New venue for Lancashire classic car New Year show

A NEW YEAR treat for classic car fans in Lancashire has been relocated to a new venue.

Traditionally the January 1 show for owners of older cars took place at Briars Hall in Lathom, but it’s now going to take place from 10.30am onwards at the Corner House pub in nearby Wrightington.

The pub’s other monthly meetings for classic car owners have been suspended for the winter until 6 March next year.

Forget Bugatti - the Fiat 124 Spider is what I'm looking forward to

IT’S ironic that 50 years after the national speed limit was introduced spy shots have emerged online of what’s likely to be the world’s fastest production car.

The Bugatti Chiron – bet on it being one of the stars at next March's Geneva motor show – will pick up where the Veyron left off by going even faster. Which means 267mph – more than twice what a Fiesta EcoBoost will do and nearly four times of our motorway limit – is its starting point.

This is the point where you’re probably about to ask the question I get punted at least four times a year – why, if we’re only allowed to do 70mph, are cars like the Chiron even allowed to exist?

I’ve no clever answer other than to point out that all manner of devices capable of causing chaos if they’re misused – kitchen knives, angle grinders, Porsche 911s and so on – are used on a daily basis by reasonable people capable of using them without getting carried away. The Chiron has as much right to trundle up the A59 as your grandad’s Triumph Herald does.

So you’re allowed to drive it – but using it as an instrument of driving enjoyment in Cameron's Britain is a bit like hiring U2 to do the entertainment at your mate’s birthday. Spectacular, but a bit much.

Anyone who really appreciates driving will know powering along a straight isn’t the fun bit – it’s the corners, where light weight, supple suspension and talkative steering count for far more than simply going fast. Which is why the Fiat 124 Spider has me more far more excited than anything Bugatti can come up with.

For starters it’s good to see Fiat’s finally realised it can make models that don’t crib off the 500 – having made its city car into a seven-seater MPV, I was half-expecting a Fiat 500-based amphibious fire engine rather than a sports car. It’s also based on the Mazda MX-5 so the 124 Spider should be a corker to drive, and with styling that’s a bit more chic than the Japanese car.

Doing a million miles an hour isn’t the point – the Fiat 124 Spider is supposed to be fun doing entirely legal speeds, which has got to be a good thing for a nation obsessed with speed cameras.

I’ve no problem with stealth bombers on wheels being used (sensibly) on Her Majesty’s highways – but I’d have a 124 Spider, money no object, over a Chiron any day.

The big surprise about the P38 Range Rover

IT’S not every eleven-year-old who gets the gig of redesigning Southport Pier. Why subcontract Southport’s seaside flagship out to some high-flying architect when you can get a bunch of schoolkids to do it?

Yet that’s exactly what I – and about 30 of my classmates – got asked to as a school project once. Obviously my design was the best of the bunch, but I remember having an argument with the council mandarin who came in to judge our efforts, who disagreed with my vision of the pier’s future. Having listened to our views, the council boffins went off – and then ordered the pier buildings to replaced with what I recall being memorably described at the time as an ‘airport terminal on stilts’.

I was thinking about this the other day when driving around in something else that had the difficult task of following up a decades-old institution – the second generation Range Rover. Any replacement for anything that’s universally loved is always going to get a rough ride. The 1994-2002 model is definitely the Rangie’s difficult second album.

It arrives in the dock charged with two counts of not being a proper Range Rover – one that it looks like a Metrocab and the other that it’s horrendously unreliable.

It’s tricky to defend the latter because I remember the car’s Achille’s heel – the complicated air suspension system – letting go on a friend’s 4.0 SE a couple of years ago and prompting a four-figure bill. Yet look back at its showings in the customer satisfaction surveys and you’ll find it was just as bad as Land Rover’s other offerings at the time – certainly, Discovery owners were equally frustrated. The Range Rover’s come on in leaps and bounds since the 1990s – but so have plenty of other cars.

But get past that – and the looks, which actually improved with the subtle nips and tucks over the years – and you’ll discover it feels like a Range Rover.

All the Range Rovers I’ve driven over the years – from a 1970 two-door to the 500bhp leviathan that tops today’s range – give you this wonderful feeling of being slightly invincible. You feel secure knowing that even if your alloys are six inches deep in thick mud you’ll power out of it effortlessly – and the most you’ll have to worry about is what position your electrically-operated leather seat should be in.

The second-gen Range Rover does all of that. Yes, it’s thirsty, but so is every other big off-roader, and because people dismiss the ‘bad’ Range Rover it’s a lot cheaper than its predecessor.

