RE: Range Rover Evoque Si4 Dynamic (2012) CAR review

All motoring journalists seem to assume that everyone lives in Surrey and talk about UK city's like Liverpool as if they where in some strange far off land. This is very odd, as most motoring journalists seem to live on farms in Wales.

RE: Range Rover Evoque Si4 Dynamic (2012) CAR review

Am I missing something? I admit this isn’t one of Mr A f-C’s best efforts but, in view of ongoing posts, I re-read it. Yes, it’s a motoring journalist moaning about being lured to what he considers a dour city, rather than the hills of Tuscany. It’s an underpaid profession, the exotic travel and free petrol are the perks - he’d probably say the same if the venue had been London, Dusseldorf or Lyon. I see comments about rats in sewers - I think everyone knows rats are everywhere, we even have two in the air-conditioned, silk-lined sewers of London and we call them Ken and Boris because that’s an effete, toff, Southern joke. He implies that Liverpool’s re-generation money might have been more responsibly spent - you can debate that but, if local authorities haven’t frittered a good chunk of it away on half thought out vanity projects, they would differ from those in most other parts of the world. Most repellant, he says that Liverpudlians live with the stench of rats. Except he doesn’t, he just makes a slightly clumsy connection between sewers and disappearing grant money using a play on the well-known phrase ‘to smell a rat’. And, can I just make an observation about this Northern pre-conception that all Southerners are up themselves and how genuine they are themselves? It’s illustrated by the assumption that a man with a hyphen in his name must come from ‘down there’. Most Brits I meet who visit London seem honour bound to tell me what a shithole my adopted city is, and how unpleasant all the inhabitants are. It’s a bit rude, and it’s not true, but I live with it and I don’t really think the people making these bigoted observations are bad people. Everyone is parochial.

About the Evoque, I think we can disagree on many points, except one. In current designer’s ongoing quest to eliminate glass entirely, the rear visibility is atrocious. For a car that will be perversely popular in cities, that slit of a rear window is irresponsible. Crouch down at small child level and see how far back from the rear you get before you see the driver’s mirror. A reversing camera should not be an option.

RE: Range Rover Evoque Si4 Dynamic (2012) CAR review

BernieHarper. Being an old school Car reader, I quite like the idea of a motoring writer who is an adept social commentator. However, if they are not, that doesn’t discredit their ability to carry out their primary task. Personally, I find it tiresome to read people slagging off other people’s home towns, accurate or not - but I didn’t see anything there as being gratuitously offensive, unless the person reading is a city planner. Although I’ll accept what you say about happy tourists, the article was suggesting that the lives of many residents had been little improved by the injections. And if you point out how these things drip down, I’ll wait a few months to respond when my fellow Londoners lifestyles and incomes have blossomed following the major disruptions I’m told we’ll experience following our own local leaders Olympian vanity project.
 

RE: Range Rover Evoque Si4 Dynamic (2012) CAR review

 As an ancient Car reader too, I loved the occasionally waspish tone of LJKS and even today find Clarksonesque rants to be generally entertaining. But this was different. Here, the “artist” decided to paint two portraits. In the first, he saw a wart and extrapolated it to a whole face. And in doing so he made his portrait grotesque and unrecognisable. This makes him at best a cartoonist, or more likely an artist in the mode of Tony Hancock in The Rebel.   So why should we trust his negative portrait of the Evoque, or any other vehicle? Of course irritation, bile and venom has its place in journalism. But never at the expense of balance or the facts. This was infantile mewling disguised as adult discourse, and sets a poor precedent for Car in my view. 

RE: Range Rover Evoque Si4 Dynamic (2012) CAR review

@Ronwhite - can you explain why you think one should deride this car?