Warning! This post contains trace amounts
of ironic sexism. Please do not take literally, there’s a love. In fact, what
are you doing reading this anyway? Shouldn’t you be doing the ironing or
something?
Every now and again I’m required to do
quite long haul chauffeuring work for Chauffeur Monkey, which involves
getting picked up in a car, being dropped off at the start point, driving the
customer home in their car while the other driver follows behind, and then
being driven home again.
Such was my job last night in a Honda Jazz
and an E Class Merc respectively, except I opted to drive in both cars purely
for research purposes.
The Mercedes E Class Cabriolet is a big,
sexy, slick, convertible fanny magnet. That is to say that it’s a convertible
car that attracts fanny, not that it's a car that attracts convertible fannies…. Well it
might do, but to be honest I’ve no idea what a ‘convertible fanny’ is.
I’ve not said fanny this much since I was
about 13.
The Honda Jazz on the other hand couldn’t
repel fanny any quicker if it tried. It’s as atheistically pleasing as a skip,
only smaller and with less engine power.
No contest, the Merc every time right?
Well, yes and no. Don’t get me wrong, I’m
not going to look unfavourably on a car just because it’s a tad out of my price
bracket – between £35,000 and £55,000 for the Merc depending on what buttons,
whistles and bells you want thrown at it – but while it may be of enormously high
quality and display technical excellence, I wouldn’t know nuffink about any of
that, and it’s certainly not perfect in my book.
For a start, the driving seat is so low it
actually feels like your arse is under
the road. This can make for some sporty fun as it feels faster than it goes
(and it goes fast), but bear in mind that I do most of my work in the small
hours on empty roads. This thing would be a positive nightmare in rush hour
traffic. All the windows are really narrow and in the model I drove, they were
tinted too. This meant that not only did I feel like a massive pimp, I couldn’t really tell how close anything was
behind me before I pulled out to overtake. I just didn’t feel safe in it.
The Honda Jazz by contrast may as well have
no windows at all. In fact, there were times last night in the wind and rain that
it felt like it didn’t. The whole thing started shaking if I went passed 70mph,
but I don’t really mind if a car does that. It reminds me that I’m travelling too
fast, and prompts me to slow down. That’s not a bad thing.
I was surprised to discover that the Merc
does on average about 47 miles to the gallon, which I'm reliably informed (by the interweb) isn’t half bad for a car of
its size. However the Jazz is obviously better in this department. In fact, I’m
lead to believe that the new Honda Jazz Hybrid runs at about 70 miles per
gallon on a combination of tea-tree oil and sheer willpower.
The new Honda Jazz also boasts a feature
whereby “the rear seats lift up, fold over and lock down in one easy movement”, which they
describe as “design flexibility at its simplest. We call them Magic Seats.” http://www.honda.co.uk/cars/jazz/magicseats/
My Fiesta’s rear seats do pretty much the
same thing, but I just call them ‘seats’.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has magic seats. A
Honda Jazz does not.
So which car did I actually enjoy driving
the most?
Well, the Merc was a fun, fast, flashy
fanny magnet. That is to say it’s a flashy car that attracts fanny, not a car
that attracts a flashy…… never mind.
However, the Honda Jazz was the car that
took me the 95 miles home to my wife, my kids and my bed, and at 2am in the
pissing rain, that’s exactly where I wanted to be. I enjoyed that journey, and
by proxy, that car the most.
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