Car Fever by James May

Author:James May [MAY, JAMES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2010-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Porsche – taste the difference

Here’s the scene. I’m in my Porsche, I’ve been driving through suburbia for some time, and I’m slightly bored. But then, as the houses peter out, I finally spot a good-looking stretch of derestricted A-road, and I think to myself, ‘Wahey. This looks good. I think I’ll put it in sport mode.’ I press the button, the legend ‘sport’ appears on the little display in the rev counter, and off I jolly well go.

I should point out that this is the first car I have ever owned with a sport button, and I’ve been utterly delighted by it; by the thrill of being able to reconfigure my car to suit the driving environment, or whatever it would say in the owner’s handbook if I could be bothered to read it. But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a mug. After ten months, I’ve had to acknowledge that the sport button in the Porsche Boxster doesn’t really do anything at all.

Now before all the Porsche bores write in, I do know that in sport mode the parameters of the traction control are relaxed so that the skilled driver can display his prowess by gathering up a whiff of incipient oversteer with an armful of opposite lock, or whatever it is men in pubs claim to be doing of a weekend. But nothing is of less interest to me. That’s just something that happens in Autocar magazine.

But at the same time, the electronic brain that governs all this also sharpens up the throttle response, making the car more lively, more frisky, more responsive to the inputs of the dedicated helmsman. Or does it?

No. I’ve just done a simple experiment. I drove along a dual carriageway at a constant 60mph, throttle held precisely, and in sport mode. Then I turned sport mode off. The car faltered, and then carried on as normal at about 57mph. As far as I can make out, sport mode simply means slightly less pedal travel is required for the same result.

There’s quite a lot of this sort of thing about; of products designed to be as good as possible and then downgraded slightly so that we, the consumers, can either press a button or pay a little extra money to have what we wanted in the first place. In the BMW M6, for example, the driver can twiddle the i-Drive control to select either 400bhp or the full 500bhp. But why, if you’d bought the M6, would you want 400bhp?

The Bentley Continental GT owner can twirl a similar knob to select the ‘comfort’ setting on the car’s suspension. Why isn’t it just like that anyway? Under what circumstance would you want a Bentley to be anything other than comfortable?

These things may give you a temporary warm feeling, a sense that car makers are considering their customers and allowing them to tailor a car to their individual requirements, but if you think about it a bit harder you’ll soon realise that they are just wasting your time.

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