Autoblog UK

Skoda's slogan is "Simply Clever" – and the Yeti delivers.

The Skoda Yeti is one of the new breed of crossover vehicles – part family car, part 4x4. The Skoda looks more functional than, say a Nissan Qashqai, but the formula is similar. In fact it looks more like a giant Fiat Panda 4x4, which is no bad thing – it's chunky, square styling makes a pleasant change from the general trend to make off-roaders look ever more sporty and dynamic. The advantage of the Yeti's "hip to be square" styling is that it has more luggage capacity than a Ford Kuga, a car which looks like it is a size bigger.

We were interested in how well such an apparently road-biased car would cope in arduous conditions, so we took it on a journey from Milan in Italy to Zurich in Switzerland. That may not sound too arduous, but temperatures were -11 degrees and we had a stop-off to try some slaloming around an ice circuit. On the roads up through the Alps, the Yeti 4x4 2.0 TDI was very impressive. Both the 140 bhp and the 170 bhp engines were surprisingly linear – whereas some high-power diesels have a sharply defined powerband with almost nothing below 1600 rpm, the new VW Common Rail engine pulled evenly from any engine speed. In fact, they responded more like a petrol engine – but with vastly more torque. Even on steep inclines above 2000 metres, they never struggled. On those same roads, with patches of snow on the corners, the electronically controlled Haldex clutch redistributed the power the instant traction was affected. The driver could tell that the electronic brain was doing its stuff, but a passenger would be none the wiser – there was no wheelspin and no sudden reductions in power.

Yesterday's news that VW is buying a 19.9% share in Suzuki and that Peugeot is considering a tie-up with Mitsubishi, shows that car companies are responding to the economic problems by trying to become genuinely global.
The VW tie up is the most interesting. VW is determined to become the world's biggest car company (it is currently Number 2 behind Toyota) and Suzuki can give it a helping hand.

The minority shareholding means Suzuki sales will not count towards to the VW total, but Suzuki has a lot of useful expertise. While VW is huge in China, Suzuki is the biggest player in India and VW would love to replicate some of its Chinese success in the other big Asian market. The other thing that Suzuki brings to the market is expertise in city cars. Although not a big company in Japan for family cars, it is very strong in Kei cars, the 660cc city cars that enjoy tax advantages in Japan (and form the basis of the Indian Suzuki Maruti). VW is pretty lacklustre when it comes to city cars – the Brazilian-made Fox is VW's least competitive design. A VW with good city cars and a growing presence in India is a prospect to strike real fear into Toyota.

I went on Citroen's website the other day and was greeted with an image of great models from the past: the SM, the DS and so on. How times change. Back in the 1980s, Citroen's chiefs had a policy of "Year Zero" – nothing made before the Peugeot takeover in 1974 could be mentioned or even seen. One Citroen employee in Slough was discouraged from bringing in his beautiful Citroen SM to the office as it reminded people that Citroen actually had a heritage. Citroen was under the impression that being a modern, professional company was all about production efficiency and talk about history showed they were "unprofessional".

The policy went to absurd lengths – one magazine got so fed up of briefings about Year Zero that it deliberately mentioned the 2CV in every article about Citroens just to annoy the company.

In recent years, Citroen has woken up to the fact that its heritage is one of its greatest assets - the Koreans can compete on cost, but they cannot compete on history with a company that has been at the forefront of technology for 90 years. Selling heritage can shift the focus away from discounts, and there is nothing unprofessional about that.

In fact, Citroen now has the air that the grown-ups are back in charge. Some of the decisions a generation ago were comedy gold – the Citroen XM was given a foot-operated parking brake because the management thought that, as Mercedes had them, it was a sign of a prestige manufacturer. In fact, it was a sign that most Mercedes were sold with automatic transmission and lots of them went to the USA – neither being factors that applied to Citroens. The other killer feature of the XM was a glass partition between the rear seats and the boot: Citroen managed to convince itself that the main reason people did not buy executive hatchbacks was that opening the boot gave occupants a cold draught. Can you imagine the meeting where that was agreed?

The current plan to create a luxury sub-brand for Citroen called DS (starting with the 2010 DS3) is a brave and imaginative one. Success is not guaranteed, but it is an awful lot more plausible than the decisions that Citroen used to make when it was trying to be "hard-nosed" about everything.

