Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [40]
What, in any case, is the point of all this? Making a car that knows when to turn itself off can't be easy, and I suspect that thousands of Citroen's engineering man-hours have been devoted to the problem when they could have been better spent hunting down and despatching whoever was responsible for the Pluriel.
But no doubt someone, somewhere, has done a calculation to show that if every engine in Britain stopped for a few seconds at every junction we could reduce CO2 emissions by a billion tons a year, or something like that. This sort of thing is beginning to annoy me. We've had the one about turning the telly off instead of leaving it on standby, and sooner or later I'm going to calculate what reduction in CO2 could be achieved if every driver in the country saved a little vehicle weight by removing the owner's handbook from the glovebox. With so many cars, televisions, refrigerators and boilers in the land, it's easy to turn innocent human fallibility into some sort of climate crime.
Beer, for example, must be destroying the planet. If you drink beer, as I do, you have to get up in the night for a wee-wee. That means turning the light on and consuming a tiny bit of electricity. Negligible, really, but if every adult male is doing it, it can be shown to equate to another X tons of pollutant in the air.
Rambling is especially selfish. If you walk for 20 miles, I imagine you build up an enormous appetite. This means using more gas or electricity to cook more food, and places a greater demand on the refrigeration at Sainsbury's. Since the Ramblers are one of the biggest organisations in the country, this must mean that stomping around in a kagoul is blighting the lives of our children.
And so it goes on. It would be interesting to know how much CO2 is being produced by the computers of environmentalists who generate fatuous statistics.
The facts are these. There is a finite supply of fossil fuel left and, in broad terms, consuming it is going to create the same amount of pollution. It doesn't matter whether I drive the Bentley and use it all up tomorrow, or drive something that conks out temporarily at every junction and eke it out for another few years. Conserving energy is ultimately fruitless and, more to the point, completely at loggerheads with the demands of a progressive world.
So – and assuming that fossil fuel consumption really is an issue – here's a suggestion. All the endeavour and ingenuity, all the time, equipment and resources, all the wit and learning; in short, every manifestation of human effort being wasted on the C2 Stop&Start, the hybrid, the wind farm and the ecological washing machine – it should all be directed towards finding the alternative.
THESE MODERN SUPERCARS ARE ALL BLOODY RUBBISH YOU KNOW
Not so long ago, driving a Ferrari or a Porsche would have invited accusations of being a right tosser. This was possibly fair enough, since the culture of the time said that anyone who took cars that seriously was probably a bit of a saddo.
Porsche and Ferrari have always taken themselves terribly seriously. Porsche bang on about 'excellence' and Ferrari about 'passion', as if they're the guardians of the proper expression of these conceits of the human condition. But it's all cant, really. Excellence is more important in the manufacture of synthetic heart valves, and passion manifests itself more properly in the bedroom. Attempting to express these things through one's choice of car was perhaps indicative of a few problems in the trouser department.
And how unimaginative was it, if you suddenly found yourself a bit flush, to go and buy a 911 or an F360? The 911 was like the Hugo Boss suit of the successful executive,