, concluye por decir que se compraría un Mazda 6 porque es más divertido de conducir o un Laguna porque es más seguro :"Jeremy Clarkson
Saab 9-3
Suckered by Swede nothings
In a competition to find the greatest ever public relations coup, Austria would take the gold medal for having convinced the world that Hitler was German. But Sweden isn’t far behind.
The public face of this meat in the Scandinavian sandwich is gentle and rather cool. The word Sweden conjures up visions of willowy blonde girls, their naked bodies as white as the wood from a holly tree, sending digital photographs to one another on their slinky Ericsson telephones. Their husbands, meanwhile, are working at Ikea, then donating 99% of their income to the state for the wellbeing of others.
It’s not quite like that. Sweden may be as resolutely neutral as Switzerland and as superficially peaceful as an ageing koala but it has one of the world’s largest air forces, and while America may crow about its stealth planes, Olaf has built himself a stealth warship. You can see it but the radar screens say it isn’t there.
Don’t be fooled by Lapland either. With its picture postcard fir trees dripping with geometrically perfect snowflakes, this appears to be Europe’s last wilderness. Just mile after mile of utter silence.
But nestling in its midst is the mining town of Kiruna. Now if I can be permitted to liken Europe to the human body, Gascony is the stomach, Scotland the brain, Germany the fist, Greece the lower intestine and Italy the eyes.
So what’s Kiruna? Well, to be blunt, it’s the arse. There are no willowy blondes. In fact, there are hardly any women at all. Biologically, the receptionist at my hotel may have been female but aesthetically she was a tractor. Had I taken her out for a drink she’d have had a pint of diesel.
Not that I would have taken her out for a drink. Kiruna is like a Wild West frontier town. In one bar I had to duck smartish to avoid being hit on the head by an airborne chair. As the evening wore on a succession of fights resulted in all the furniture being reduced to the flat-pack state for which Sweden is so famous. Peaceful? You couldn’t get less peace if you staffed the White House war room with Millwall supporters.
Don’t be deceived by the high-tech phones and the Abba soundtrack. Let this lot off the leash and they’d be up the Humber tomorrow, stealing our women and burning Hull to the ground.
Don’t be deceived by Saab either. You may think that its new 9-3 is a Vauxhall Vectra with the word Vauxhall crossed out. But this is not so.
Yes, Saab, like Vauxhall, is owned by General Motors and yes, the new 9-3 was designed alongside the Vectra. They even look the same and they both sit on what GM calls its Epsilon platform. But the cars are totally different.
Sweden, so far as I can tell, is not a team player. Years ago Saab teamed up with Alfa Romeo, Fiat and Lancia to design a big car. But the project fell apart because the Swedes insisted that their car — the 9000 — should have tall wheels to deal with snow, not something that unduly bothered the sharp-suited boys in Turin.
So, while the Vectra and the 9-3 both have the same base the Saab has bigger wheels, a wider track and a longer wheelbase than the Vauxhall. It is a completely different car.
But then it would be, of course, because Saab makes fighter planes, yes? No it doesn’t. The link between the car and aircraft companies has been tenuous for years but these days it’s barely there at all. Indeed, I rang a man in Saab’s PR department to find out what fighter technology is employed in the new car. He was called Gary, but nevertheless sounded like regal velvet as he admitted: “Well, the man who designs our dashboards used to be a pilot.”
So there you are. Gary, the Old Etonian soundalike, tells us the violent peaceful Swedes at Saab are now making a Vauxhall that isn’t a Vauxhall or a Grippen fighter jet. So what is it? God knows. Swedish cars have a reputation for being safe and looking after you should you swerve to miss an elk and end up in a wood. Indeed, I know of no country in the world where the locals drive so carefully: 55 may be the speed limit but nobody achieves such dizzy heights.
On the other hand, Sweden has spawned some of the world’s greatest rally drivers. There have been some pretty raunchy Saabs, too, with water injection and turbos the size of Denmark, some hitting the front wheels with 220bhp.
So which is it to be, safe or sporty? Which word best sums up the new 9-3? It doesn’t matter, actually, because people buy a Saab for all the things it isn’t. And the thing it isn’t most of all is German. It isn’t pushy like a BMW or clinical like an Audi. It’s neutral and quiet, like Sweden’s supposed to be.
I know Saab was very worried that by making the latest 9-3 a saloon rather than a hatchback, as was always the case in the past, its traditional customers would be alienated. But it doesn’t matter. You could fill the seats with spikes and fit casters instead of wheels. Just so long as it doesn’t have a BMW badge on the back.
