While getting behind the wheel of a hire car here invariably involves dicing with death in a micro motor sporting almost as many dings as kilometres on the clock, in Europe, most hire companies have upped their games.
On a recent trip to London, I was presented with a nippy, almost-new Volvo V40 D4, with less than 2,000km on the clock. Quite aside from my surprise at its 2.0L diesel engine propelling me away from Heathrow Airport with acceleration that my ride in the UAE – a 2012 Ford Mustang – would struggle to match, its up-to-the-minute spec brought a salient issue into focus: in-car technology.
In a wave of revisionism that would make the cast of 1984 blush, certain sections of the driving population seem to regard the onrushing progress of in-car technology as the work of the devil himself. Nostalgic for a past that never really existed, they'd have you believe that safety features are unnecessary obstacles to driving enjoyment; and don't dare mention the potential of driverless cars.
From the ground up, I don’t buy it. When I first moved to the UAE four-and-a-half years ago, I was presented with a Ford Focus rental car. It got me from A to B, admittedly, but now I have my ‘Stang, full of the sort of technology you get in Fords farther up the food chain than an entry-level Focus, I couldn’t go back to braving the Sheikh Zayed Road without cruise control. And on the rare occasion when I clamber into a car that doesn’t possess a USB slot for easy importing of my mobile music collection, residents of Fujairah can probably hear my cursing from Abu Dhabi.
Volvo has been at the forefront of technology smarts, coupled with the vanguard-pushing design development that we recently profiled in these pages. My V40 was no different, with its eco stop-start technology allowing me to drive around London, out to the West Country, north to Manchester and back to London on a single tank of diesel – and without particularly worrying about how heavy I was with my right foot. Had I driven economically, I might have made it back to the Middle East without refilling.
Though it’s a relatively standard feature in 21st-century cars, having an exact digital readout of how many kilometres of fuel you have remaining is enormously reassuring and handy, too – back in the day, how many of us would admit to coasting when the fuel light started blinking, without actually knowing how far until the engine spluttered to a stop? (Alarmingly, the gauge on some of the bangers I drove in my younger days would become magically half-full if you swung round a corner fast enough.)
Driving in various cars in the past year or two, I’ve seen first-hand the real-world benefits of blind-spot warning lights, rear-view reversing cameras, obstacle-detection sensors, smart satnavs and DAB radios.
Naturally, none of this is going to placate the purists, but before going misty-eyed for the days of “real driving”, perhaps consider the act of completing a three-point turn in my first car, a 1989 1.2L Vauxhall Nova. Back then, in the heady days of the late 1990s, you needed biceps like The Rock’s just to negotiate a roundabout without disaster, thanks to its lack of power steering. I’ll keep my mod cons over my old cars, thank you very much – perhaps just as well, as I irreparably binned that plucky little Nova into a hedge more than 15 years ago.
aworkman@thenational.ae
