Is Technology Making Cars Worse? - /ROAD TESTAMENT

[MUSIC PLAYING] MIKE SPINELLI: Hey, welcome to Road Testament on Drive. Hit us up on @Drive on Twitter. We have an excellent show today. And the reason why it's excellent is we have a special guest who's come all the way across the oceans blue. Hello, Chris Harris. CHRIS HARRIS: Hello, Mike and your ***. You well, yeah? MIKE SPINELLI: Me and me *** is fine. CHRIS HARRIS: Your move. MIKE SPINELLI: My moves. So what are we talking about today on Road Testament? CHRIS HARRIS: Every time you say Road Testament, is it law to go-- Road-- MIKE SPINELLI: It's a nervous tick. It's become a thing where I start and then turn to the camera. CHRIS HARRIS: Let me tell you why I'm here, MIKE SPINELLI: OK. CHRIS HARRIS: That made a noise, didn't it? MIKE SPINELLI: It's OK. CHRIS HARRIS: I'm here to provide moral support, Michael. Because I think that this is a difficult job. MIKE SPINELLI: This is a very difficult job, Chris Harris. CHRIS HARRIS: So I'm here to prove that actually it's not very easy sitting in a studio trying to talk about cars. MIKE SPINELLI: No, it's absolutely true. And I know your on-screen delivery is usually spot on, as you say in your land. No, no. It's-- CHRIS HARRIS: It's Pakistan? [LAUGHING] MIKE SPINELLI: No, but I mean, you're good on camera, right? You've done camera stuff before. I'm-- CHRIS HARRIS: I'm not going to say anything on that. MIKE SPINELLI: All right, all right. No, I know you're very, very modest. By the way, very modest individual, sign of genius. Or, no, no all right. See that was a joke. See what I did? That was-- all right. So today we're talking about cars and moving from generation to generation. And sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes that's a bad thing. CHRIS HARRIS: OK. Forget all the messing around. We're car geeks, all right? MIKE SPINELLI: Yes. CHRIS HARRIS: So we're having a beer. We'll inevitably get onto a discussion of this stuff. And I think a common theme at the moment is that cars have reached such a point of technical brilliance, but also sort of interactive brilliance. They're great fun to drive. Is the next generation going to be as good in all areas as the past generation? Because there's no doubt that technically they're going to become better and cleverer. But does that mean they're going to be as much fun to drive? We've just been through the whole 997 to 991 process. And I'm not entirely convinced at times. You drive a 991, electric steering, and PDK gear change. I'm not sure it's giving me everything I was getting in the old car. I'm still not convinced either way. And we were discussing, weren't we? So we've got some significant launches coming up. Has it gone too far? Do we need the technology? And is it providing us with what we want? MIKE SPINELLI: And in making cars easier to drive if you're not a skilled driver, in doing that, in creating things like PDK that for the driver who isn't skilled with the stick, are we actually democratizing-- clipping the highs, and bringing the lows up in a way? You know what I mean? It's-- CHRIS HARRIS: It's happening everywhere, isn't it? It happens in every discipline, in every walk of life. Golf's a good example. I know you're a keen golfer yourself. MIKE SPINELLI: Of course. CHRIS HARRIS: But if you take the average golf bat now, and I give it to you, and you hit the ball with that golf bat, you'll hit it a lot better than if I gave you a club from 20 years ago. That would have just been a mess and hurt your hands. So I think that improvement in motorcars is a good thing. I don't think that every car should be a widow-maker. I really don't. So 996 GT2 on a wet road probably should have a health warning on it. It was amazing. It's great fun for us to do skids and stuff, to say we can do it. But to the majority of people that own them, it was an accident waiting to happen. But has it gone too far? So let's start this off with 991 and 997. Have you driven both? MIKE SPINELLI: Yes. Yes. CHRIS HARRIS: OK. If I had outside now a 997 GTS late model, manual gear box, and a 991 which had the PDK, and the electric steering and everything and I said-- you've got this car for three days to enjoy driving. Which one would you have? MIKE SPINELLI: That's an excellent-- I think-- CHRIS HARRIS: Well, answer it then. MIKE SPINELLI: I hadn't thought of that. And we hadn't rehearsed this. So I would go-- I'm going to go with the GTS. CHRIS HARRIS: Would you? MIKE SPINELLI: Because of the steering. CHRIS HARRIS: You see? So you've answered. MIKE SPINELLI: And I don't want to be one of those wankers as you-- no, no. I don't want to be one of those idiot automotive journalists that automatically think that electric steering is crap. CHRIS HARRIS: The 911 died when they took