As second acts go it was brilliant. Although not as brilliant as my schoolboy redesign of Southport Pier was.

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.

Spectre - great film, shame about the cars

I’M THINKING of opening a sanctuary – perhaps on some remote Scottish island – for fellow film fanatics in the run-up to James Bond’s next outing.

I can’t be the only film fanatic determined to avoid anything that might have prematurely ruined Spectre, but it was nigh on impossible to avoid finding out the plot details unless you spent the last six months in a cave or with your head planted firmly in the sand – something the film’s creators didn't exactly help by dripping trailer after trailer onto my Facebook feed every other night.

In the end it turned out to be a belter of a film. Don't worry - I’m not going to reveal which femme fatale he beds or what facial disfigurement the villain has if you haven't seen it, but you’ll have to allow me one spoiler alert. Why was Daniel Craig – the best ‘real world’ Bond since Timothy Dalton leapt into a swimming pool in Licence to Kill – getting involved with cars you and I can’t actually buy?

Everyone knows great cars – whether they’ve been approved by Q or not - and Bond films go together. Sean Connery being told his Bentley’s ‘had its day’ and then being introduced to a silver car with a few optional extras is one of cinema’s greatest moments, and Roger Moore winding down the window of his aquatic Lotus and casually throwing out a fish one of its funniest. Then there’s the moment Timothy Dalton fights his way through the roof of a swerving army Land Rover in the opening moments of The Living Daylights, and that glorious moment when Daniel Craig flicks on the lights to reveal a gleaming DB5 in Skyfall.

All of these vehicles have one glorious thing in common – you can, even if you might need to be a millionaire in some cases, buy all these cars in real life. Yet you can’t with Spectre’s automotive stars.

For starters there’s Bond’s car – an Aston Martin of course, but unlike the DBS or DB5 the DB10 Daniel Craig uses is not actually a production model. The closest you’ll be able to get is next year’s DB11. Close, but not exactly the MI6-spec the Bond fantasists who propel Aston’s fortunes will be wishing for this Christmas.

It’s the same story with the baddies’ choice bit of kit – a Jaguar C-X75, which was mooted as an XJ220 successor at the Paris motor show five years ago. It wasn’t a production car then and it still isn’t now – and I reckon using one in Spectre is giving today’s kids false hope.

It's a top-notch 007 outing – but I just thought the cars (except the one at the very end) were a bit of a letdown.

You love the NEC Classic Motor Show - here are some other great classic car shows you won't want to miss

LAST weekend I joined 68,000 of you in getting up at the crack of dawn so they can join a traffic jam just outside Birmingham. It was worth it – the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show is one of those automotive pilgrimages everyone should do at least once.

Even petrolheads I know who think anything south of Crewe is ‘a bit far’ will happily head down the M6 to see 3000 classic cars – whether it’s an Austin Maestro van or an Aston Martin Vanquish that floats your boat, chances are you’ll have found it in Birmingham’s halls of automotive dreams.

It’s also the place where you can see Mike Brewer and Edd China finish a three-day resto miraculously close to kicking-out time on the final day and where just about every spare part imaginable will be at the bottom of a box on an autojumble stand.

It’s great fun – but it’s also where most petrolheads’ idea of a weekend outing stops.

The NEC show is great despite having to visit Birmingham on a dreary weekend. Auto Retro, on the other hand, is an excuse to persuade the other half to catch some winter sun in Barcelona – and it’s only a budget flight away from Liverpool or Manchester. If you’re staying overnight Barcelona’s hotels cost roughly the same as Birmingham’s – and whichever way you cut it, you’re more likely to persuade your other half with Gaudi’s basilica than the Bullring shopping centre.

It’s the same story with Germany. I love the Silverstone Classic, but book your plane tickets now on the cheap and you could just easily go to the Nürburgring in the height of summer for the AVD Oldtimer Grand Prix. Forget the language barrier – it’s worth going just to see all those BMW M1s and Porsche 911s going to war on the world’s scariest race track.

Then there’s the Irish National Classic Car Show in Dublin next March – a whole day of motoring fun and an evening of knocking back pints of Guiness, less than an hour from John Lennon airport – or the AutoMotoRetro show in the shadow of the old Fiat factory in Turin. Then there’s the behemoth that is the Essen show next April – if you think your feet get a bit tired after a day after tramping around the NEC then you’ll have no idea just how enormous Europe’s biggest classic car show is. You could spend weeks wandering around in there!

