Why the best road trip car can also be the worst. And vice versa
Nik Berg
We love cars at Detour, but it’s the journeys on which they take us that make for the best tales. Cars are quite literally the vehicle for the story and the right car on the right road just makes the occasion all the more memorable. The wrong car on the wrong road can do that too.
In 2020 my son Max and I took our ridiculously raw Caterham Seven on a 2,000-mile adventure. In just seven days we sought out seven of Britain’s best driving roads. When we were on those roads the car was sensational. We’d have the rudimentary roof off, soak in the sights, sounds and smells of our surroundings as we went from apex to apex. We perfected our heel-and-toe downshifts and occasionally stepped a foot or two beyond the limits of grip, stupid big grins across our faces.
But then we’d get to the end of one of these amazing routes and have to navigate busy motorways and the little Seven couldn’t have been less suitable. It was so noisy that any form in-car entertainment – from a little music to attempts at conversation – was impossible and it was a dreary grind. The changeable weather meant we were at times too hot, too cold, too wet and too dry. Sometimes more than one at once.
Getting in and out of the Seven with the roof up required circus skills and I ached for days afterwards. Every inch of the car was used to stow our gear, but you could forget about finding somewhere to hold a drink. We made it work, but boy was it work at times.
By contrast 20-odd years earlier on a California road trip from San Francisco to Las Vegas and back to Los Angeles I rented a Cadillac DeVille – a great land yacht that made the miles simply waft by in air-cushioned comfort. We tuned into local radio stations and passed through Death Valley blissfully oblivious to the horrifying heat outside our climate-controlled Caddy. It was glorious.
Cadillac
And then we found a mountain road and it was awful. Terrifyingly so. I tried to keep apace with a one-litre Japanese hatchback, but deploying the Cadillac’s V-8 simply set the tyres screeching and two tonnes of metal slid closer to the edge of the mountain. The views I’m told were wonderful, but all I saw was the line in the middle of the road. Even slowing right down to barely a trot, the car was so unwieldy that it required all my attention to avoid a vertical excursion.
In both cases there would, of course, have been a happy medium. Perhaps a Porsche or Aston Martin, a Mercedes or BMW that would cope with the distance and the dynamics alike. But I somehow doubt either story would be as good as result.