April 18, 2007
I could use a laugh; how 'bout you?
Nobody writes like the Brits, especially when it comes to obits and reviews, and nobody writes car reviews like Jeremy Clarkson.
“I could have one of these,” I thought as I pulled into my yard. But of course I can’t, because I am a man and the Audi TT is so completely girlie that I’m surprised it isn’t supplied with a bra and high heels. It really is Jane Austen with windscreen wipers.
Or is it? If you believe hardline feminists, the sort of people who have Amazonian lady-gardens and wear dungarees made from hemp, then all men are intrinsically rapists and the only reason we don’t actually molest every single girl we see is because we’re all at home beating up our wives.
Males, thanks to their physical size and their muscles and their need to spray seed into everyone and everything, are threatening, dangerous and deeply unpleasant.
Really? I only ask because if we look at nature, it’s normally the other way round.
[...]
Then you have the praying mantis. As we all know, the female celebrates a successful impregnation by biting the head off its lover.
Other examples include the Mills-McCartney, a curious one-legged animal that infests the male’s nest for a short period of time and then leaves with most of its contents.
I damn near sent piping hot coffee spraying across the keyboard when I read that description of the soon to be ex-Mrs. McCartney. Whew.
Anyhow, that's just the windup, as Clarkson works himself up into a lather, ready to do justice to the Cadillac SRX4 luxury SUV.
This is a very ugly car. So ugly in fact that you’ll want to get inside it and shut the door as quickly as possible. But sadly when you are inside it’s even worse.
Cadillac has gone for a half-timbered look with bits of wood nailed to every flat surface, and some that aren’t flat at all — the steering wheel, for instance. Now this kind of thing worked in Elizabethan times. Team it with some wattle, some daub and a hint of thatch and all is well. But polish your wood until it gleams and then team it with plastic and I’m afraid the end result will be, and is, absolutely revolting.
Still, it could be worse, and it is, when you fire up the big 4.6 litre engine and go for a drive. Because immediately you run out of petrol.
Officially the SRX can achieve 16mpg, but unofficially, on the school run say, you’d struggle to get more than 12. Couple that with the £36,895 asking price, and the likelihood of piano-falling-from-a-tower-block depreciation, and this car could well turn out to be more expensive to run than the Iraq war.
It gets worse, too, because it’s marketed as a seven-seater, but it isn’t really. To fit into the rear seats you’d have to be so badly deformed that you’d need all manner of specialist equipment to keep you alive. An iron lung, for instance, and that isn’t going to fit.
What’s more, you can only get into these seats from the driver’s side, and only then if you have no legs, no arms, no head and a torso that can be twisted like Plasticine. Best to push the little button that electrically folds these seats away and pretend they don’t exist.
[...]
The Cadillac? It has no discernible sex. But then it has no discernible purpose. If it were a creature, it wouldn’t be a lion or a praying mantis or even a chimp.
No, I think it would be a wasp — useless and hateful in equal measure.
Man, that's good stuff.
I found this on Joe Sherlock's site, which always has an eclectic mix of postings -- not all of them car-related.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 18, 2007 05:12 AM
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