He didn't like it very much.
Source: Timesonline: Jeremy Clarkson reviews the BMW 135i M Sport convertible.
BMW 135i M Sport convertible
By Jeremy Clarkson
You may have noticed that all actors smile constantly while driving in a car commercial. This is ridiculous. No one smiles while driving, unless Clement Freud is on the radio, and he isn’t any more, because he died.
I urge you all to look next time you’re on the road. Anyone driving alone is pulling exactly the same face. It’s a zombie face. The face of someone who’s medically alive but is actually dead. It’s a face I imagine prisoners pull when in solitary confinement.
Out of a car, Stephen Fry appears to be interested, intelligent and alert. In a car, he looks as gormless as a scolded dog. We all do. You never see this in commercials, though. Because in a commercial the actor’s whole being is 90% teeth, and his eyes are sparkling like a rippled sea at sunset. He is delirious with pleasure, not because he’s just thought of something funny or seen a hippopotamus in dungarees going the other way. No. Rather preposterously, he’s delirious because he is enjoying the act of driving so much.
There’s a lot of smiling in the new BMW advert. It’s all sunny skies and wind in the hair and happy shiny people going round corners. It’s absurd in every way. Except one. The final words that accompany this uplifting festival of happiness, spoken by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, sum up exactly what motoring is all about.
Here’s what he says: “We realised a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make”.
Bang on. You can buy a cheap car that takes you to work economically and you may be pleased with the savings you’ve made. But saving money is never joyful. It is mean-spirited and demonstrates that you have a heart of coal. If you wish to lead a joyous life, you should always spend 10% more than you earn.
Joy in a car can come from many quarters. It can come from the “feel” of a button on the dashboard. It can come, such as it does in a Porsche Boxster, from that spine-tingling noise the exhaust makes at precisely 5200rpm. It can come from the way a car turns into a corner or, as you will find in a Nissan 370Z, from the way the engine blips on down changes. Joy can come from a nicely flared wheelarch, from good graphics on a sat nav screen, from the surge you feel when you accelerate. Sometimes, as is the case with the Aston Martin DBS, it can come from so many places, all at once, you are left feeling a little bit light-headed. Even the stitching on the seats made my heart feel all gooey and warm.
I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why I don’t like cars made by Proton and so on. But now I do. They are not joyous. They are built purely to shore up an emerging nation’s balance of trade, and you will never find any joy in anything where every single part has come from the lowest bidder.
Joy, contrary to what BMW would have us believe, does not make us smile. Even in the aforementioned DBS, I do not gurn like a mad person as I drive along. But joy does make us happy and content and satisfied. In a car, joy is more important than an airbag.
Strangely, however, the one car company that rarely gives me any joy is BMW. It’s why I would never buy one of its cars.
That’s not to say its cars are no good. The new Z4 is marvellous and the M3 is one of the most perfectly balanced machines ever created by man. It makes an F-16 fighter jet look ungainly and lumpen.
However, you always get the sense with a BMW that science has ruled the roost throughout the entire design process; that anything with a bit of flair or panache has been ditched to make way for another equation. And as for the line, “We realised a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make”?
Hmmm. What BMW made people feel in its early days was not “joyous”, but “frightened” as those Munich-engined warplanes swooped out of the sky, machineguns blazing.
It’s much the same story with the Beethoven/Schiller Ode to Joy. It isn’t. It’s a stirring piece of music, for sure, but even before the European Union got hold of it, it was never quite as happy-making as, say, the Carpenters’ Please Mr Postman.
Joy’s not really a German thing, I suppose. We do joy. The Americans do joy. The Italians do joy, even though they never laugh. Germans, though? They’re rather better at precision and accuracy and following orders. Which is why I can’t quite understand what went wrong with the new convertible version of the 135i.
It is featured right at the start of the “joy” commercial. The driver is an old man in a hat who is smiling enormously, presumably because he’s just caught a glimpse in the rear-view mirror of his comedy moustache. Certainly, it’s not because of the car.
I like the hard-top 135 very much. In a road test on these pages, I said it harked back to the big engine/small car philosophy that crystalised the BMW range back in the early Eighties. I even gave it five stars, and so I was looking forward to driving its convertible sister.
The 3-litre engine’s unchanged and it’s still great. You have one little turbo that gets you going and then another enormous turbo that kicks in if you really need some clout to overtake. The result is better economy allied to a seamless, relentless, muscular stream of power that’s never exciting or zingy, but always there, ready to arm wrestle its way into your consciousness.
However, the convertible is 254lb heavier than the coupé and that iron lard makes its presence felt every time you put your foot down. This car is as zesty as Stonehenge.
Of course, you’d imagine that with 254lb of strengthening material, it would at least be rigid and strong. But no. All the time the steering wheel is wobbling and vibrating, and sometimes you can actually feel the flex that is sort of inevitable when the front and the back are joined together by only the floor and a bit of Millets canvas.
I don’t doubt that, in extremis, the 135 will handle nicely. And we know it’s quite fast. But there is no excitement here. Not even a crumb of joy.
As a practical proposition, it’s not much cop either. The boot is tiny and the rear seats are suitable only for people with no legs. I should also mention that with the electric roof up, you cannot see what’s coming at oblique road junctions and that getting it down takes a yawning 22sec.
In theory, this car should be very good; a modern-day incarnation of the old 2002 or the 323i. I like the manually adjustable seats and the lack of styling. I like the fact the roof is canvas rather than metal. It feels like the sort of car in which the need for driving pleasure has been put above the need for gimmicks and gadgets. But what results is neither an ode to joy, nor a very good car.
BMW 135i M Sport convertible
Engine 2979cc, six cylinders
Power 302bhp @ 5800rpm
Torque 295 lb ft @ 1300rpm
Transmission Six-speed auto
Fuel 30.1mpg (combined cycle)
CO2 225g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 5.7sec
Top speed 155mph
Price £32,515
Road tax band K (£215 per year)
Release date Out now
Clarkson's verdict
About as joyful as a German joke
Source: Timesonline: Jeremy Clarkson reviews the BMW 135i M Sport convertible.