As I’ve said many times before, Saab buyers are courteous and efficient. No Saab driver has ever punched you in the face for forgetting to turn your indicator off. And you will never hear anyone say: “Look at that maniac in the Saab.” I bet that you have never been carved up by a Saab, either. You haven’t, have you? You won’t be with this new one, either. Or if you are, you won’t notice. In the past, Saabs have had a distinctive look with their wraparound windscreens and their enormous bumpers. But this new 9-3 is as obtrusive as Heather McCartney’s prosthetic leg.
Nor does it go fast enough to do much carving. I tested the 175bhp 2.0 litre with the light-pressure turbo and it felt awfully pedestrian, though there is a heavy-pressure version coming which should address this.
In fact, I struggled to find a single reason why I’d buy one, something that makes it stand out from the crowd. Not reliability, Saab doesn’t have a blemish-free record on that front. Nor price: it costs about the same as the equivalent Audi A4 or BMW 318i. And not running costs: it’s in a higher tax bracket than the Germans.
I quite like the way that Saab’s former pilot has put a button on the dash that turns off all the instruments at night except the speedo. But I kept turning them back on every few miles because I was paranoid about running out of fuel.
And I quite liked the handbrake, which is disguised as a piece of furniture. Even though it did try to break my fingers. But that really was it.
Of course, those of you with a fondness for Saabs will find nothing wrong with the new 9-3, it’s exactly what you were expecting. The trouble is, of course, being Swedish, you were expecting the wrong things.
So, if I were you, I’d buy a Mazda 6, which is demonstrably better to drive, or a Renault Laguna which is as safe as living in a cellar.
Vital statistics
Model Saab 9-3 2.0t Vector
Engine Four cylinders, in-line
Capacity 1998cc
Power 175bhp @ 5500rpm
Torque 195 lb ft @ 2500rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual
Suspension (front) struts, anti-roll bar; (rear) multi-link, coil springs, anti-roll bar
Tyres 215/55 R16
Fuel 33.2mpg (combined)
CO2 206g/km
Dimensions 4635mm length, 1466mm height, 1762mm width
Company car tax £1,968 for a higher rate taxpayer
Acceleration 0 to 62mph: 8.5sec
Top speed 133mph
Insurance Group 14
Price £21,595
Verdict If you really, really can't stand the idea of an Audi or a BMW, go for the Saab if you must. But don't buy it because you think it will be more fun, cheaper, more reliable or less expensive to run than the competition. Because it won't"
Pero es que mirad lo que pone en la prueba del Seat Melón Cupra R. Pone a parar a los españoles, nos llama tercermundistas, etc
. Copiado de este enlace:"Spanish fishermen. What two words bring such cohesion to the rest of Europe? Whatever the problems elsewhere we all hate them and their huge floating vacuum cleaners. They’ve Hoovered up their own coastline and now they’re using a billion pounds of our money to Dyson the shores of every other member state.
Turkey probably thinks that if it joins the EU the biggest change will be the abolition of its death penalty. Not so. What they don’t realise is that they will be taxed an extra £1.50 in the pound so that Manuel can rock up and catch everything in everyone’s garden pond. Live in Ankara? Got a goldfish in a little bowl in the kitchen? Well, be afraid. Be very afraid.
And yet when that oil tanker, the Prestige, went down the other day suddenly Manuel and his merry band were no longer pirates raping the seas from the Faroes to the Falklands. Television reporters stopped calling them “Spanish fishermen” and went for the sympathy jugular, calling them “local fishermen”.
This, of course, conjures images of some silver-haired old walnut tending to his nets while his creaking old boat gently tugs at its moorings. “Oh no,” we’re all supposed to think, “all of his catch will be ruined. He will starve. His children will die.”
Pah! I’ve been to this part of Spain. It’s full of trawlers the size of South America. They never fish off their own coast — that’s been barren for years — and they only ever return to base for the next subsidy cheque.
And there’s another thing: oil floats, so quite how it impacts on the nonexistent fish I have no idea. The only creatures that could possibly be harmed are sea birds but, I’m sorry, this is not Britain. Here you only need to spill a gallon of diesel and Rolf Harris is there in a jiffy with a team from the local puffin parlour. Every bird is given a treatment that would cost Tara Palmer-Tomkinson half a year’s salary.
I can’t see this happening in Spain. If you live in a country that stabs cows and throws donkeys from the top of churches, how can anyone be genuinely blubby over the fate of some blackened guillemots.
Oh they might act a bit, but all they want out of this is EU cash. That’s all the Spaniards ever want.