The comment from Richard Phillips, Silverstone's managing director, that the 17 year deal between Bernie Ecclestone and the British Racing Drivers Club (BRDC) is "peace in our time" was ironic.

The phrase was coined by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who announced peace with Hitler just months before the Second World War – and Phillips's comment served as a (possibly unconscious) reminder that Bernie recently described Hitler as a man who "could get things done."

In any event, it apparently brings to an end years of acrimony between the two sides. Bernie's dislike of the BRDC is well-known and he has been threatening to drop Silverstone for at least a decade. He managed to bully the British government into paying for the widening of the A43 to service the recetrack and, in 2000, punished the circuit by moving the Grand prix to Easter, guaranteeing that the car parks became mudbaths. However, in his recent decision to move the race to Donington, Bernie finally overplayed his hand. Although Bernie was a great friend of Donington's owner (and saviour), the recently deceased Tom Wheatcroft, no-one else could take the idea seriously.

Donington has a character of its own, but it is a million miles away from a modern F1 track. Complaining that the facilities at Silverstone were not good enough and so the British Grand Prix was moving to Donington was like saying, "a Ford Focus is not big enough for me, so I am buying a Fiat 500".

Following up our recent story about Beijing saying it did not want the Saab factory, it is becoming clearer about what it does want. It is still apparently mulling over what it might buy from GM in terms of current products but, in the meantime, it has bought the production line for the old Saab 9-5.

On the plus side, that does give Beijing access to a western platform which is more advanced than anything it could come up with itself. On the negative side, it is slightly surprising that anyone would want the oldest large car platform in Europe: the 9-5 dates back to 1997 and has its origins in a stretched Vauxhall Vectra chassis.

The Chinese market is getting steadily more sophisticated and starting to demand contemporary designs. The days when VW could get rich in China by selling the early 1980s VW Santana (a Passat with a boot) have gone forever. The 9-5 is going to have to be sold very cheaply to compete even in the domestic market, and it is certainly not going to be viable in western markets at any price.

People do snigger at the idea of a Skoda called Superb (the name actually harks back to a pre-war model never sold in Anglo-Saxon markets), but Skoda is very bullish about this car. While the proposition of the Superb may look simple – an executive-sized car being sold for less than a Mondeo or Insignia, the truth is a bit more complex. As the Koreans and Japanese have proved, there is no point selling an executive-sized car if it looks and feels like an overgrown Toyota Corolla, no matter how cheap the price. Kia once offered the Magentis at £9999 and a fat lot of good it did them. The Superb is different: from the outside it looks as convincing as an Audi or BMW and the quality of the interior is absolutely first class. We jumped out of a BMW Z4 and into the Superb and the latter had noticeably better fit and finish. Indeed, only Audis have better finished interiors than this car, and then only fractionally.

So it looks the part and it feels the part, but does it deliver on the road? The chassis and engines come from the collective parts bin of VW and Audi, and Skoda is normally pretty adept at combining them into a convincing whole. We tried the full range of engines, starting with the 1.4 TSI. Now, the idea of a 1400 cc engine in a car almost the size of an Audi A6 Avant may seem absurd, but this one confounds expectations. With its turbocharged and supercharged engine, it has the power (125 bhp) and torque of a 2.0 litre petrol without the thirst.

One of the perks of buying a car like a Porsche is the access it provides to the manufacturer's "Experience Days" – driving the car on the track while getting some instruction from professional racing drivers. Now Porsche has democratized the process – you can bring any car and Porsche's team will teach you to drive it better. Being Porsche, it is not any any old track, but one the company has built specially to simulate a tight A road. As well as the track, the Porsche Experience Centre includes a small lecture theatre where the theory of driving is discussed and a gym where racing drivers can test their fitness. Lest you think the gym is a bit of a token effort, it is regularly used by F1 ace Mark Webber and features equipment you are never going to see down your local Virgin Active. One of the most remarkable items is a wall of flashing lights with buttons underneath each light. The lights come on at random and you have to hit the appropriate button, at which point the next light comes on. Most people score about 60 hits in a minute, but F1 drivers get 120. That is the difference in reaction time from average to world-class.

