Don't Stop Me Now

BMW 645Ci

Mostly, people are bullied for a reason. In interviews, Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted she was bullied because she was gawky, Mel Gibson because he had an American accent at an Australian school, Michelle Pfeiffer because of her big lips, Whitney Houston because she was too white and Anthea Turner because she was too posh. But then she’s from Stoke-on-Trent, and in the Potteries even Fred Dibnah would have similar problems.

I was bullied at school by a chap called Dave and it’s really not hard to work out why. He was a bully and I was the nearest living being when he felt like a workout.

It is my fervent wish that the nurse who calls round to mash his food these days is also a bully. I hope she wees in his pudding.

Sometimes, though, people are bullied for no reason. A friend of mine was at the Edinburgh Festival once, which, so far as I can work out, involved sitting in a pub drinking lots of beer. This meant, inevitably, that pretty soon he rushed off to the lavatory to be sick.

Unfortunately, and I guess we’ve all been there, stomachular reversal is not an event which can be tamed and timed. So it all started to arrive before he made it to the stalls.

At the last moment he shoved the cubicle door open and vomited extravagantly… all over some poor chap who was in there doing, and minding, his own business.

Without a word my friend slammed the door shut, and then he thought: ‘Oh no. I have just been sick all over someone who is Scottish. He is bound to come out of there and pull my arms off.’ So, confused by drink, he thought he’d better get the first punch in.

With that he opened the door again and, before running away, planted a huge fist in the man’s startled face.

Now put yourself in the shoes of the man in the loo. What if he wasn’t someone who eats piledrivers for relaxation? What if he was simply a poet, up in Edinburgh with his bookish girlfriend for the festival? How do you think he’s going to feel, being punched by a man who’s just vomited into the Y of his trousers and pants? To get some idea of the bewilderment and the sense of persecution, try driving around Britain in one of the new 6-series BMWs.

After a while you’re forced to think: ‘I am sitting here at a road junction with my indicator on and nobody is letting me out. Why does everyone hate me so?’ I think we are genetically programmed to be fearful of BMW drivers in the same way that we are programmed to be just a little bit frightened of Scottish people in pub lavatories. We know that most people above the border are normal, but we’ve all seen Trainspotting. ‘Glass’ may have been turned into a verb by the youth of South Yorkshire, but it was turned into a pastime in the bars of Glasgow.

And so it goes on the road. You may be a very good driver. You may be a caring father who runs a meals-on-wheels service for the old folks at weekends. But if you drive a BMW, you are tarred with the same brush as the berk in the 3-series who thinks the Highway Code stopping distances are measured in millimetres.

Two or three times in the 645Ci I was genuinely staggered at the belligerence of other road users when it swung into their peripheral vision. I don’t think I could have had the door shut so firmly on me if I’d had www.kiddieporn.com emblazoned on the doors.

If you currently drive a Jaguar or a Mercedes – or any other type of car, actually – you will find this reasonless bullying hard to stomach, and for that reason alone I’d steer clear of the 645, which to everyone else is the 666.

But of course, if you are a BMW driver, right now you’ll be used to the persecution and you’ll be wanting to know what the new boy is like. So here goes.

First of all, it’s a lot less than you might be expecting. I sort of assumed it was a replacement for the unloved 85oi and would cost, ooh, I don’t know, £75,000. But actually it’s a whisker under £50,000, and that, for such a big, imposing car with such a big, imposing badge, is good value.

However, we can’t ignore the looks. Most car designers are anonymous souls who labour away in a back room, trying their best to accommodate the wishes of engineers, marketing men and the boss’s wife. Unlike people who design clothes or cook food, we don’t know their names or where they live. Peter Horbury is not Coco Chanel. Walter de’Silva is not Nicole Farhi.

But Chris Bangle, the man who’s reshaped BMW, is different. We know he is American. We know he has a beard. We know he hates journalists. And we know, because there was a story about it in the Sunday Times last week, that he has recently been ‘promoted’ and will no longer have his fingers in the pencil case.

He really has created some monsters in his time. The 7-series is weird and the 5 just plain ugly. With the 6 it’s almost as though he was being overseen all the time by more conventional theorists. You can sense his flamboyance in every detail, every angle and every panel, but it’s been suppressed.

Unfortunately, his minders obviously popped outside for a fag when he did the back end, because he went berserk. It’s his maddest work yet, Prokofiev meets Munch in a discordant Munchen blaze of horror in B flat. Certainly, if you were to buy a 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside.

Inside, you sense the hand of Bangle in the quality of materials. Because he’s from America, where Styrofoam is considered to be luxurious, everything has a coarseness to the touch. There is no wood, but if there were you get the impression it would be MDF.

Then there is the driving position. Despite the usual array of adjustments for the seat and the wheel, I never once found a sweet spot where I was truly comfortable. The wheel was either too high or I couldn’t see the dials.

And you do need to keep an eye on your speed, because, as you’d expect in a 4.4-litre two-door V8 coupé, it doesn’t exactly hang around.

Now I want to make it absolutely plain at this point that the 645Ci is bloody good to drive. With its Vanos this and its variable that, the engine produces a seamless stream of power, and the dynamic-drive suspension teamed with fluctuating-rate steering means the handling is pin-sharp. You’d have to nit-pick to find any dynamic fault with the way this car goes.

And yet, despite everything, I’m afraid I didn’t like it. The problem is that I had no idea what sort of car it’s supposed to be.

In essence it’s a two-door version of the 5-series. So you think coupé. Right. That must be sporty in some way. And it is, but not in the way I was expecting.

It could have been aurally sporty, producing a V8 bellow every time I put my foot down. But it didn’t. The engine is almost completely inaudible 90 per cent of the time and gently hums when it’s asked to work hard.

So perhaps it could be sporty in terms of interior trim. But no. You won’t find body-hugging seats or splashes of carbon fibre in there. It’s just the usual BMW blend of utter functionality, topped off with a satellite navigation system That Does Not Work. Again.

OK then, so it’s a stylish car, a car with discreet good looks (ahem) in which none of the comfort or silence has been lost? No again. Because the ride is firm to the point where it’s almost annoying.

This is silly. If they’re going to give us a hard ride, then go the whole hog and give us exhausts like wheelie bins and deep Recaro seats. If, on the other hand, they’re going to give us the acoustic signature of a nuclear submarine, then let’s have a comfy ride.

Maybe a car without the optional dynamic-drive system would be better, but one thing’s for sure, the model I tested fell between two stools, trying to play a ballad and thrash metal… at the same time.

If you want a thrilling drive from a car like this, buy a Porsche 911. If you want the last word in comfort, buy a Jaguar XKR. If you want to be abused by the dealer, buy a Mercedes of some sort. And that means the BMW is stuck out there with only one USP.

It’s the automotive equivalent of ginger hair. You’re going to be bullied.

Sunday 22 February 2004

Don’t Stop Me Now