the fan off the engine. MIKE SPINELLI: Exactly. But there's something that I enjoy about where the 911 stopped at the GTS. CHRIS HARRIS: And I think there is something in that for me as well. And the M3 is a very interesting example. I've just driven the RS4, which-- it's not a car that people get quite as frothy about, the RS4. Because it serves a purpose that's a bit different to the M3. The M3 is the heartland of the whole web community, fast, sub-911 performance thing. And that car is defined by being rear driven, having a manual gearbox, locking differential, and a normal aspirated engine. And the next one is probably going to have only paddles, might well do. And it's probably going to have a turbocharged engine. So does that mean that suddenly everyone's going to want to own a E90 series M3 to keep it? MIKE SPINELLI: I mean, it didn't quite happen that way with the E46 and the-- because when that car came out, that was perfection, right? CHRIS HARRIS: I think it still is in some ways. MIKE SPINELLI: And it still is in some ways. But it hasn't-- people aren't hoarding them though. So you're right. CHRIS HARRIS: I think they're going to, though. MIKE SPINELLI: Maybe eventually they will. CHRIS HARRIS: That's a tip. Buy an E46 M3, either a CS or a CSL. Do you get CSL here or not? MIKE SPINELLI: We didn't get the CSL, no. CHRIS HARRIS: Ooh, you really missed out there. MIKE SPINELLI: We don't get-- and this may be another show when you come back-- but all of the crap that we don't get that you guys get. CHRIS HARRIS: You're not even getting the RS4. I spoke to one of the brand guys on the RS4 launch and said, why aren't they getting the RS4? It'll be a massive market. And they said, they wanted the RS3 instead. I would say that the E46 M3 will be remembered as one of the great performance cars. In fact, I was thinking in my head of a feature that I want to do for Piston Heads, Piston Heads, about the top 50 performance cars of the last 50 years. And I might be able to construct an argument for the E46 being the most complete package of all. There's not much wrong with that car. OK, the brakes are made of butter, but you can sort that out. But it still looks fresh. If you see a clean one-- that's not been pimped and messed around with-- you just go, wow. So the car that followed it-- I mean, you could argue that the E92 in terms of its fuel range, and some of things it does in the steering, are not actually as good as the E46. So did the M3 start the trend, this downward spiral? MIKE SPINELLI: Well, in a way, I mean, it's when did capability start trumping decisions about a car's driveability, right? So-- CHRIS HARRIS: I can tell you founded Jalopnik with that incisive thinking. [LAUGHING] MIKE SPINELLI: But you know what I'm saying. It's really about-- and people blame Nurburgring times. CHRIS HARRIS: This is my pondering face. I think it started about five or six years ago. I think we could also then come back to your question, when did it start. Let's try and define it. What are the systems that define the movement from interaction to technical excellence? They are chassis systems, aren't they? Anything to do with traction control, your control, stability, damping, switchable damping, electric power steering. Anything that gets in the way of your hands on the-- or feet or bum on the control systems of the car to the actual control moving-- is evil. That's when we should be going-- MIKE SPINELLI: Yeah. Well, when processors got fast enough for them to be able to take sensor data and translate it through the bus into the various hardware bits that make all that stuff possible, I think that's when *** started going a little bit crazy. CHRIS HARRIS: Can you get milk out of those? [LAUGHING] MIKE SPINELLI: The moobs? [BEEPING] CHRIS HARRIS: You've explained it in a way that I can't. Because I can't even turn a Apple Mac on. So for me, you're quite right. It's when people started doing more things with laptops than they did with screwdrivers and honest tools. MIKE SPINELLI: Right. There's a curve somewhere where that became-- CHRIS HARRIS: 2002. Somewhere around there, I think. And for me it's really interesting. Because the next gen of cars-- we can, I think, assume that the manual gearbox is now dead. I mean, I'm there fighting for the survival of the thing because I feel it so passionately. But much to my irritation and sadness, I can't find a Ferrari 599 with a manual gear box in the UK. There is no such car. It was never delivered. You've got some here. And a guy on Twitter was corresponding with me early today saying, I have one. It was a bit of a nightmare in first and second gear. I then said, but was it good, once you got it going? And he went, magic, that open gate. But I think the move towards technology in cars