The NEC is great and as a show it belongs to 'us' - the classic car nuts. But just remember there are so many other shows just waiting to be discovered, and they’re only a cheap flight away.

Adios, amigo. See you in Barcelona!

Read more about the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show in today's issue of Classic Car Weekly

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.

Peugeot - the driverless drive of your life

KEEN students of all things ironic – and I don’t mean Alanis Morrisette’s terrible 1995 hit – will look back at this week as a pivotal point in motoring history.

It’s the moment Peugeot’s chosen to reveal the full details of its first family-sized hot hatch since the turn of the century. Sure, the 207 and 208 both wore the GTi badge with varying degrees of success but the French automotive giant’s shied away from slapping it on the rump of its rival to the Golf and Focus. The old 306 GTi-6 was the of the most entertaining things ever to grace a supermarket car park – and I think deep down Peugeot knew it, which is why it was never directly replaced. Until now.

The catchy-sounding ‘308 GTi By Peugeot Sport’ has more power than the Golf GTI – 250bhp in base level trim, or turn up the wick slightly for 270bhp – and it’s more than a grand cheaper too. It’s also able to sprint to 60mph in six seconds before going on to an electronically-limited top speed of 155mph, but none of this will matter if Peugeot forgets to make it utterly addictive to drive.

That’s why the manufacturer is promising it will be ‘the best all round hot hatch’ – because anyone familiar with the old 205 GTi will know outright speed is missing the point. Driver involvement is everything, which is why Peugeot says its new GTi’s ‘ been designed with the sophisticated and enthusiastic driver in mind’ is available with something called a Driver Sport Pack, which it says ‘allows owners to ramp up the high-octane feel’.

Peugeot is clearly taking this driver involvement thing very seriously. Or rather, it would be had it not just scored a coup by becoming the first manufacturer to make a car travel between Bordeaux and Paris autonomously. The heroes of driving involvement have taken a major step forward – for driverless cars!

Don’t get me wrong – as someone who regularly does seven-hour round trips on boring stretches of motorway I’d love to be able to stretch out in the back seat and read my copy of The Champion on those long journeys home, and it’s great Peugeot are pioneering the tech because then there’s more chance it’ll eventually arrive on cars we can all afford.

But that world of drive-by-wires and clever radar sensors is completely inverse to Peugeot’s traditions of getting stuck in and enjoying a 205 or a 309 on a deserted road somewhere in deepest Yorkshire.

I can’t wait to see how Peugeot proposes putting the two in the same car.

Forget the emissions tests – it’s the real world that matters for Volkswagen

SOMETHING weird has been happening at office water coolers and in crowded bars across the North West. People – some of whom have no interest in cars at all – have been chatting in serious tones about diesel Volkswagens.

As boring topics go it’s up there with mortgages and washing machines – yet it seems to have relegated the Premier League, Strictly and whoever Katie Hopkins is offending this week firmly into ‘Oh, by the way’ territory. Even the tabloids are it. The Sun splashed ‘WE ARE FUMING’ across its outraged front page in response to Europe’s biggest car maker flunking the emissions entry exams.

What happens next will involve lots of American lawyers, hefty fines and some rather panicky German businessmen holding board meetings – but I wouldn’t rush to stick the Golf up for sale. Today’s derv-burners are still far cleaner and leaner than smokey old clatterers like my 17-year-old Peugeot 306 – I love its ability to eke 55 miles out of every gallon, but in emissions terms a new VW would run rings around it.

What’s far more important about the VW scandal is that it finally throws a spotlight on the testing regimes used for new cars – almost all of which are complete cobblers. It’s all very well slamming a car company for coming up with software that can get a car through emissions test, but the real problem is the test itself.

The tests used for cars sold in this country fail to take account of the 57.3 million square miles of land on this planet that isn’t inside an EU or manufacturer testing lab – the real world, where you and I and all those other pesky motorists live. None of us have the luxury of getting 76mpg and artificially low emissions in hermetically sealed, optimised conditions. We’re all getting a fraction of that in rush hour congestion on the A59, which is why I’m forever getting complaints off people who can’t match their car’s claimed MPG and why I’m not surprised the reality of VW’s diesel offerings is nowhere near what the lab testers said. It’s complete nonsense.

What’s needed is a revolution in how new cars are tested – a test that happens in the real world, where car makers can’t effectively cheat their way through and in which you and I end up looking at realistic emissions and MPG figures when weighing up whether to plump for a Polo over a Fiesta.

We’ve been doing it with independently adjudicated safety tests for ages – your new family hatch is nowhere in the showrooms these days without a full wad of Euro NCAP stars.

