In two million years man managed to discover only three important things:
fire, the fact that wood floats, and the horse.
Then within 100 years, starting in about 1820, he came up with everything
else. Railways, cars, aeroplanes, horror stories, antibiotics, electricity,
the telephone, the computer, the lawnmower, photography, the record player,
the typewriter, barbed wire and of course linoleum.
One day you were painting bison on the side of your cave. The next you were
chatting on the “phone” with Aunt Maud in Wakefield while listening to the
news on your “radio”. It must have been a nightmare for the new-fangled
science fiction writers. Because by the time they got round to finishing
their books all their ideas had become science fact.
But then we arrived in, ooh, about 1920 and everything just stopped.
Mobile phones. Word processors. The Eurofighter. They’re all just developments
of ideas that came along in the 19th century. And it’s easy to see what went
wrong: the British Empire collapsed.
I’m going to use Isambard Kingdom Brunel here as a case study. When he fancied
the idea of building a new train or a new bridge or a new tunnel he had to
find benefactors. And they were everywhere, gorged with cash from the
empire’s 11.5m square miles and its 400m inhabitants.
Initial estimates for his Great Western Railway, which was to link London with
Bristol, suggested it would cost £2.8m. But this, as things turned out,
would only have got it as far as Slough. The actual cost was a truly
astronomical £6.5m.
And when it was finished he went back to the financiers and said: “Let’s keep
going. Let’s take the passengers off the trains in Bristol and put them on
steamships to America.” And they agreed, paying for the SS Great Western and
then the SS Great Britain and, when that ran aground, the enormous SS Great
Eastern. The biggest ship the world had seen, or would see, until the
Lusitania came along 50 years later.
Now imagine if IKB were around today. And try to imagine how far he’d get if
he suggested to Network SouthEast that it should finance an idea he’d had
for scramjet flight to the space station, and then plasma drive rockets to
the most distant of Saturn’s moons.
Today nobody looks at the long term. Nobody builds great houses for the
grandchildren and huge gardens for the generations to come. The quick
growing leylandii has replaced the oak as our tree of choice. And
shareholders will fire any CEO who doesn’t turn a profit within the next
quarter of an hour.
“So thank you for your very kind offer, Mr Brunel. But would you mind awfully
getting lost.”
Nowadays we celebrate James Dyson as a great engineer because he invented a
vacuum cleaner with no bag. And we swoon over the latest mobile phone
because it can send a grubby 10-second video clip of your genitals to your
girlfriend.
The single best invention I can think of in the past 20 years — 20 years! — is
Sky Plus. But it’s not really up there, is it, with the invention of flight
or electricity or the car? Speaking of which . . .
You may marvel at the new Aston Martin V8 but may I prevail upon you to stop
and think for a moment. Yes it is handsome and yes it is fast. But it is
still propelled by a series of small explosions, just like Karl Benz’s
tricycle more than 110 years ago.
I’m absolutely certain that given a free rein and a bottomless vat of money,
someone in Scotland, which is the font of all inventiveness, could by now
have made a new type of engine that runs on brussels sprout peelings,
perhaps, and develops limitless power.
But instead the great engineering minds are employed to think of new ways in
which the cupholders can slide out of the dashboard. Honestly, they’re
talking about the fitment of MP3 players in cars these days as though
they’ve created a cure for the common cold.
The last truly great piece of automotive ingenuity came from Toyota who, in
the late 1960s, showed the world that cars didn’t have to break down all the
time. But since then the world’s car makers have been playing around with
the seven degrees of separation.
We’ve had engines with three cylinders and five and 10. We’ve had engines at
the front, in the middle and at the back. We’ve had airbags for your face,
your wife and your children. We’ve even had airbags for your testicles.
And we’ve had the Fiat Multipla. In the middle of the 1990s Fiat noticed that
you could buy cars with one seat, two seats, three seats, four seats, five
seats and seven seats.
Which meant there was a gap. In the big scheme of things it wasn’t a
particularly big gap. But in the stagnant climate of late 20th century
industrial thrustiveness it was a yawning chasm. There was no car with . . .
wait for it . . . six seats.
The solution they came up with was a family-sized hatchback that had three
seats in the back and three in the front.
So radical and amazing was this that plainly the car needed a whole new look.
And so the Multipla was born, the first car to resemble an Amazonian tree
frog.
Unfortunately this turned out to be a mistake. Customers liked their cars to
resemble sharks or leopards or, er, cars. But not frogs. And so the Multipla
was a monumental flop. And then it was dropped.
And now it’s back again. But this time round the quirky styling has been
replaced with a blandness that beggars belief. I have to say that this is
the most boring looking machine in the whole of human history. I’ve seen
more exciting cardboard boxes.
And to make matters worse, while Fiat was fiddling about, Honda cottoned on to
the six-seat idea and came up with the FR-V, which I suspect may be the
second most boring looking car in the whole of human history.
There’s obviously a problem with this three and three lay-out. It means the
car has to be square, and because it has to be tall too, to give an
impression of space and practicality, it also has to be cubed. As a result,
you end up with the Borg spaceship from Star Trek.
And there’s another problem, too, which becomes evident when you take one into
town. While it will fit comfortably into spaces denied to the longer and
more traditional people carrier, its girth makes it a nightmare in narrow
streets. I spent most of my week with the Honda and the Fiat backing up.
It’s funny. I never really noticed this with the old Multipla. Maybe it’s
because that front end was so scary other people backed up to get away from
it.
Or maybe it’s because the overpowering styling obliterated the faults. Asking
how wide the old Multipla was would be like asking if Adolf Hitler had big
feet. It sort of wasn’t important.
Anyway, if you live in a Georgian town with broad streets and you have
precisely four children, which is best? On the face of it the Fiat looks
good. While the top models cost around the same, £16,500, there’s a cheap
entry-level Multipla for £13,300 whereas the least expensive Honda is
£14,700. It should also be mentioned at this point that Fiat can sell you a
diesel whereas Honda cannot. Neither can do an automatic gearbox.
But I’m afraid that a test drive shows the Honda to be the better choice. It’s
noisy, for sure, but it rides more smoothly, it’s faster, and it feels as
though it’s made from materials that will last beyond next Tuesday.
Let’s not forget that in the Top Gear customer satisfaction survey, Honda won
and Fiat didn’t. By a long way.
To be honest, though, I really didn’t like either of them. They were dreary,
bland and the width really is a nuisance. So if you have three children may
I suggest you buy a packet of condoms. If it’s too late, buy a Toyota
Corolla Verso.
Vital statistics
Model Fiat Multipla 1.9JTD
Engine type Four-cylinder, 1910cc, turbo diesel
Power 115bhp @ 4000rpm
Torque 150 lb ft @ 1500rpm
Fuel/ CO2 44.1mpg (combined cycle) / 170g/km
