Documentary Movies & Series

The Volvo XC90 — I can’t find anything wrong with it

By Jeremy Clarkson (The Sunday Times, June 1)

God knows why a young person would look at my farming show and think, “Mmm, that’s what I want to do for a living.” Sure, it’s fun to whizz about at harvest time, playing with heavy machinery and drinking cider in the late summer sunshine. But for the other 50 weeks of the year it’s mostly a smorgasbord of mud, pain and sadness, and it’s all topped off with a pay packet that would disappoint a Congolese miner.

Nevertheless, I regularly receive missives from teenagers asking for a job and they all have one thing in common. They haven’t learnt how to drive.

So how are they going to get to and from the farm when it’s three in the morning and a pig is dying? Or it’s 10pm and we’ve just decided to plough one more field before calling it a day? There are buses, sure. I saw one in November, and I’m told another came along in February but I can’t confirm that. Some might argue that they could come on a bicycle, but we don’t employ that sort of person here.

It’s the same story in the world of television. You employ someone as a runner and they arrive with a first in astrophysics and an ability to converse fluently in German, Polish and Chinese. Plus they’re willing as hell and fun to have around. But they can’t drive.

So what’s happened? Well, I know that today’s young people see the car as an unnecessary expense, and in London that’s almost certainly true. But London’s doomed. In a few years it’ll just be a seething mass of people in high-visibility jackets waiting their turn to make chanting noises about whatever issue is affecting their mental health that day. I suppose people will always be needed to clear fatbergs from the sewers, but soon all the fun jobs will be in the sticks. Where you need a car.

Which, of course, is a “bad thing”. Drive one and there’ll be a whiff of "far right" about you. A sense that you’re a climate change denier and that you possibly haven’t burnt your Harry Potter books yet. As is required in paragraph four of the laws governing acceptance on social media.

Certainly I know of no young person who thinks a car might be “fun”. Or that speed is exciting. Or that the noise of a V8 really does do chemical things to a human being’s limbic system. Nor do they see a car as a symbol of freedom. They see it as a tool. And, worse, a tool they can do without. And I find myself wondering if, in middle-class circles, maybe the Volvo XC90 must take a share of the blame for this.

When I was being driven to school, we just went in whatever our dad had. The idea that he’d choose something specifically for that role was preposterous. One kid at our school was dropped off in his dad’s Maserati Ghibli. And even though they managed to get his trunk in the back, I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the reason he bought it.

Then, early in 1983, we were told we must all wear seatbelts. And at a stroke that meant kids couldn’t be squeezed into the back of a car like Spam. They each needed their own seats. And the very next year along came the seven-seater Renault Grand Espace, which answered that problem.

All of a sudden people began to choose their next car based not on how fast it went or how cool it was, but whether little Johnny would be comfy on long journeys and safe in a crash. Soon there were hundreds of people carriers and they were all terrible, until 2002, when Volvo introduced us to the XC90.

This was different somehow. It didn’t look like a box. It didn’t feel mumsy. It may have been designed for the school run but it had a he-man stance. You could almost convince yourself that it was a Swedish Range Rover. But it wasn’t. It was a school-run box. A bloody clever one with actual space for seven humans and their dogs, and all wrapped up in a skin as impregnable as a submarine pen.

This, then, was a car you bought with your head. I know this because I’ve had two. And they were tremendous. But consider what our kids thought as they were ferried to and from school in the back. I’m not sure it will have given them the same tingles as my mate’s dad’s Ghibli.

There’s a new XC90 now. Not that you’d know by looking at it. It looks pretty much the same as all the others, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a handsome car. And I love how it says “AWD” (all-wheel drive) on the back. Volvo always likes to pick on one feature and put it on the boot lid. They used to have little badges saying “5 speed”. And the 340 had one saying “lambda probe”.

There are three trim levels and a choice of three engines. The £62,000 base model is a turbocharged 2.0-litre, which sounds pretty boring, and the top model gets some kind of hybrid system, which sounds unnecessary and expensive. So I tested the middle-order B6, which uses every possible means to extract as much as is possible from every atom of fuel. It has a turbocharger, a supercharger and 48 volts, and it works very well.

The trim level fitted to my car was called Ultimate, which means it came with 21 inch wheels. Often this can spoil the comfort, but I also had air suspension, so it didn’t. Size? Well, it’s big, but less intimidating to drive round a city than a Range Rover. And it’s surprisingly light. The best thing, though, if you ignore the relentless common sense, is the interior. Pale and smooth and zincy, the dash is fronted by the sort of wood normally used to make Kevin McCloud’s spectacle frames. And you get a vertical sat-nav screen, which in north-south countries such as the UK, and Chile, and Sweden for that matter, makes more sense than the usual wide-screen systems. Which are better suited to east-west countries such as America.

I spent a long time trying to find anything annoying or substandard and I just couldn’t. Apart from the relentless bonging, obviously, but that’s a government requirement these days. It was a nice place to sit. It was comfortable, and while I did raise an eyebrow at how the top speed has been limited to just 112 mph, we rarely need to go faster than that on a school run.

So yes, while it’s likely that the XC90 has poisoned the next generation’s mind into believing that cars should be sensible, I have to admit that if that’s the way they’ve got to be now, the latest incarnation is absolutely spot on.