Now what we need is a proper, independent organisation to finally banish the bull from new car emissions and fuel economy figures. Perhaps VW’s inevitable fines could pay for it.

Porsche's unlikely tip for saving the planet

AS NOBLE callings go saving the planet isn’t exactly glamorous. Sorting out recyclables from household rubbish, paying 5p for shopping bags and sticking solar panels on your roof isn’t exactly the stuff of dreams.

Happily, this worthy-but-dull drive to keep the environmentalists happy needn’t extend to driving itself. As long as you’ve got a spare £76,412 lying down the back of the sofa it’s now entirely possible to help save the planet – by buying a turbocharged Porsche 911.

In fact, buying a turbocharged sports car is now the ONLY option you’ve got if you want a brand new 911 (which, I suspect, most of you do). There are all sorts of complicated explanations for why turbochargers are beneficial but the end result is a sort of automotive alchemy where weedy engines can be persuaded to work harder than bigger, heavier ones.

Anyone who went to school in the Eighties will already have learned from their bedroom walls that Porsche knows a fair bit about using turbos to eke a little extra out of the 911. In fact you’ll be pleased to learn that even in the latest model range there’ll be a proper 911 Turbo. Turbochargers went on to make Formula One cars unfeasibly fast (until they were banned) and flame-spitting rally cars a bit too tricky to handle, and in the 1990s your diesel hatchback wasn’t complete without one. Unlike hybrids and electric cars, turbocharging has instant petrolhead currency too. For anyone who disagrees, I present the Volvo T5, the Audi Quattro, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth and the Mitsubishi Evo.

But this time Porsche’s been clever. It’s used turbochargers as an excuse to make the 911’s engines smaller and – here’s the important bit – more efficient and kinder to the environment. Where the outgoing Carrera had a 3.4-litre flat six, this one makes do with just three litres, and you’ll get more to the gallon too. It’s essentially the same trick Honda’s pulled off with its diesel offerings – swapping a 2.2-litre engine for an equally gutsy 1.6-litre – and the magic ingredient that makes Ford’s paperweight of an Ecoboost engine work is the hoofing great turbocharger it’s married to.

So there you have it – you can tell your Greenpeace pals that the new 911 is entirely sensible as green-minded purchases go. Just don’t tell them it’s 20bhp more powerful and seven seconds quicker around the Nürburgring or you’re stuffed.

Coincidentally this is Life On Cars' 911th post. Spooky or what?

Why I love the unloved Allegro

THERE are plenty of great cars I don’t particularly like. Yet it takes a different sort of topsy-turvy logic altogether to like what’s widely regarded as Britain’s worst car.

If you’re the sort of armchair car critic who’s had their idea of what constitutes a rubbish car cemented through a lifetime of Jeremy Clarkson DVDs then you might as well click away now. If on the other hand you’re prepared to give even motoring’s worst offenders a fair trial, then you’ll be shocked by the verdict.

I’ve just spent the past three days hoofing about in an Austin Allegro – and I really enjoyed it.

It’s fashionable to give the poor old Allegro a kicking. In the past couple of years the tabloids have picked up on at least three surveys naming and shaming it as Britain’s worst car, in 2012 a Tory peer likened a poorly thought-out Government policy to one and Jeremy Clarkson could only think of the Morris Marina when looking for cars he hated more. In fact, I nearly joined them when a 1.1-litre Series 3 Allegro left me stranded on the M11 a couple of months ago.

So I wasn’t expecting much when a colleague chucked me the keys to his pride and joy – a V-registered Allegro 1.3 in a fantastically Seventies shade of brown with beige seats. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting to fire faithfully into life every time I tried to start it. Surely British Leyland relics from the decade that brought you the three day week and Terry and June aren’t supposed to do that?

Nor was I expecting it to go and steer in a genuinely entertaining way. I know from the 1.1-litre car I borrowed a few months ago that to drive they feel a bit like a Mini that ate all the pies, but this 1.3-litre car had just enough extra oomph to overcome the podge. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but the right Allegro is a fun car to drive!

What’s more, it has room for five, the interior’s light and airy because its window pillars are so much thinner than today’s hatchbacks, and if you look hard enough you can still pick decent ones up for under a grand. Just about the only downsides are the lack of a hatchback – bizarrely, the logic was that giving it one would harm sales of the Austin Maxi – and looks that I think are cute and distinctive but most people hate.

So the world’s worst car is actually not all that bad. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!

We build replicas of sports cars - why not hot hatches?

