Life On Cars

A fond farewell to The Champion

You might have read elsewhere that The Champion newspapers, which cover the Sefton coastline and the towns and villages of West Lancashire, are no longer being printed. That also means that my Life On Cars column, which has been running since 2009, will no longer be printed in their pages. I’m saddened first and foremost for my friends and colleagues at The Champion who have lost their jobs, and…

I’M SURE the folks at The Champion won’t mind me letting you into a little secret.

You might be reading this in your first newspaper of 2022 but I’m actually speaking to you from the past, as 2021 is put out of its misery by a succession of Year In Review stories.  Obviously the biggest story has been the arrival of the Omicron variant, and while I’m glad that it appears to be milder than the outgoing version it is a tad baffling that the World Health Organisation appears to…

IN THE end, if the memorable mantra of Highlander is anything to go by, there can be only one. 

Unless it’s the question of who the UK’s best-selling carmaker is, in which case the answer’s a tad more complicated.  The figures were released by the gatekeepers of Blighty’s car industry, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the other day, and on the face of it the answer is, for the first time ever, Volkswagen. More of you have bought Veedubs than cars from any other brand over…

SAY hello to the new Ford Mondeo.

Or to be more accurate, say nǐ hǎo.  Apologies if I’ve offended any Mandarin-speaking Champion readers with that hastily googled translation, but you do at least get the new Mondeo as ample compensation. You see, the fifth generation of Ford’s motorway mile-muncher has just been launched in China – and that’s pretty much where it’s staying. There are no plans to bring it here, or to any markets…

IF YOU’RE reading this column then chances are that you’ll know what a donut is – and I don’t mean the sort that widens your waistline if you over-indulge.

Nope, I’m on about the screechy, rev-happy variety, because it’s under the spotlight in West Lancashire Borough Council’s consultation on car meets in Pimbo. For those of you not up to speed – as it seems, the people taking part in the meets most definitely are – there’s a campaign at the moment to crack down on cars from right across the North West converging on the area. They are, in the words…

THE HALCYON days of the Highway Code of – ooh, about a week ago – are over. How’s the new regime going for you, then?

I gingerly ventured out onto the roads in the MX-5 the other day and was ready for the rewritten rules of the road, which were rolled out last Tuesday (29 January). It would, according to the Daily Mail, be CHAOS AND CONFUSION. Cyclists would be hurtling down, to borrow the two-inch block caps headline, THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, and as a mere motorist, I’d be POWERLESS to stop them. Not just…

LIKE the last Lighthouse Family song that you listened to, or a distant planet discussed in hushed tones by Professor Brian Cox…

The Citroën C1 is reassuringly impressive but – let’s be honest – you’d completely forgotten about it, hadn’t you?  That, I suspect, is why the French carmaker’s decided to turn the lights out on its smallest model. Since 2005 and over two generations it’s shifted more than 1.2 million of them, but it’s decided, just as Ford did with the Ka+, Renault has with the Twingo and Vauxhall has with…

THE COST of everything, you might have noticed, is going up a bit

Even so, asking for a mark-up in the region of two thousand per cent seems a bit much.  Don’t worry, you haven’t accidentally zoned out of this week’s Champion and into an economics lesson delivered by a Zimbabwean bank manager – no, this is still very much a column about cars. It just so happens that the car in question, apparently, is worth £5,000 now and a cool £108,000 in in the not-so-far…

IT WON’T matter how much of your clobber VW’s new load-lugger can swallow, how well it handles or how long it takes to charge up

The new ID-Buzz doesn’t have to worry about any of that, because it’s ‘gramtastic.  As in it’ll work a treat on Instagram which – and forgive me if I’m about to make myself sound about 400 years old – is a social media app where people upload pictures of things, and themselves in front of or enjoying said things, for your online approval. I’ve got an Instagram account which is full of Morris…

Morgan’s new model is bigger and better

ALL of me is excited about Morgan’s new Super 3 – but I suspect it’s my buttocks that will benefit the most.  It’s an all-new, three-wheeled sports car, but the thing that intrigues me most about is that it’s appreciably bigger than the one it replaces. Not in a bloated, middle-aged spread sort of way, but in that you’ll no longer need to be as lithe and agile as it is to clamber in with any…

SMASHING news – quite literally

The safety boffins have been chucking vans at concrete blocks, and it turns out that if you’re going to have a shunt while doing deliveries for an online conglomerate, then Fiat’s Ducato is the best of the bunch.  The Italians have impressed the experts at Euro NCAP enough for them to name it as the first ever load-lugger to pick up a Platinum safety rating, but after that the party poppers and…

Ford goes electric – and it’s no joke 

TOP bit of car-based trivia for you. Tesla’s boss deliberately called his models the S, the 3, the X and the Y because they spell out SEXY – or rather, they do if you’re the sort of motoring enthusiast who still thinks it’s funny to type 55378008 into a calculator and turn it upside down.  Poor old Elon missed out on the chance to make the gag a bit more obvious because Ford still owned the…

Hammond’s a proper car nut, on and off screen

IT’S not every day you get to see a major TV star talking about what they’re really passionate about – and in this case, it’s mending old cars and tinkering with MGBs.  There was a national show celebrating car restoration last weekend – and cards on the table, I work for one of the companies that puts it together – which more than 25,000 of you packed into the NEC in Birmingham to see. One of…

Let’s think smartly about charging commuters

YOUNG executives, the late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman once opined, drove the firm’s Cortina. Nearly 50 years on, the same go-getters will be ruddy lucky if they get a 1-Series chucked in as part of their competitive salary package – and now it looks increasingly likely that they’ll have to pay to park it outside the office too.  There’s a lot of talk at the moment about various local…

Forget whether it’s a proper Lotus – just go and buy one

LOTUS excels at lightening things. Including, I suspect, this week’s Champion, as those of you offended at it launching a crossover simply rip out this page in disgust and chuck it straight in the bin without even reading the rest of this week’s column.  It’s fair to say the new Eletre, revealed to the public over the past week, has raised a few eyebrows. The chaps in Norfolk call it a…

The smart new arrival that I’d happily have

TESLA’S boffins have clearly been busy.  Having not got distracted by their founder snapping up some of Twitter and then declining a seat on its board despite being its new biggest shareholder, the electric car experts have managed to find time to release another model. It’s a small crossover, capable of hoiking itself 270 miles on a single charge and equipped with an in-car avatar that acts as…

It’s daft and costs a fortune – and I still want one 

WHAT’S the earliest you can get away with mentioning Christmas?  I think the cheekiest pre-festive plug I’ve ever come across was an eatery in Ainsdale, which once plugged the fact, mid-August, that it was now taking bookings for its Christmas dinners, but I’m going to go even earlier than that and pick the Wednesday just after Easter. Largely because I’ve just decided what Father Christmas can…