On our visit, Vicky Butler-Henderson of Fifth Gear fame was giving part of the talk about driving technique (not a regular speaker, I regret to say). One of the most memorable things she said was that, in ten years of giving racetrack instruction, she had never met a pupil who was as good as they thought they were. With that warning ringing in my ears, we went to the track. The instructor gave clear, straightforward advice – my main area for improvement was to look further ahead so my cornering could become smoother. Interestingly, the mildly squealing tyres I thought were a good sign on one corner were nothing of the sort. They meant I was staying too long with the steering lock on and I was overheating one of the tyres.

As you read this, 20 people in Oxfordshire and Hampshire are preparing to take delivery of what BMW hopes is the future of the car. The electric Mini is part of a field trial to get real-world experience of how everyday drivers get on with electric cars. That is real electric cars, not the quadricylces being presented as cars by the likes of G-Wiz, as demonstrated by the Mini E having a Cooper S-beating 201 hp. Unfortunately, it does suffer one deficiency associated with traditional electric runabouts, however: it is only a two seater as the lithium-ion battery pack takes up the space once occupied by the rear seats (and indeed most of the boot). That is a consequence of using an existing car as a base – future electric models under development by BMW, Renault, Nissan and others will be designed around their battery packs, so passenger space will not be compromised.

From the outside, the Mini looks normal apart from a few electric stickers – in a nice touch, the socket for the recharger is positioned where the fuel cap normally goes, so owners can easily guess where to put the plug. The statistics of the Mini E are impressive: 0-62 mph in 8.2 seconds an electronically limited top speed of 95 mph , a maximum range of 156 miles and a normal range of 100-120 miles. Of course, we have been hearing impressive-sounding claims for electric cars for at least 40 years, so we wanted to know how the Mini E really drives.

The boss of Fiat, Sergio Marchionne has given Alfa Romeo a blunt warning that its future is not guaranteed. Increasingly fed up with Alfa's habit of regularly announcing a new strategy and a great new future, Marchionne told trade magazine Automotive News Europe, "We need to stop doing it. You cannot be a newborn Christian every four years. It's the same religion, eventually you need to own a religion and carry it to conclusion."

The two options currently on the table are equally drastic – and deeply unpalatable to Alfa enthusiasts. The first one is simply to stop developing new models after the 147 replacement, the Giulietta, goes on sale next year. That would leave Alfa in a kind of half-life making small cars for as long as they have a market – a bit like sibling Lancia, in fact. The other, which is no more pleasant, is to use Chrysler platforms as the basis of the next 159 and 166. The idea of an Alfa sharing a platform with the next-generation Chrysler Sebring is scary stuff and has shades of the dreadful Arna of the 1980s - a mix of Alfasud and Nissan Cherry intended to cut the costs of Alfa Romeo (it was more like cutting the throat of Alfa Romeo).

Marchionne is certainly right to be furious with the management of Alfa. After the successful launch of the beautiful 156, which used to sell a healthy 120,000 a year, the lacklustre 159 completely lost momentum. People use to love the 156 for its looks or hate it for its unreliability (or frequently both), but the 159 is about as big a threat to the BMW 3 Series as the Renault Laguna. Alfa's total sales were just over 100,000 last year – miles away from what a semi-premium car company needs to break even. Just ask Saab.

Today, VW has unveiled its new pick-up truck, which is notable for two entirely unconnected reasons. Firstly, it is VW's first own-designed pick-up, as VW aims for world domination (the company is deadly serious about overtaking Toyota to take the global Number One spot).

Secondly, it is yet another VW with a daft name. Presumably the company whose first car was known by the name of an insect feels that silly names are a core value.

The Sharan was probably the best/worst example, but the Tiguan was not far behind. Amusingly VW said the Tiguan was chosen by a public vote after it put forward four other names that were even more ridiculous: Namib, Rockton, Samun and Nanuk. Presumably, "none of the above" was not on the voting paper...

On a serious note, though, VW may be doing us all a favour. Companies spend a fortune paying branding consultants to give names to their products and yet the most successful car company in the world is on a mission to show that you can give a product a name apparently chosen by the temp in the stationary office, and it does not seem to matter one bit.