NOSTALGIA’S a funny thing. I doubt the ‘good old days’ really are as marvellous as their supporters make out, but bringing bygone eras back to life is big business.

You already know you can go out and buy a Volkswagen Beetle, a Fiat 500 and a MINI – all of which are a heck of a lot easier to live with than their 1965 equivalents – but you’d be surprised at how many people make a living out of giving you an even more hardcore hit of nostalgia.

That’s why Triumph will sell you a Bonneville that to casual motorcycle fans looks and feels almost exactly like something that lapped the TT circuit half a century ago, managing directors hitch up Airstream caravans to the back of their Range Rover Sports and tickets to the Goodwood Revival sell out in half a femtosecond. Even the politicians are it – Jeremy Corbyn reckons 60% of us would rather railways were state-owned, like they were in the good old days.

Naturally, there are plenty of car companies who’ll sell you a slice of the sort of nostalgia where it’s got to feel as well as look the part. You’d think Morgan would have this niche pretty much to itself – there are caves with primitive paintings of the Plus 4 etched onto their walls – but there are also companies who will sell you replicas of Jaguar XK120s and importers you can source you a brand new Lada Niva straight from Russia – 18 years after it officially disappeared from the nation’s showrooms.

Yet I reckon the specialists are missing a trick. There are lots of companies who are fulfilling the pent-up nostalgia of people who want a classic British sports car that happens to be brand new – take the Caterham Seven – but what about the thousands of us who spent their youth pulling hot hatches out of hedges?

In the past few weeks I’ve driven the Ford Fiesta and the Volkswagen Golf in the lithe MkI guises their late 1970s creators intended, and they handle and steer so much more crisply than their modern day equivalents. Today’s hot hatches are brilliant, but even a modern day Fiesta ST doesn’t have the flyweight fun factor of the old XR2.

If you can buy what’s effectively a showroom fresh Jaguar XK120 or a brand new Lotus Seven, why can’t you get a brand new Fiesta XR2 or Clio Williams? The teenagers who grew up with Sam Fox rather than Diana Dors are going to want their nostalgia hit soon enough – and it’s hot hatches, not sports cars, they grew up with.

Kit car builders of Britain – consider the gauntlet laid down!

So long Chrysler, and thanks for the Lancias

THE THREE cars might as well have been coffin nails. That’s the total sum of what Chrysler sold across the UK last month – a distant final blip on the sales chart of a brand that’s been axed yet again.

You might have missed that this emblem of American motoring got quietly deleted from the showrooms earlier this year, which is why the three Chryslers sold last month would’ve been dealers clearing out the last hangers-on now that British sales have effectively stopped. In effect, these three sales are a bit like fingernails that keep briefly growing even after your heart’s ticked its final beat.

It doesn’t take an automotive coroner to deliver the verdict – what was behind a terminal sales slump was a quartet of not terribly relevant models, two of which were Italian offerings masquerading under an all-American badge. Pop across the Channel and the Delta – actually deleted here last year on account of its dire sales figures – and Ypsilon are better known as Lancias. I’ve argued before they should have been known as Lancias here too because they’d appeal to people who grew up driving them on Sega Rally, but apparently every time someone mentions the L-word an entire retirement home groans with tired tales about rusty Betas and engines falling out.

Chrysler’s other two models are rather more American but even less relevant. I love the 300C’s moodiness and mean proportions – it’s like a Rover P5 that’s been kicked out of school for smoking behind the bike sheds – but its high running costs don’t really chime with a Britain reeling from spending cuts. It’s the same story with the Grand Voyager. In a world full of Renault Scenics and Vauxhall Zafiras we only need one truly massive people carrier – and it’s the Ford Galaxy. So poor Chrysler was stuck with four models nobody really wanted.

But here’s the thing. Sales of sister brand Jeep are up nearly 60% compared to this time last year, and parent firm Fiat is going from strength to strength, having just introduced a new version of the 500. Whether it’s a rugged-looking off-roader with real world running costs (the Renegade) or a cutesy city car every twenty-something girl falls in love with (no prizes for guessing that one), both sell relevant cars people want to buy.

The days of cheap-as-chips Neons, Voyagers dominating the school run and Vipers being plastered across bedroom walls seem a very long time ago.

Ormskirk MotorFest - how hard can it be judging a concours?

SIMON Cowell has it easy on The X Factor. At least he gets some easy dud entrants to kick out of the proceedings on his annual – and inevitable – pop juggernaut as it thunders towards the Christmas number one.

