Cars

Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him.  As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the daytime, except on a meter for a maximum stay of two hours. A married couple is only permitted one primary residence between them, and the larger country house will most likely be designated the main home. In all central London boroughs (not just Camden as in this example), you’re not eligible for a resident’s parking

There were a couple of moments where this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed might’ve been a little dicey. Day three of the four-day extravaganza, on Saturday, was cancelled due to 50mph winds. That may not sound all that alarming, but the ‘central feature’ at the Festival of Speed amounted to nearly 100 tonnes of steel sculpture soaring eight storeys over Goodwood House – seat of the Duke of Richmond since the 17th century – with typically several thousand petrolheads picnicking below. It also included six valuable Porsches hovering just below the clouds, and with the public told to stay away there was still every chance His Grace might suffer a

My year of motoring tourism didn’t begin auspiciously. Early on the morning of New Year’s Eve, in downtown Dieppe, I looked out of the window of our rented apartment with its magnificent view of the Église Saint-Jacques, painted by the likes of Pissarro and Sickert, and noticed that our car had disappeared.  What followed over the next three hours was a journey of discovery – of the government offices and gendarmeries of the historic maritime town (on foot, in the rain), by which process I was eventually informed that my car was now residing in a secure pound on an industrial estate some five kilometres out of town.  I tried to

As a motorcyclist, I’m used to hearing complaints about loud exhausts. Plenty of bikers revel in the roar of their motor – after all, a powerful engine is one of the main appeals of motorbiking. But for anyone living near a busy road, the sound of revving can be thoroughly stressful. Most people who spend time in towns or cities will have jumped at the distinctive noise of a tailpipe backfire, a couple of short explosive bursts that can sound like gunshots, or the drone of a clearly illegal exhaust note. The idea that someone has modified their car or motorbike to give the rest of us a fright is

The Volkswagen ID Buzz is a pretty car, though so innocent-seeming you would forgive it anything. It succeeds the equally pretty T2 campervan, the Betty Boop of 1950s vehicles. The T2 was so convincing – cars, like everything, vary in charisma – it is one of the most famous vehicles in the world, so much so that I can’t think of one without seeing Don Draper’s face. Iconic is a stupid word, but the T2 was iconic, and in testament you will pay £20,000 for the bones of one, though you shouldn’t. I should have waited for Exeter and topped up at Bristol, as the delivery driver counselled, but I

Any historic London footage inevitably features cars busily rounding Hyde Park Corner and shooting off up Park Lane, against the background of sky-scraping hotels and thriving offices. Have you seen the same bit of London now? It’s a giant car park, brought to a standstill by an administration with seemingly little idea how to promote a thriving capital. The city’s best-known thoroughfare has been reduced from three lanes to just one open for traffic northbound, one for bicycles (used sparingly in rush hour) and one for buses, usually empty. That’s just one lane for normal traffic, used by Londoners simply trying to get from A to B via one of

Some years ago, I was despatched to Las Vegas to learn how to be a chauffeur. The Wynn hotel had purchased a fleet of Rolls-Royces, and their Aloysius Parkers were being taught how to drive the Rolls-Royce way – i.e. a cut above your Lincoln Town Car etiquette. ‘The umbrella can be used both defensively and offensively,’ I recall Rolls-Royce’s Andi McCann saying, as if he’d walked off the set of Kingsman. Andi is the personal driver to Rolls’s CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös and the company’s lead trainer. I learned many things on his white-glove course, starting with how umbrellas, housed inside each door, can be used to protect from paparazzi

I recently spent a long weekend in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, driving a fast car, eating tortellini alla panna twice a day and rifling through Luciano Pavarotti’s DVD library. The tenor’s house, outside Modena, has been converted into a museum filled with his many shiny awards and Hermès scarves, framed photos with Bono and Mandela and, yes, his unrivalled collection of Police Academy movies. I also visited Modena’s sprawling San Cataldo cemetery to see the imposing family tomb of one Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, 1898-1988. I listened carefully. It was peaceful. Apart from birdsong, not a whisper. There was no whirring, no drilling, no vibration or rumbling from

Britain makes the world’s best luxury cars: we got there early, as we did with the Industrial Revolution, which is why our infrastructure is fraying, though our cars aren’t. You can argue about Rolls-Royce vs Bentley, and both be right, though the late Queen chose a Bentley for the state limousine and a Jaguar Land Rover for the state hearse in Royal Claret. (It was little discussed, for reasons of taste, but it was a very beautiful hearse. The claret was right.) Perhaps a Rolls-Royce is too elitist though; with minimal specification, it could be made to look like a crown. Here is the Bentley Flying Spur Mulliner: the Bentley