The Clarksometer: Volvo XC90 Ultimate B6 AWD

Engine: 1969cc, 4 cylinders, turbo and supercharged, petrol

Power: 295bhp @ 5400rpm

Torque: 310 lb ft @ 2100rpm

Acceleration: 0-62mph: 6.7sec

Top speed: 112mph

Fuel: 29mpg

CO₂: 214g/km

Weight: 2,140kg

Price: £77,640

Release date: On sale now

Jeremy’s rating: ★★★★☆

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A third thumb? I can count the benefits on one hand

By Jeremy Clarkson (The Sunday Times, June 01)

Many years ago, I made a television show that no one watched. I can’t even remember what it was called. But I do recall that at one point I interviewed a professor of robotics who showed me some inch-long metal insects that knew they should head to a charging point when their batteries were running out of juice. They were a very long way from the Terminator.

Anyway, after we’d watched them doing not very much for an hour or so, we turned the cameras off and during the de-rig, he explained that he and his wife both had implants in their arms, and when they were connected over the World Wide Web, as it was known at the time, he could feel what she was feeling.

Not rage or disappointment or joy. Those are emotions, he couldn’t feel those. But when she was having some, er, “me time”, he could feel what she was feeling. And this struck me as weird. Because while it must be fun to experience your wife’s lady moment, I just can’t help thinking that the brain that designed and built such a system could and perhaps should have been more gainfully employed.

And that’s more or less what I thought last week when I read about some boffins at various British and Swiss universities who have built a robotic thumb that can be controlled with the toes. Not for someone who has lost theirs in a forestry accident, but for people who have two normal thumbs and would like another.

I’m aware, of course, that the human species has reached a point where body modifications are widely available and much in demand. You can enlarge your breasts, have words drilled into your face, remove unwanted skin, grow new hair in a bald patch and whiten your teeth till your mouth shines like it’s full of burning magnesium. You can even remove your genitals if you find them annoying in some way.

But I wonder, how many people have ever woken up in the morning and thought, “You know what? I think my life would be immeasurably improved if I had an extra thumb”?

It’s quite a complex bit of kit, because you’ve got your new supernumerary and fully opposable digit, which goes on your right hand below your little finger. And it’s controlled by pressure pads in the sole of your foot that send a signal wirelessly to two motors strapped to your wrist. Apparently, it’s been tested on people ranging in age from 3 to 96 and they all got the hang of it in minutes.

Great. But what are the advantages? Well, say the boffins, the guinea pigs they used to test the new invention could pick up pegs and put them in a basket. I think a small “wow” is in order at this point. And they could also pick up foam rubber shapes using their new thumb in conjunction with their fingers. Well, yes, but what was the normal thumb doing at this point? Nothing, is my guess.

Still, I’ve had a think and I reckon that with two thumbs, you’d be able to open a bottle of wine using only one hand. I’m not sure why you’d want to do that, though. Maybe if you were defusing a bomb with one hand and you were suddenly thirsty? You could also peel a banana, come to think of it, but again, I’ve never wanted to do that while sending a text message or retrieving something from the Aga.

I wonder, then, if maybe the boffins might have a rethink and come up with some robotics that might actually be useful. Eyes in the back of your head, for example. Or maybe a spare … no, let’s not go there — we’ve had enough smut for one week. But you see what I mean.

I’d quite like a robotic liver. I’d use the existing one for normal everyday activities and then in a pocket, or some kind of belt pouch, I’d have an evening and weekend liver that is better able to deal with alcohol. God gave us two kidneys and two lungs and two arms and two legs. But we only got one liver and that, I think, was one of his biggest mistakes.

I digress, so let’s get to the point. It’s all very well giving a robotic thumb to someone who already has two. But wouldn’t it be better to develop something for people who don’t? There are about 25,000 amputations in the UK every year, and while prosthetic limbs have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, they are still a very long way from the real thing.

There are scientists working on Steve Austen-style bionic limbs that are controlled by the mind, but it’s a huge job. They’ve only just reached the point where a robotic leg can deal with rough terrain. And until recently, they were as useless at stairs as Daleks. But to get them working as well as normal legs, you have to employ the finest minds from so many different disciplines: neuroscience, robotics, computing, medicine — and that’s before you get to all the maths needed for the algorithms.

None of this should phase us. It’s all doable. But not if the world’s finest minds are busying themselves with spare thumbs and anti-fat jabs and having their wife’s orgasms. In the US, billions of dollars were spent on cosmetic surgery in 2022, whereas a UK company trying to develop better prosthetic arms for children was given backing in 2019 to the tune of just £4.6 million.

I realise, of course, that whenever you mention robotics and microprocessors that can access the human mind, particularly at a time when we have all just dipped our toes into the unknown depths of artificial intelligence, it’s likely to cause various scaremongers to start shouting about Skynet and Judgment Day and so on.

But when diabetes arrives in the night and they have to remove one of your legs, you’re going to wish science was focusing more seriously on a replacement and a bit less seriously on a new anti-dandruff shampoo.

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And here's . Clarkson's columns are regularly collected as books. You can buy them  or your local bookshop.

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