I reckon I got assigned a far trickier task at this year's Ormskirk MotorFest. One that involved making some even tougher choices, even if it didn’t involve breaking the dreams of any teenage girls desperate to be the next Pixie Lott.

At this year's event I got given the task of judging the classic cars entered into the event’s new Concours D’Elegance – a sort of automotive Crufts for people who pamper and polish their pride and joy rather than using it for late night jaunts to the nearest 24-hour supermarket for some scones and a bottle of washing up liquid.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only showgoer who spotted the irony – someone who owns a slightly shabby MGB and this year entered the MotorFest in a Range Rover that still needs a bit of bodywork attention was being asked to judge cars on their tidiness.

Happily, my co-judge was motorsport historian (and MotorFest commentator) Neville Hay. You’d like Neville – not only has he got a wicked sense of humour and is never short of an anecdote, but he’s probably forgotten more about old cars than I’ve learned. Yet the task was still unenviable. If every car in a field is in wonderful condition and has been doted on by its owner for years on end, how on earth do you go about picking a winner?

We both agreed a mission statement - in the same way a Crufts prizewinner that doesn’t get to go out digging holes and chasing sticks isn’t really on, we wanted to avoid the show queens that get trailered to events and give the prize to a nice car owned by someone who enjoys it in the real world.

Even then, we ended up picking nits to separate the truly brilliant cars from the merely great ones, docking points off for the sort of scuffs most motorists don’t give a stuff about. In the end a single point split the winner from the car that came second – it really was that close.

It really ought to have been a bit like a primary school sports day where everybody won a prize, but in the end we gave it to Graham Postlethwaite’s virtually immaculate Rover P5B Coupé. Even in a contest packed with prizeworthy motors it was a deserving winner.

The cheque should land on my doormat by Friday. Only joking…

Read more about the Ormskirk MotorFest in this week's issue of Classic Car Weekly - published 9 September 2015.

Toyota has started the next revolution for UK motorists

THE other day I got to try out a real technological groundbreaker – but it wasn’t a car.

Nope, I was playing Pong on an Atari – it wasn’t the first computer game, but it was the one that really caught the world’s attention. It seems weird to think that in 1972 playing a crude electronic representation of table tennis was at the cutting edge of killing time with a friend, but we wouldn’t have got to Angry Birds and Grand Theft Auto V without it.

On the way home from toying with Atari’s finest – and having a nostalgic test drive of Super Mario Kart on 1992’s Super Nintendo while I was at it – I overtook what I reckon must be the motoring world’s Pong on the motorway.

Time really hasn’t done the original Toyota Prius any favours. In the same way the Atari looks impossibly simple in a world where you download slick games straight to your smartphone, the original Prius looks positively prehistoric next to say, a Focus or an Astra of the same era. Then again, that’s the price you pay for being first out of the blocks with something new.

The Prius might look gawky now but it offered us the first chance to drive something other than a straightforward petrol or diesel – a hybrid - and it paved the way for today’s BMW i8s, Vauxhall Amperas, ‘h’-badged Lexus limousines and KERS-assisted Ferraris. Toyota now offers six different hybrids of its own, including a third-generation Prius that’s a lot more Call of Duty than Pacman.

But Toyota isn’t prepared to leave it at that. For as long as anyone can remember it’s been perpetually locked in a technological arms race with Honda, and both reckon the next big thing is fuel cells. In a nutshell, cars that can refill in an instant with hydrogen, somehow make it into electricity without any need to cue the Pathé newsreel of the Hindenberg disaster and then tootle along leaving only water vapour in their wake.

Honda’s already been at in the States with the FCX Clarity, and now Toyota’s taken a tentative leap into the British market with the Mirai.

The Japanese giant is playing it cautious – perhaps not surprisingly, given the £56k price tag and the almost non-existent hydrogen fuel network here at the moment – and you can tell by its slightly edgy styling that it’s going to be another machine that’ll date horrifically.

Chances are you won’t be ordering one of the first cars off to roll off the boat this month – not when it costs nearly twice the price of a Range Rover Evoque – but you’d be a fool to bet against it.

Toyota and Honda are bankrolling fuel cell cars, and they’ll be everywhere in 15 years’ time. The Mirai will look crude in no time, but the revolution’s got to start somewhere.

Not everything about the Calais crisis is bad news for motorists

CALAIS used to be about cheap booze and going on holiday. Yet you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s now a rolling news story rather than somewhere you wave your passport.

I’ve just got back from a long weekend of driving on the continent and I’m glad I sailed out of Harwich rather than Dover. The seemingly endless footage of lorries parked end-to-end on the motorways and Gendarmes arresting people desperate to sneak into Blighty doesn’t exactly do the idea of nipping over to France any good.

