car but can seat seven people. It was the perfect response from a country with Catholic ethics on birth control. I remember the first time I drove one of these things and I was blown away.

You could have knocked me down with a small pork chop. I mean, I knew he had a Renault Fuego. chassis and had a normal 2L engine, but it was so UNC car to drive, the windshield was so far away that you needed binoculars to see if the wipers worked and inside the seats they folded, turned, tilted and did the D dance, It was a The bed was a conference room, it was the future and pretty soon all the other engine manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon, but then people started saying wait a minute, why should I have a conference in my car?

I can have one in the office. And why do I need a bedroom here? I have one at home. Remove the Thrills in the minivan could be seen in their true colors. It's a van. It's a plastic van with electric windows. That made the whole concept of the seat deeply unpleasant. has tried to make the minivan fashionable by bringing it to life, it's important to remember that no matter how many television screens they put on the headrests and how big the wheels are, the minivan is just a minivan like a bus, it's not desperately practical either if you're going to have people over for the weekend and you need to stock up on cheese look at this W look look look look look look look Wesley Dale with blue briz is fantastic oh this is useless I have to take these seats outside, they better have adequate space for cheat, great, except for one small problem, the seats have to stay in the tent, keep in mind this is where they belong, as I pointed out a few

years

ago on Top Gear, you certainly don't want your kids sitting on top, sitting back here.

I find it difficult to relax in this or any other minivan. If you get hit from the rear in a normal wagon, there is a lot of metal behind it to absorb the energy of the impact. It's called the crumple zone, but in this I'm right against the tailgate, my head is so far from the glass. I would be extremely nervous if I let my children sit here. Some companies have tried to address this by making their people carriers larger, but it hasn't worked at all - the VW Caravel, for example, really is a van, as is the Mercedes V-class, and then there's the Chrysler Grand Voyager. long battle.

It's not a truck, but in a recent safety report it was the only vehicle that didn't get a score. in the front crash test, my goodness, long story short, the minivan can handle people and cheese, but at the same time they have no street cred, there are safety concerns, they are too unwieldy to drive and I hate all of them except one , like most minivans. the voxel zaps a presumptuous seven with the rear ones stuck to the tailgate, but unlike most people carriers, it's normal to drive, it feels like the Astra it's based on, it's not brilliant but it's not big or bad either, which What makes this car so special is that most of the time it's a five-seater with a big trunk, but when you need those two extra seats you don't have to go to the side and ask muscular Bob to take them out of the garage, no. it matters. what you do is you just press this Le Slide on the middle bench as far forward as possible and that way when you open the tailgate, look, there they are and even I, who am 100% pure fat, can lift them up so easily, even They come to look. with proper 3 point seat belts, so if this car is so smart and that's why we don't see them everywhere, what's wrong with it?

Yes, it's a Vox, an eight-track flagship in a CD ROM world, however, rather than moving away from the MPV. Back at the family hatchback, mothers have begun swarming in tightly organized groups of about 200,000 toward the four-wheel drive off-road car. It's really hard to think of a more inappropriate selection of family cards than this one. Roaders were built not to do this. If you trace the family history of four-wheel drive country cars, you end up here at the Willis Jeep. It even formed the basis of the original Land Rover, but it was Land Rover single-handedly that created the spark, the car that got the racers out of the mud and into the nights.

Bridge, the Range Rover Vogue was the first to marry the ability to go anywhere in a party dress, luxury and style, it opened the floodgates and soon there was a river of steel outside. in each schoolyard in sw3 and then, after the school run, some of them head to take up more space than strictly necessary in the gym parking lot. You also see them in the supermarket and this is mcness if everyone in London changed their hours. Highway drivers for anything smaller than the duration of each Jam would be turned away in a heartbeat and think about fuel savings.

