Don't Stop Me Now

Hyundai Accent

I’ve always thought that being a motoring journalist is a bit like being Prince Andrew. Hugely good fun but, in the big scheme of things, not very important.

Two recent events, however, changed my mind. First of all I drove a Hyundai Accent with a three-cylinder diesel engine. And then I went, as a paying punter, to the London Boat Show.

You see, I recently bought a small cottage by the seaside and thought it might be fun to have a boat of some kind, something that could tow a waterskier and be used for setting lobster pots. So I parcelled the kids into the car and set off for ExCeL, the huge exhibition centre that is so far to the east of London it really ought to have a Norwegian postcode.

All I know about boats is that they use up all your money and turn the person at the wheel into Hitler, so I felt the boat show would be full of experts who could help me make a reasoned and rational decision. It was not to be.

Because I’ve worked at many motor shows in the past, I know why. These events, you see, are not designed for the punter. They’re designed principally so the people manning the stands can spend a few days away from home, getting sloshed and doing their very best to sleep with all the agency girls.

So when I rocked up, bright and breezy, on Sunday morning, most of the salesmen had had at best 20 minutes’ sleep. Some seemed not to know what a boat was, leave alone which might have the best hull for dealing with choppy coastal waters.

After two hours my six-year-old was bored and crabby and I’d narrowed the choice down to either a speedboat or a rib. Those selling ribs explained that speedboats were very uncomfortable, and those selling speedboats said ribs lose all of their value in about 20 minutes.

What I wanted, apparently, is a tall freeboard and a deep V. ‘Absolutely,’ I said, nodding sagely.

Even the names of the boat makers were meaningless. I’d heard of Riva, but their only offering – a small speedboat – cost £275,000. And I vaguely remember John Noakes careering around the North Sea in a Zodiac.

But does that make it a good thing? Or is it a sort of aquatic Rover? We found several boats that looked just like the Riva but cost a tenth of the price. Why should that be so?

I’d love to give you an answer, but the owners wouldn’t let us on board in shoes and the ever-helpful Health and Safety people wouldn’t let us take them off.

Engines? Well, I managed to discover that the absolute best were from Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha and Volvo, and that petrol was the way forward, or diesel. Inboard is vastly superior to outboard, outboard is vastly superior to inboard, stern drives knock rudders into a cocked hat and rudders are way better than stern drives.

Then we came across the Seadoo stand, where my six-year-old had a tantrum and we learned that, in fact, what we wanted was a jet engine because it works in shallow water and has no propeller to sever your kids’ legs.

‘A jet!’ howled one of the rib boys with derision. ‘A jet is usheless. It gets shand in the impeller and is ruined, and who’s going to service a shupercharged Rotax motor in the middle of the Irish Sea? Hic.’

I never did find the answer because by this stage the six-year-old was lying in one of the aisles banging her fists into the floor and saying she’d never been so bored in her life, the eight-year-old was lost and the ten-year-old was busy ordering a 115-foot Pershing.

I began to think it might be easier simply to buy lobsters from the market, but nevertheless we came home weighed down with, oh, about 400 brochures for a wide range of boats, all of which seemed to be suitable.

I shall probably end up buying the cheapest, and that’s what started me thinking. Is it like this when people who know very little about cars go to a motor show? Do they come away drenched in salesman beer-fumes, clutching lots of shiny pictures of lots of cars? And then end up buying the Hyundai Accent because you seem to get so much for your money? I can understand the reasoning. On the face of it, the Hyundai Accent appears to be the same sort of size and shape as a Volkswagen Golf. If you’d heard of neither, you’d look at the Hyundai’s £9,400 price-tag and almost certainly wonder why the Golf costs £3,000 more.

The salesmen, if they were sober enough to remember, would rattle on about torque and CO2 emissions and all sorts of stuff you never knew mattered, and you’d end up as bewildered as I was by all the talk of deep V hulls and roller trailers.

This then is where motoring journalism starts to make sense. Because having driven all the family hatchbacks you might be considering, I can tell you with absolute certainty that You Should Not Buy A Hyundai Accent.

First of all, there’s the obvious stuff. The Accent takes 14 seconds to get from rest to 60 mph, and I know people who can accelerate faster than that. If you buy this car, you will not be able to overtake anything, not even a tractor, or a horse, and that means you’ll have to spend your entire motoring life only going as fast as the slowest person in the world.

The only good thing about the sedentary progress is that you’ll never know what a rotten handler your Accent is. But you will notice the ride, especially when you get the bill from your osteopath for a new spine.

Dynamically, the Accent is possibly the worst new car on the market today. In every single respect every other car on the road goes, stops, steers and rides with more aplomb.

On its own, however, I know this is not enough of a deterrent. I was told that the cheapest speedboat wouldn’t have enough grunt to pull a set of waterskis, even if they had nobody on them, and that it couldn’t handle a ripple. But I kept looking at the price-tag and thinking, ‘Yes, but…’

Well, try this for size. Hyundai is not selling the Accent for less than £10,000 out of the goodness of its heart. It is cheap for the same reason that a cow’s eyeballs cost less than its fillet.

Korean labour rates are the same as those in Europe. The tax burden is just as enormous, too, and you have just as many middlemen taking their slice of the pie. Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion that Hyundais cost less to make than VWs.

Do not think, however, that because the Hyundai is made from cheaper parts they’ll be cheaper to buy when something goes wrong. I did a bit of research on this, and it turns out that Korean clutches, headlamp units and door mirrors are often more expensive to buy in the UK than equivalent parts from European makers.

And if that’s not enough to dissuade you, consider the implications of depreciation.

The pipe smokers’ bible, known as Which?, recently found that some Korean and Malaysian cars lose 77 per cent of their value in the first three years, compared with a 50 per cent loss on various European alternatives. So the initial £3,000 saving is wiped out.

There’s something I’ve found out as well. If you buy a Hyundai, or any car from that part of the world, you will be seen as a bore. Invitations will dry up, your kids will refuse to speak to you, your wife will sleep with your friends and you may end up committing suicide.

If you want a five-door family hatchback, buy a used Ford Focus, and if you want something new, a new Ford Focus. A Golf is lovely, but you’re paying what the market will stand rather than what the car is worth.

I do hope that my column this morning has been as helpful as the boat journalist I met as I left the show. You might think that writing about boats for a living was an even bigger waste of time than writing about cars. But he listened to what I wanted, and where it would be kept, and then he told me what to buy.

On that basis I found him to be more important and worthwhile than the new president of the Palestinian Authority.

Sunday 16 January 2005

Don’t Stop Me Now