So the other day, I was driving down the motorway, and the lorry beside 
me casually drifted into my lane. As you can perhaps imagine, when two 
vehicles travelling at 70 MPH touch each other, this is a fairly 
traumatic experience. That said, all that happened is that one side of 
my car is now slightly melted, and has half an inch of tire rubber on 
it. (Let's face it, a lorry tire is bigger than my entire car...)

Turns out the only word of English that the driver knows is "sorry". It 
also turns out that the truck is registered in the Netherlands, the 
driver's name sounds Polish, and his insurers are in Russia... but I 
digress.

After an unreasonable number of delays and phone calls, my insurers 
*finally* took my car away to be repaired, leaving me with a curtsey car 
until they finish fixing mine.

Now, needless to say, they aren't exactly going to lend you a Ferrari 
911 for a few months. I understand that. But I was expecting to get a 
car which can actually reach 70 MPH. I don't think that's an 
unreasonable expectation. My first car was an utterly shagged old Ford 
Fiesta that had been back to zero *twice*, and that managed to get to 
70. (Just!)

The car I've been given is a Vauxhall Corsa 1.2 litre. I'm not sure 
whether it's petrol or diesel; ridiculously, none of the documentation 
mentions this fact. (There's a space in the handbook where you're 
supposed to fill in the details; it's blank.) Given the complete 
inability to accelerate or to handle high revs, I had assumed it was 
diesel. However, yesterday I filled it up with petrol, and it hasn't 
stopped working yet, so apparently it's actually petrol after all.

When it was delivered to me, it had slightly less than 2,000 miles on 
the clock. So at least you can say it's brand-new. That being the case, 
it's abysmal performance is even more surprising.

Let's take it from the top. Here's a list of things I dislike about the car:

- It does not appear to be possible to adjust the seats. I've never seen 
that in any car, ever. (You can move the seats forwards and backwards, 
but you apparently cannot adjust the back.)

- The rear-view mirror distorts distances, making objects appear 
drastically further away than they actually are. When you consider that 
THE ENTIRE PURPOSE of this mirror is exactly to allow you to determine 
precisely how far away other traffic is, this is a major failure.

- The rear-view mirror is tinted black in a further attempt to prevent 
you using it.

- The steering wheel is aligned so as to EXACTLY obscure the dashboard.

- The steering wheel has several knobs and dials placed on it, 
positioned exactly where you want to put your hands to hold on to the wheel.

- The dashboard has two identical dials on it. Obviously one is engine 
speed and the other is road speed. There is no way to determine which is 
which, except that the right-hand dial has a second scale printed on it, 
marked "kph" in almost illegibly tiny writing.

- There is no temperature gage. Arguably you don't need one, but it 
would be nice to know when my hands are going to stop freezing.

- It is not possible to turn the lights off. You can have sidelights, 
sidelights + headlights, or just headlights. But you cannot have no 
lights at all. Even if you're driving through Death Valley at high noon, 
you have to have your lights on, so you look like a complete tosser.

- The suspension seems overly "bouncy". It's not that it's too hard or 
too soft, but more that it doesn't seem to be damped very much. Go over 
a bump and the car bounces up and down for what seems like an awfully 
long time afterwards.

(The suspension also makes a rather alarming crunching noise as I drive 
around the work car park. But that's probably because of the 
ridiculously brutal speed ramps they insist on having here...)

- The steering seems surprisingly heavy. I'm presuming it just lacks 
power steering; all the cars I've driven recently had that.

The big, big issue, of course, is performance. Or rather, the utter 
absence of anything resembling it.

Now obviously a 1.2 litre engine is never ever going to perform like the 
2 lire fuel-injected engine I'm used to. It's just not gonna happen. On 
the other hand, when you drive down the road and lorries, buses and dump 
trucks are overtaking you, something isn't quite right there. :-P

The car has 5 gears. I eventually realised that when you get to a 
certain speed, a little light comes on warning you to change up a gear 
before you break the engine. And my god, the engine seems to struggle 
*constantly*! You know that sound an engine makes if you try to do 45 
MPH in first gear? This car sounds like that ALL THE TIME!! I don't 
*care* if the rev counter says it's only doing "20" and the engine 
red-lines at "70"; it STILL sounds like it's about to explode!

(One might ask "20 what?" Usually a rev counter will say "x 100 RPM" or 
similar, but this one says nothing. Since the engine idles at about "8", 
I'm guessing this is "hundred RPM". It doesn't actually *say* so 
anywhere though...)

According to the warning light on the dashboard, you need to change up 
to top gear if you exceed about 35 MPH. Yes, you heard. There are FIVE 
GEARS to get from 0 to 35, and just ONE GEAR to get from 35 to 70.

In solemn truth, the car *will* get to 70 eventually. It just takes an 
absurd amount of time. And the engine becomes *extremely* loud. Like 
this is something the car really isn't designed to do; you're actually 
exceeding the design limits of the car. Which is frankly ludicrous.

Also absurd is the way that as soon as you get to any kind of hill or 
slight incline, the car begins to slow down, and nothing you can do 
prevents this. Even with my foot flat to the floor, the engine literally 
cannot handle a slight hill. Hell, even if you're only doing 30 through 
a city center you have to start changing down gears because the car WILL 
NOT stay at a constant speed. That's just pathetic.

As I drove home last night, I noticed that the distance between 
consecutive junctions was insufficient space for the car to reach 60. I 
just looked on Google Earth, and those junctions are about 1000 meters 
apart. (Roughly half a mile.) So even with a rolling start, when I come 
off a roundabout at 25 MPH or so, HALF A MILE still isn't enough of a 
run-up to reach 60. Unless it's downhill.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

The first car I owned was a heap. But the second one was a 1.1 Peugeot 
205. Despite the puny engine, it was wicked-fast off the curb. (It was a 
little more lumbering at high speed, but you could quite easily get up 
to 90 MPH by mistake.) You would have thought a brand new car with a 
bigger engine would be even faster... and, apparently, you would be wrong.

My previous car was a 1.8 petrol, and that used to get 45 miles to the 
gallon. The hire car gets only a piffling 37 MPG, despite an engine 
that's 33% smaller. Hell, my *current* car manages 36 MPH, and that's a 
2 litre monster!

In summary, this car has a tiny engine but still drinks fuel, yet 
manages to be slower (and louder) than cars with an even smaller engine.

I completely recommend that you buy this car!

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