is going to mean that cars that obviously celebrated not having technology in the past, will become more collectible. So I think an M3 with a manual gear box is going to be worth twice an SMG car. I do. I had a Ferrari 575 manual with Fiorano. I mean that just sounds like me waving my willie around. But it was a really cool car. But because it's got a manual gear box, that is now worth a load more money. Because people realize that if you're going to drive it once a month, much nicer to do this than do this. Other cars that are coming up, Golf GTI-- is that going to be worse than the car it replaces? Is it going to be less fun? I'm not so sure in terms of the Golf. Because the Golf already is quite a numb thing, isn't it? So to be better, it's just got to be a bit quicker and a bit more technically capable. So maybe this only applies to cars that are more than just a device. MIKE SPINELLI: Right. Well, I mean a lot of it has come down from starting with safety stuff, right? So they've had to make cars heavier. And once they can lighten them up with new materials though, maybe you can go back to the kind of feel that a-- if you can pull the average sports sedan down from 3,800 pounds down to-- CHRIS HARRIS: I have no idea what that means. MIKE SPINELLI: Well, what's kilograms? 3,800-- CHRIS HARRIS: That's what? 1,700 kilograms. MIKE SPINELLI: 1,700. So 1,700 kilograms down to something more in the range of 1,400, say. And then the forces acting on every corner become less. And you don't need to over dampen and over tire. CHRIS HARRIS: A lot of it's down to compliance and legislation, though isn't it? For example, if you've got a car like the RS4 with its S-tronic gearbox, when it goes through the-- certainly in Europe-- when it goes through the European drive cycles for fuel economy, it's 20% more efficient, because they can program the S-tronic gearbox to behave a certain way during all the cycle tests. So manual gearboxes and that kind of stuff is just, it's basically being outlawed. And I find it really disappointing. What other cars are coming up that could also be considered to be less enjoyable? What about this F12 M? That's an interesting one. Because the F12 replaces the 599. And I think the 599 can probably be classed as a technology car, can't it? There were a few manual ones, but it was very much traction control, electronic differential. It had some very clever things. But it didn't have the diff, did it? It had the F1 track. And that car was very much a sort of PlayStation device, wasn't it? You had two hands on the wheel, the paddles, and you didn't do much else. The F12 will be the same. This is another thing then. By just throwing more performance at a car, do you make it better? MIKE SPINELLI: Right. And that's-- and as we know, from the cars we just even mentioned that that's not the case, right? CHRIS HARRIS: I agree. MIKE SPINELLI: And I think in some ways horsepower is becoming a kind of consolation prize for that happening. So OK, it's got 700-- let's say, the F12 is going to have 700-- CHRIS HARRIS: The lord taketh away. MIKE SPINELLI: The lord taketh away and addeth the horsepower. So you end up with a 700 horsepower, or even the Reventon, right? Six something, right? What is it? 630? I don't even remember what it is, right? CHRIS HARRIS: Well, the Reventon thing. Or the Aventador. MIKE SPINELLI: The Aventador. CHRIS HARRIS: Oh, that's 700 horsepower. MIKE SPINELLI: That's straight 700, exactly, OK. CHRIS HARRIS: Just the 700. MIKE SPINELLI: Right, but just 700. It's a remarkably quick car. As much fun-- well all right, well, maybe Lamborghini's a bad example. Let's not put a full Lamborghini on the table. Because it is better than a Murcielago, better to drive. CHRIS HARRIS: The reality is-- you're quite right to put it like that. I think that it's very difficult to present technology as an overtly positive sales device to people that want an emotional car. You can do it in normal cars, because you can say this is safer, more efficient. And people go out and buy cars in volume like that. But you can't do that in terms of-- why is he waving at me? MIKE SPINELLI: I don't know. CHRIS HARRIS: It's very off putting. MIKE SPINELLI: He's doing a Pete Townsend. MALE SPEAKER: That's for you. CHRIS HARRIS: But you can't actually-- it's difficult to sell an emotional product on those terms. And you're quite right. So they just give bigger numbers. Like, I drove a 599 earlier this week. And in second gear, full noise on a British A road, it feels antisocially fast. It feels so much faster than either of the things we were driving today-- driving the ZL1 and the GT500. Honestly, 599 fully lit is outrageous. If you got out of that car-- and then said to the person that had been sitting next to you, wetting the