Horses can be smaller than you think

When motor manufacturers publish the facts and figures on a new car, they should be accurate, surely? Yet a growing number of car-makers are claiming bhp ratings which simply aren’t true. 

The thing is, when a new model is launched, engine power is often given in the metric unit of PS. Confusingly, PS is sometimes called HP; or horsepower. But never brake horsepower (bhp) – the unit used in the UK. Most motoring journalists know to convert PS to bhp by dividing by 1.014. Okay, so there’s not a huge difference (200PS equals 197bhp) but it would be sloppy to say the car had 200bhp, just because you can’t be bothered to reach for a calculator.

But now I see a number of manufacturers doing just this. In recent months I’ve come across an Italian, a French, and a German manufacturer, all quoting the PS figure for their new car and merrily claiming it as bhp. Incompetence or conspiracy? Hard to tell.

Did you see an episode of that spy thriller ‘Spooks’ a few months ago, with terrorists threatening to blow up the Thames Flood Barrier? The Baddies (terrorists) wanted to force the Government into publishing a top secret document, while the Goodies tried to stop them.

Then it transpired that the document was the Government’s real policy on the environment: since it’s far too late to stop climate change, the only issue is how to grab control of the world’s resources in the aftermath of environmental meltdown. Meanwhile, the Government will pay lip-service to green issues with a series of utterly meaningless ‘initiatives’, purely to keep the population quiet. Suddenly, the Baddies weren’t quite so bad and the Goodies were… confused.

At the time it seemed a depressing portrayal of a possible future. Now, I simply believe it to be true.

Increasingly, people see moral as well as financial reasons for choosing low-emission engines and driving fewer miles. Okay, so budget airlines are advertising flights for £9.99 and the Government supports a second runway at Stansted – but thank goodness Gordon Brown has axed Stamp Duty on ‘carbon-neutral’ homes, eh? All 200 of them.

Makes you wonder who writes the script.

I have been buying fuel since petrol was 2/6 a gallon. In metric money, that’s eight gallons for a quid, or less than three pence a litre. And throughout that time, the price has never been consistent - neither between brands nor localities. And the more expensive fuel becomes, the greater becomes the disparity bewteen cheapest and dearest.

Take my local area, for example. I live in Surrey, just outside the M25, and even among the five cheapest prices in town, thanks to PetrolPrices.com I can tell you that today three pence a litre separates the cheapest (Esso) from the dearest (BP) - and all the outlets are within a couple of miles from each other. Even more confusing is the fact that Esso is both the cheapest and second-dearest, and you could practically spit from one garage to the other. How does that work? Can anyone come up with a plausible explanation?

Having said all that, I never shop around: I simply fill up when the car’s running on fumes. What kind of fuel am I?

The production Fiat 500 is expected to closely resemble this Trepiùno Concept Car

If you want to buy the funkiest car to hit the streets this decade you will have to wait until September.

That’s when Fiat plans to launch its new 500. Replacing the Seicento, Fiat’s new mini will cost more than a base Panda and be built on a Ford platform, the one Fiat will be making for the new Ford Ka. It will also have the Ford’s engine, transmission and suspension. In fact, only the body and interior are exclusive to the Fiat, and even that’s open to doubt.

But the new Fiat car (or should that be Fiat Ka?) will sell like Red Bull on a Friday night and you can expect long queues, so hurry, whilst stocks last. With lots of bright colours and power-flower graphics, and loud interiors to match, it will be every ladette’s dream car.

Surrey without 4x4s

I was going to write another piece about how Ferdinand Piech is lining up the ducks so that Porsche can take over Volkswagen, and about how a few sycophants have already showed their hands, declaring Piech to be the very best thing since geschnittenes Brot.

I was going to write such a piece but my spy at Wolfsburg has taken a turn for the worse and hasn’t been seen for days, so instead I shall have to content myself with a short piece about global warming.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about it until a recent TV programme on the subject made me realize that we all must do something, and soon. By means of clever animation and graphics we were treated to a glimpse of Britain in the grip of an ice age, in which the whole country took on the aspect of North Britain, the proper and one-time familiar term for Scotland.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather my Surrey daffodils came up a month early than live in North Britain, a possibility very much on the cards if the Stern report is taken seriously. The ice-man cometh, unless we act now.

With this prospect in mind, I was delighted to note that the Detroit motor show is playing host to a plethora of gas-guzzlers – the sort of cars that ignite fury in the hearts of do-gooding Prius drivers. Bring on the gas-guzzlers, I say. Enough of your lean-burn hybrid engines – let’s all live in a greenhouse.

And there is sound logic in such treason. Think how much energy would be saved if we didn’t need central heating: I wouldn’t mind betting that in warming millions of homes, the nation’s power stations belch out more CO2 in a year than all the 4×4s on the books of the DVLA. And another thing: for every 4×4 we condemn to the scrapheap, China builds two more; and in a few years time, ten more.

So ignore the doom-mongers – who are in any case in the employ of a government anxious to generate more stealth tax to replace falling tobacco revenue – and plant a few palm trees and buy a 4×4. You know it makes sense.

The new Range Rover Sport

I see that MI5 is offering a new text-alert service. That’s quite scary: you could be quietly dozing off on the train when some strident tone awakens you to the terrible realisation that tomorrow might be your last day to obtain a 10 per cent discount on their kitchen cabinets.

If anyone’s interested, I am also offering a text-alert service: it will let subscribers know the moment my neighbour leaves her driveway. Her dopey husband has just bought her a new Range Rover Sport. She couldn’t cope with a Freelander and now he’s put her behind the wheel of something almost twice the size and double the speed. In a single week, the door mirrors – both of them – have acquired substantial scars, and the rear wing has obviously been in contact with a brick wall: the one on Farm Lane near the City of London Freeman’s School, if I am any judge.

It doesn’t help that she drives about with her ‘phone glued to her ear, and does so with impunity because our village bobby is too busy dealing with a spate of daylight robbery that started when a new family acquired the National Trust tearoom franchise.

I think the time has come to introduce type-training. They used to do it for buses and I believe it is still required for aircraft: before a pilot can fly a commercial airliner of an unfamiliar type, he or she must be trained and tested accordingly. And it’s progressive: a pilot cannot in one step graduate from a Dakota to a 747, which takes years of experience to master. Moreover, there must be as many landings as take offs.

Play it right, and such a system could rid the roads of inexperienced 4×4 drivers, before they do the same to us.