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.So everyone sits on the roads, not moving for hour after hour after hour.Every Laburnum Close and Orchid Drive is full.Every B road is full.Every dual carriageway is full.And there’s no way in hell that Fatty Prescott is going to get this lot onto a bus.For these people, image is everything.They won’t even admit to living in Surrey, saying instead they live on the Surrey/Hampshire borders or, for those in the know, that they live in GU4 – which, the postman will tell you, is a ritzy suburb called Shalford.Here, I saw mothers depositing their children at school from cars that were several miles long.One had an American off-roader that was easily bigger than an Intercity 125.Why should she use a train when she’s already got one?And these people don’t park their cars neatly outside the school gates.They simply abandon them nearby and stand around with the other mothers, who’ve abandoned their space shuttles and coaches, arranging bloody coffee mornings.‘Actually I can’t make it today.I’m having sex with the gardener.’That, of course, is after the gardener in question has helped the ranger to chop down a few more trees.Trees need to be murdered here because, to convince themselves that Surrey is not simply London SW37, the locals demand that the open spaces be kept as such.They call them beauty spots, and that’s exactly what they are – spots, tiny little pinpricks of manicured green in a sea of fake marble pillars and Mitsubishi Shoguns.When the rush hour has subsided and Surrey Woman is at home watching the gardener pant over her panties, old people come out of their houses and climb into their Chevettes and Rover 600s and head for the hills – where the ranger has ripped up some more trees to make car parks.I spent two days in such a car park this week, and have rarely felt so depressed.The view was undoubtedly pretty, but you know that it’s stage-managed and that just over the next hill lies Esher, which isn’t pretty at all.And you know that you must not let your dog off its lead or pick a flower.This is countryside in the same way that the Spice Girls is a rock band, that is, it isn’t countryside at all.If it were cheese, it would be Primula.And the visitors know it.They sit in their cars, not daring to get out in case they break one of the ranger’s rules, and they stare at that pitiful facsimile of nature for hours on end.They don’t talk.They don’t eat.They don’t read.They’re sitting in a bloody car park, surrounded by hundreds of other people in cars, listening to lorries lumbering up the A25, watching a tree being chopped down by nature conservationists.One man turned up in a brand-new Bentley Turbo R and sat in his car facing, not the view, but the café which sells chips.And the staff there explained that Paul Weller is a regular visitor.Small wonder the poor bloke has such a strange view of the world when he’s forced to sit in a traffic jam for two hours just to get one.Surrey is more awful, I suspect, than hell.If that’s the future for commuting then, my God, you can have my keys right now.A frightening discoveryI’ve been sitting at my computer now for two hours, unsure about how this week’s column should begin.You see, after years of Biro-sucking, I’ve finally decided the Land Rover Discovery is absolute rubbish.But we’re talking here about a national institution – an automotive Prince Philip – and you can’t just launch into attack mode saying it’s a completely useless waste of everyone’s afternoon.But it is, that’s the trouble.It’s ugly; really, really ugly and I have no idea why this has never occurred to me before.It’s been around for years but only this morning did I start to ask the important questions.Why does it have that raised bit at the back? No dog I’ve ever seen is 15 feet tall and not once, ever, have I heard of someone keeping a pet giraffe.The Discovery doesn’t need that rear end lump.And why’s the back window cockeyed? And have you seen the panel gaps, for God’s sake? I reckon you could get into a Discovery without opening the door.And the windscreen’s too flat, and the wheels are lost in those huge arches.They’re like Polo mints mounted at the entrance to Fingal’s Cave.Seriously, next time you’re down in Guildford have a look.You’ll see that the Discovery is even uglier than a Ford Scorpio.It is also dangerous.Now that’s contentious stuff.You can say a car manufacturer’s new product is a waste of the world’s resources and they’ll do nothing.You can liken it to a cup of cold sick and refuse to test it, saying it’s more boring than dying, and still they won’t react.But call a car dangerous and whoa, what’s this? A writ? Blimey.Well, here’s the defence.I’ve always felt that all cars are capable of stopping in roughly the same distance but this, it turns out, is just not true.I tested a handful of cars last week and was simply amazed by the results.A Lexus GS300 took just 139.8 feet to haul itself from 70mph to a standstill whereas the aforementioned Land Rover Discovery came to a halt in an almost unbelievable 224.1 feet.And that, to save you the bother of working it out, is a difference of 84 feet.I’ll say it again: 84 feet, 28 yards, five car lengths.Think about that.You crest a brow on the motorway to discover the traffic ahead is stopped.If you’re in a Lexus you’ll pull up just in time, but if you’re in a Discovery you’ll still be going at a fair old lick when you have the smash.Now I want to make it plain that the Discovery is not the only car to perform badly in this test.The Toyota Rav4 is awful and the Ford Explorer is horrific, but whereas the other two have many strings to their bow, the Disco does not.Yes, it is a fine off-road car, as well it should be with those Range Rover underpinnings and a lusty V8.There’s a diesel too, but quite frankly, I’d rather take my own appendix out.The only good thing about the diesel is that it’s not terribly powerful.Thus, you’ll never get up enough speed to turn it over, which is something that I suspect could happen very easily indeed in a V8.A top-heavy, 2 ton car simply cannot be as wieldy as a low-slung saloon.Of course, the big safety device fitted to all Discoveries is the build quality.As they spend most of their time on the back of low loaders, all the braking and cornering problems are cured at a stroke.Now, I’m machine-gunning the Discovery because I’ve recently spent some more time with the new Freelander, whose praises, you may recall, I sang a few weeks ago in a deep and lusty baritone.Well, after several thousand miles I can report those initial findings were just about right [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]