seat-- you said to them, the one that replaces this in a few month's time has got 100 horsepower more, they'd just go, that's not true. It can't be possible. So I'm not sure it does actually add an awful lot more, this extra power we're getting. It's dead exciting. Quite the way we'll use it, I don't know. But you know the sad thing? I honestly thinks that outside of this room not many people care about this stuff. MIKE SPINELLI: And that's-- yeah. I mean, that's-- CHRIS HARRIS: And it just makes me go-- I just don't want to know. MIKE SPINELLI: I know it's become-- sports cars used to be something that was a mainstream product. Now it's becoming like a jet ski. It's almost becoming like a power sport that you do or that you get on the side. And you drive your Prius during the week. CHRIS HARRIS: But are we going to go through a regeneration, where we relearn this stuff? And we become passionate about it again? HiFi did this. For many years, in the '80s, HiFi became more about buttons and widgets and gadgets. And then suddenly sometime in the '90s, I think people just went, do you know what? That's actually ***. Let's just have a pure amplifier with a source *** and a volume ***, and not have tone controls. Let's have it plain unadulterated. And that's kind of persisted to this point, and become the way that people behave with HiFi. So why isn't it happening with sports cars? Why do things have to get so flipping complicated? MIKE SPINELLI: Well, here's what-- I mean, do you think that we might just be technology-wise in a transitional stage? I mean, obviously, the auto industry is always in a transitional stage. Because they're always looking for the next thing. But do you think that with lighter materials, stronger lighter stuff, more carbon fiber, maybe lighter cars, maybe better engineering, things like the magnetic dampers, for example, that can do all kinds of different things, right? Or-- CHRIS HARRIS: None of them right. I think what we'll see is a tangential family of cars for this purpose. For want of a better phrase, for flat Earthers like you and me, I think that manufacturers will make stuff that will satisfy us. And it will be basic. And it will be carbon bodied, maybe even carbon structured. And it will have, maybe, if we're lucky, a lever here, three petals, and it will be pure. But it probably won't be from the brands that we want it to be from. It probably won't be from the Ferraris and the Porsches and the ones that we'd love it to be from. It might be from clever, malleable, fast-moving companies like this little Rennsport-- looks like it could be very interesting-- Toyota with the FRS, GT8 whatever you want to call it. That's a really profound statement at this point in time, I think, to say, two driven rear wheels, manual gearbox, off you go. I think that's a strong statement. So I think it will, sadly, unlike HiFi-- the motorcar is scrutinized on so many levels, on so many sociopolitical, even environmental levels. It's under scrutiny the whole time. And it has to be seen to be moving forward and to be making itself cleaner, and more responsible within every community that it operates. And that means it's going to have to adopt all these technologies. And the next BMW lightweight sports car, the I whatever, might have a carbon shell. But sadly, it'll change gears itself. And we're stuck with it. I feel quite depressed now, Mike. Can we get a drink? MIKE SPINELLI: Yeah, let's go get a drink. I was going to say maybe we should put away the knives. Put the knives away. MALE SPEAKER: OK. CHRIS HARRIS: Just go and buy an E-- MIKE SPINELLI: That one there. CHRIS HARRIS: Go and buy an E46 M3. I'm now absolutely convinced that that's the car-- 18 inch wheels, because the 19s were a little bit bling. So 18s, manual. I like the heated seats option. If you don't have heated seats, you've got the gap on the button thing as well. So the heated seats are good. And also, when you buy it, check in the air ducts for the brakes. Because if they've been removed, that means it's probably done some track workout. MIKE SPINELLI: And you could almost get one cheaper than what a good E30 is going for now. Because those things are just-- have gone off the chart. CHRIS HARRIS: Yeah, the E30, it is-- MIKE SPINELLI: It's gone. We missed it. CHRIS HARRIS: That's another Road Testament. Is the E30 M3 overrated? Ducks! MIKE SPINELLI: Whoa, thump. [BEEP] Road Testament, that's it for this week. Thank you very much. Chris Harris in New York. Could you imagine this? It's awesome. CHRIS HARRIS: JF took me to the place that they used to film the Bing on The Supranos. I mean-- MIKE SPINELLI: Hey, come on. Come on. Who's better than you now? Who's better than this guy? CHRIS HARRIS: I don't know-- Mike Spinelli? [LAUGHING] [MUSIC PLAYING]