Well, what I'm doing now is a very simple test. I'm filling this 4.6L Range Rover Vogue SE to the brim with gas. Wait a second, I'm fine, I think you'll agree, this is now full. Yeah, now what I'm going to do is take it for a spin and then we'll come back and fill it up again and look how many miles per gallon this thing is actually doing well all I have to do now is zero the trip there we go and we're ready. , let's get on the road. I love driving Range Rovers and have never been able to do so.

Point out why I mean, yes it has a high driving position, but a lot of cars have that, yes it has a big V8, a lot of cars have one of those, it has wood, but what is a Jaguar? I think it really is a combination. All in all, it's a sure knowledge that you're on to the best of the best now that this thing has fuel injection and you might think that the fuel injectors are like little hypodermic needles that deliver tiny amounts of atomized fuel to the cylinders. What you need to do is not think more in terms of eight burly firefighters pouring gasoline through their hoses.

Well, I've been driving for a couple of hours in the kind of stop-and-go city traffic when taking the kids to school or going to work and I've gone 41.7 miles and what I'm going to do now is fill it to the brim again, I'm going to fill it up so it all comes gushing out, so that's going to happen. that's 2085 ly and now we have to do the math, ok, that's 20. 85 l now we will convert it from Euro Babel to English by dividing it by 4546 it is equal to 4.58 Gall, we take note of those 45864 gallons, ok, do it now.

We did 41.7 miles divided by 4. 5864 miles per gallon, getting all nine and nine miles per gallon. I tell them people who have off road cars are stupid and crazy, they should take them off the roads and birch them up to an inch away. their lives offroad cars are bold, antisocial and idiots and the people who drive them are stupid, this is mine, it's a 4 ler, 24 valves, 6 cylinders, 2 and 1/2 tons, what's the word monster, well, I need an SUV because where I live the routes to the city are so congested that the best way to go to school is here.

We are on a road to nowhere. See you tonight. Bye bye. Do you have to go exploit the right to Ram? You can save 20 minutes a day and that's worth it, but it's more important than this. It's safety, it's the kind of vehicle where if someone hit you, you'd be pretty sure that, strapped in here, you know you wouldn't get hurt. It helps on country roads to be high up and that's good, it means you can look down. Minor fatalities in your normal cars, but that means the SUV has to have a high center of gravity and that's not so nice if you need to take emergency measures on a highway, it's more likely to roll over than a normal car and then we have brakes or rather we don't, so all things considered, the off-road car is not good at avoiding accidents, but it is very good at dealing with them once they occur in a collision with a normal car, as you can see. roader is clearly the place to be, four wheel drive cars are like nuclear weapons, if one person has one then to protect themselves everyone else must be horrified at the thought, well don't worry you don't have to chain yourself to the rails at Land Rover's Factory just wait until petrol hits £7 a gallon and then see how many they sell, so what have we established so far?

We know that the run-of-the-mill family saloon doesn't really cut it. We know that the minivan is not practical. The roader is really expensive and the zaira is a voxal, so where does this leave us? Well, I'm delighted to say that it leaves us in a better position than we could have imagined. Make me smile. I will do what you want. This crazy car designed by a group of people who apparently never met is called the F multipler. It's 4 inches shorter than the hatchback on which it's based, but crucially it's 5 inches wider, meaning there's room inside for six in two rows of three, and that means no seats. in the trunk, which is therefore large enough for things like a piece of direct logical thinking, is a masterpiece.

Dad is happy because he costs 13,000. Mom is happy because she doesn't have to put the kids in the crumple zone. The kids are happy because she has a Mad Dash and the dog is happy because she's on television again, but best of all, Victoria's friend can go too. She doesn't have to stay home and eat worms. It's curious, isn't it? This is the only prediction about life in the year

2000

. In fact, it happens that we do not live on pills and do not use Baker's foil soups, but we have to drive in a car that looks completely crazy, stay here, people of UK television is driving in the fast lane with something really entertaining. and the history of high-speed motorsport Clarkson's car later

years