It’s a horrible situation, and certainly not one that’s down to the Border Force chaps on either side of the Channel; if the grilling they gave a colleague and I for attempting to depart Dover in a smoky old Austin Allegro was anything to go by they’re definitely on the ball.

I’ll let the cabinet ministers, the frustrated truckers and the readers of The Daily Express argue about the one thing ruining motoring holidays more than anything else this summer – but it’s not all bad news. One thing that’s come out of it is a nifty invention that could have all sorts of motoring implications.

The Freight Transport Association – an organisation that represents about half the nation’s truckers – is encouraging Scania Man to fit his lorry with a carbon dioxide detector before chugging into Calais. The idea’s a simple one – as we all chuck out a bit of CO2 every time we inhale the gadget will let you know if anyone’s stowed in the back, helping you avoid a £2000 fine. Clever stuff, and the car world should be taking note.

Suppose your slightly dotty relative leaves Fido in the car while he pops into the shops. Normally if it’s a sunny afternoon our canine chum would be in trouble, but the carbon dioxide detector used to help those frustrated lorry drivers could save the day. If a car was fitted with one that worked in conjunction with its temperature sensors, it could detect the doggy distress and lower the windows before it’s too late.

There’s more. Suppose you leave your car overnight and it gets some unwanted attention. If the car detects the carbon dioxide of an intruder it could immobilise and alert the police. Alternatively, it could lock them inside and set the stereo to play Chesney Hawkes’ 1991 hit The One and Only on a loop as punishment.

Obviously, it would need to be cleverly programmed to work alongside all the other gizmos you get in the Astra, the Golf and so on – but if cars are clever enough to park themselves then they’re definitely clever enough to know if a dog or burglar is inside when they shouldn’t be.

Sadly it probably won’t solve all the grief at Calais but – and I hope I’m right on this one – it might save your canine chum in years to come.

The C4 Cactus is far from perfect - but at least you remember it

EVERYONE has a favourite Citroen. Whether you ask your mum or your best mate – or even your best mate’s mum – I reckon anyone with even an ounce of car awareness can reel off at least one of the French firm’s offerings.

It might be a rustic old 2CV or a swoopy DS. Perhaps it’s that Saxo VTS you once cheekily handbrake-turned in an empty car park, or the BX your slightly wacky relatives used to run around in. The fact you can probably recall at least one means Citroens are memorable – imagine if I’d asked you to name your favourite Kia instead. Struggling a bit?

Yet the legacy of those great cars is a manufacturer that’s forever trying to overcome a bit of an identity crisis – which is why for every wonderfully weird Xantia there’s usually a crushingly boring Xsara that almost seems to say “Sorry, we got a bit carried away earlier”. Every brief bit of brilliance seems to get hauled in with a succession of me-too models nobody remembers.

Take the C4. I loved the original, with its steering wheel boss that just floated in the upright position no matter which way you turned and the Honda CRX-esque proportions and sharp snout of the three-door model, but I can’t even remember what the current model looks like.

Which is probably why the spin-off appears to have wheels stolen from the set of Space 1999 and two giant Dairy Milks glued to its sides. The C4 Cactus is wilfully weird.

There is a genuine reason for it having those squishy, moulded blobs – park up in a tight space at the supermarket and you won’t return to find a Range Rover Evoque’s door has left a dent in yours. It also looks great despite the bonkers detailing, packs a phenomenal amount of legroom and headroom into a small(ish) space and it’s easy to drive.

The interior is as wonderfully avant-garde as the exterior – particularly the way the glovebox has been made to look like a trendy briefcase. I’m not so keen on its other trendy feature – the decision to operate every conceivable control through an iPad-esque screen. Not only does it rob the rest of the cabin of buttons and switches but it’s so fiddly, complicated and irresponsive it was actually distracting to use.

That’s before I get to the Blade Runner-esque digital dash readout that doesn’t have a rev counter, the boot lip that’s a bit too high up for heaving heavy bags of shopping and the over-assisted, feel-free steering – but I’ll forgive the irritating foibles because I like the Cactus.

In a motoring landscape where generic hatchbacks with badges like EcoBland plastered across their rumps the Cactus is a breath of fresh air. It might not be my favourite Citroen, but it’s a car you can’t forget in a hurry.

MG needs to get back to its sports car roots

OPAL FRUITS, Stephen Fry’s tweets and Top of the Pops. It’s funny how you only really start appreciating some things when they’re gone.