If I were in charge, I’d simply point out that crude oil is 3m-year-old seafood that died and rotted. Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant’s foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet’s ability to self-heal. And they were spectacularly wrong again with the Prestige.
When it was first holed they said it should be bombed. A couple of points on that. Heavy crude will not burn unless it’s been heated first, and if it’s in water it won’t burn at all. But if by some miracle it had caught light, think of all that smoke. Why not just let the ship sink to the bottom where the oil would solidify in the cold water and be as benign as sand? But enough on the trouble with Spain, let’s talk about its cars.
Spain is not a big manufacturing country. In fact, if you went through your house you probably wouldn’t find a single thing that was made there. But they do nail the odd car together, which are called Seats.
From memory I could tell you who makes almost every car on the road, roughly how much it costs and vaguely what it’s like to drive. But without using reference books I have no idea what Seat makes. I believe there’s a car called the Ibiza and possibly one called the Toledo. There’s a people carrier too, and I think that’s it. What I do know is that they’re all VWs for less money. But if you want a cheap Volkswagen and really don’t care about the badge, why not buy a Skoda? I have even considered borrowing a Seat to see what’s what but then thought, what’s the point? In 15 years of writing about cars nobody has ever stopped me in a petrol station and asked me about them. I get paid to notice them and I don’t. So they’re like the Prestige: harmless but about 7,000ft below our radar screens.
Apparently, Seat is the fun side of Volkswagen. It’s the slightly wayward son who sleeps all afternoon and nicks a fiver occasionally from his dad. But everyone forgives him because when the sun goes down he’s quite a laugh.
A Volkswagen, then, with a sense of humour. That’s the theory, but to find out if it works in practice I borrowed something called a Leon Cupra R.
It’s trumpeted as the work of Seat’s motor sport department. What motor sport department? I have racked my brains for 40 minutes and I cannot think of a single area in which Seat takes part. It used to be in rallying, but not now. Perhaps it does canoeing or something that’s not on television or in the papers. That would be a very Seat thing to do — something invisible.
The Cupra R is billed as the fastest car ever built in Spain. But that’s like being the best chocolate maker in Egypt. I’m sure Seat’s canoeists were jolly pleased to have squeezed 210bhp out of VW’s 1.8 litre turbo but this colossal output doesn’t translate into particularly scintillating performance.
Zero to 60mph in 7.2sec was par for the course in 1985 and though a top speed of 147mph sounds good, especially in Iberia, where it’s actually faster than the speed of light, it’s ho-hum in the first world. VW’s Golf R32 and Alfa’s new 147 GTA will both climb past 150mph.
The Seat fights back by being a mere £16,995. That’s way cheaper than the VW and the Alfa, and significantly less than Ford asks for a Focus RS or Honda for a Civic Type-R.
To find out what it feels like on the road, I deliberately set off 15 minutes late to see my daughter’s school play. There were 70 children, 68 speaking parts, and she was one of the two, but I still had to be there and on time.
Things started badly. In fact, I never even got out of the drive before I crashed. Seat talks about the pinpoint active chassis and the four-pot brakes but neither stopped me understeering off the gravel into my new curly wurly tree. I don’t know its proper name. We now simply call it “broken”.
On the proper road it really wasn’t bad. Third gear acceleration is particularly strong, which is good for overtaking, and it is grippy without being uncomfortable. The long wheelbase probably helps here.
It helps with interior space, too. Even with a pair of Recaro seats the size of Devon in the front there was still a deal more space than you get in most hatches. A decent-size boot, too.
As for quality, well I don’t know. Underneath it’s a Volkswagen, which is a good thing. On top it’s Spanish, and that’s not.
I wouldn’t buy one. When it’s good it’s quite good, and that’s not good enough. When it’s bad it’s not bad, which isn’t good enough either.
Other than that, what can I say? It’s from Barcelona. Just like Manuel.
Vital statistics
Model: Seat Leon Cupra R
Engine type: Four cylinders, turbocharged
Power: 210bhp @ 5800rpm
Torque: 199lb ft @ 2100rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual
Suspension: (front) independent MacPherson struts, coil springs, anti-roll bar; (rear) twist beam rear axle, coil springs, anti-roll bar
Tyres: 225/40 R18
Fuel: 32.1mpg (combined)
CO2: 211g/km
CO car tax: £1,560 for a higher-rate taxpayer
Top speed: 147mph
Acceleration: 0 to 62mph: 7.2 sec
Insurance: Group 17
Price: £16,995
Verdict: Quite good and, in this class, that's not nearly good enough"
Mi madre, qué ganas de darle un par de leches y una patada en los mismísimos