In fact, I’d like to add the MGF to that list. It's roughly 20 years since its launch  – and the more I think about it, the more I realise its absence is a fairly significant bit of Britain’s automotive armoury missing.

Okay, so it wasn’t perfect. If I had a pound for every armchair critic who dismisses the ‘F for blown head gaskets I’d have enough to buy a replacement Rover K-Series engine, but much more serious were its poor showings in customer satisfaction surveys when it was new. Oh, and Anthea Turner was a proud owner.

Yet despite Anthea’s best efforts Britain loved the ‘F – in fact, for a brief stint it actually outsold Mazda’s MX-5 – so for more than a decade it acted as the nation’s fun, inoffensive sports car of choice. Just like the MGB did a generation earlier.

Where is the modern equivalent? It’s the middle of summer, there’s a generation of company car drivers given allowances rather than mid-range Mondeos by their fleet managers – and what I suppose would be called the MGG is nowhere to be seen.

MG is alive and well, but it should be hunting on the territory it used to call its own as well as targeting the Hyundai-peddling masses.

I drove an MG3 last year and it was frugal and fun in an old-school, Citroen Saxo-ish sort of way. I suppose – and feel free to raise your eyebrows at this one – it does sort of live up to the legacy left by the old MG Metro. Fair enough, but what I reckon the world really craves is another proper MG, the sort you can pop the roof down and enjoy when the sun’s shining, and hole up in the pub and discuss breakdowns when it isn’t.

The MGF’s old rivals – the Fiat Barchetta, the Toyota MR2, the Alfa Spider and so on – are all gone, leaving the MX-5 as just about the only option left if you want a small, fun, inoffensive sports car.

Now is the time for MG’s Chinese masters to make it happen, but chances are they won’t. Don’t get bored with waiting – chuck a grand at a cheap MGF and remind the world what it’s missing.

Forget the silly name - the Nissan Qashqai is a deserving cash cow

THE Nissan Qashqai is a bit like the geeky kid everyone seems to have gone to school with. Studious and destined to go on to greater things, but entirely fair game for the playground bullies because some cruel parents have given it a stupid name.

I’ve just spent a couple of days in the company of the latest 1.5 DCI model and almost felt compelled to leap to its defence because people couldn’t resist calling it names. Sticks and stones – apt, given its off-roader pretensions – may break its parts but words will never hurt it.

“Ahhh, so you’ve got a Nissan Squashed Quiche! Any good?” a mate of mine immediately asked when he found I’d got the nation’s fifth best-selling new car as a temporary companion.

I replied by telling him that yes, I can understand entirely why so many of you are buying them. It’s roomy, easy to manoeuvre for something of its off-roader stature, and it’s well equipped. In fact, easily my favourite thing about the latest model is the optional Blind Spot Warning system, which flickers a tiny little orange lightbulb next to your door mirror every time an errant Transit thunders past. It’s got the potential to save your life on a congested motorway, but it doesn’t beep intrusively every ten seconds. Just that little orange flicker to remind you. Why can’t all cars have one?

Another pal wasn’t surprised when I told him. “They’re great, those Cash Cows. Loads of people I know have got ‘em”.

Agreed. Not only is usefully more practical than Nissan’s family hatch for the same sort of money, the Pulsar, it’s got a chunky, rugged look to it the more conventional Golf rival doesn’t. Like the first generation Cash ‘n’ Carry – sorry, Qashqai – it’s also built in Britain so you can justifiably buy one as a patriotic purchase, and unlike the first generation model it doesn’t suffer from having slightly cheap-feeling plastics throughout its interior.

It was my dad, however, who posed the big question. “It looks like a good car, the Mushy Peas,” he said. “But would you buy one?”

Personally, I wouldn’t – but that’s because the Skoda Yeti I tried a few weeks ago could endure trickier terrain and carry bigger bookcases than the Crash Bandicoot can, and I know the Nissan makes up for it with better looks and a nicer drive.

The great thing with this bit of the market is that everyone makes a small, off-roader-esque car these days – but the Nissan’s one of the best because it’s such a good all-rounder. That’s why it’s such a big seller – and why it really is a Cash Cow.

Get your entries in for the 2015 Ormskirk MotorFest!

CLASSIC CAR owners have until the end of the month to get their entries in for this year’s Ormskirk MotorFest.

This year’s event takes place on Sunday, August 30 and includes a new Concours D’Elegance competition which rewards owners for cleanly presented cars. The MotorFest takes place in Ormskirk town centre and Coronation Park.

For more information and to get your classic car entered go to the event's website.