Clarkson reviews the 2.0 facelift Macan

[Wing Commander]

Hammond champions Porsche; so Clarkson will not!

Clearly! When he complains about the ride quality you just know he's talking out of his backside!

Maybe the car he drove had 21” wheels with no PASM or air suspension...?!

[Dandock]

Hammond champions Porsche; so Clarkson will not!

Clearly! When he complains about the ride quality you just know he's talking out of his backside!

Maybe the car he drove had 21” wheels with no PASM or air suspension...?!

No idea albeit the pic show 21s. He drove two. One, a rentajobby in Italy, apparently was a base model: he doesn't mention anything about no. 2. No idea if the pic was 'the car' or just a stock shot. Anyway here's what he had to say... in extreme flippant mode!



I flew with many friends recently to a 40th-birthday party that was being held in a gigantic tent near Siena. And after we landed in Florence, everyone began the long and boring trudge to the rental car desk for the keys to their much-scratched 40cc Fiat Uno. In which they would spend the next couple of days wrestling with its strong tendency to pull to the left. And some unpleasant smells.

Me? Well, I was met by a beaming Italian chap holding a Porsche board. My friends were very pleased for me. And many expressed their pleasure by ignoring me completely, or muttering darkly under their breath as they lugged their heavy bags into the sticky heat of a Tuscan afternoon.

I would have offered two of them a lift, but I assumed I’d be given a 911, so there’d be no room. I was wrong. It was a Macan, the smaller of the Porsche SUVs. And not only that, but it was also fitted with a four-cylinder engine. So it was the cheapest version of one of the cheapest models.

I didn’t mind, however, because the last thing you want for a drive through Tuscany is a fast car. You want the journey to last for hours so you can savour the light and the endless valleys and the sense that round every corner you’ll catch a whiff of Alan Yentob or maybe Melvyn Bragg.

I want an interesting and powerful car for trips from London to my place in the country, because there are many Peugeots to overtake. I want an interesting and powerful car on most journeys, in fact, because I like the fizzes and the crackles and the sense of fine engineering when I go round a corner. But in Tuscany, I just want an air-conditioned space in which I can sit and watch the view go by.


What was the car like? No idea, I’m afraid. I used it for three days and can’t remember a damn thing about it, but that’s OK, because when I got back to London, there’d been a clerical error and the car waiting for me was, yup, another Macan.

This one was green. Very green. More green than the love child of George Monbiot and that Green MP in Brighton. You know grass, in the evening sunlight, after a couple of days of rain? Well, it was far more green than that. This was press-demonstrator green, a colour designed so that the car positively leaps off the pages of those car magazines you read at the dentist’s. I absolutely adored it.

I liked the interior too. The Macan has just been very mildly facelifted, so it has a light bar all the way across the back end — wow — and a new dash, which is pretty good. I especially like the way Porsche sticks to the principle, first used on the 928, of festooning every flat surface with buttons. And then putting half a dozen more in the roof. Men like buttons. They’re a measure of our place in life.


The engine, though, was something else. The diesel option has gone and a petrol-powered 2-litre turbo is now seen as the solution. But it isn’t, because in order to make it bear-friendly, it’s controlled by algorithms that make acceleration possible only if you ram your foot through the firewall and push yourself along the road. You have to use a lot of throttle travel to cause a change in speed, and even more if you want the seven-speed double-clutch gearbox to change down.

I’d like to say that this is solved if you push the button marked Sport, but it isn’t really. There’s a similar problem with the “hard ride” button. It’s bumpy before you push it and bumpy afterwards too. I think Porsche was so busy fitting buttons that it forgot to attach them to anything. Even the air-con Auto button does nothing but illuminate a small red light. Which, technically, warms things up a bit.

So it’s not a particularly inspiring car to drive, and not fast, and there isn’t much space in the back or the boot. And while it has four-wheel drive, the low-profile tyres will spin pointlessly every time you drive into a gymkhana car park. And there’s more.

I doubt you’ve heard of Andy Wilman, but he’s a genius. He was the boss of Top Gear, when it was good, and he’s the boss of The Grand Tour now. His skill in the edit is legendary. He knows what will work and what will not. He knows how to make me look normal and James May look interesting. And after he’s viewed a thousand hours of footage, he will stun staff by remembering every last detail of it.

But the funny thing is that, although he has spent the past 20 years in a small, dark room in Soho, watching cars go past cameras, he is wilfully uninterested in the subject.

His first car was a Datsun Sunny and things went downhill from there. He even had a Mini Countryman at one point. He can now borrow press demonstrators whenever he wants, so he could swan around in Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. But these companies are unable to offer him what he really wants, which is a 1.2-litre paraffin stove. So he’s usually to be found in a Hyundai.

He surprised everyone in the office recently by buying a BMW M3. But after he’d kerbed every inch of all four wheels, which took about a month, he sold it. And we were all keen to see what he’d buy next. Perhaps it would be Boris Johnson’s old Toyota Previa. Or a Rover 75. But no. He went for a Macan.

I can see why it would appeal. The poor ride. The lacklustre engine. The cramped rear quarters. And the buttons that don’t seem to make any difference. But these things on their own are never quite enough for Andy. He likes his cars to have hidden weaknesses as well, so I did some research and I think I know what he found.

The Macan was unveiled in 2013, but it was actually based on the Audi Q5, which by that stage was five years old. There’s a new, updated Q5 now, but, incredibly, the Macan — even the most recent, facelifted version — is still based on the original. Which means it’s sitting on a platform that was designed when Tony Blair was in power. We’ve had Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May since then.

And that original Q5 was not a good car. James May, Richard Hammond and I don’t agree on much, but we all agree that Audi’s mid-size school-run-mobile was about as bad and as bland as cars can be. Toyota Picnic bad. An ocean of wallpaper paste garnished with a layer of nothing at all.

Yes, you do get a Porsche badge on the Macan and you do have the option of that green paint. But, really, you’re spending a ton of money for a car whose underpinnings weren’t much good even in the Bronze Age. And what you end up with is a car that’s not just unnoticeable in Tuscany. It’s unnoticeable everywhere. That’s why Wilman bought one, obviously. And it’s why I wouldn’t.

[Panthera]

It's typical Clarkson; no details about the car, mostly about him & his mates. Not a car review, more a puff piece, so not worth considering when evaluating the Macan as an ownership proposition.

Having said that I do find him and the GT crew very entertaining

[adam b]

JC thinks of a joke or an agenda item, that makes a car review fit it, rarely informative or amusing these days although I still enjoy TG / GT.

He continues his mantra against the 911, but when he actually drives one (996 RS, 997 turbo spring to mind) he loves them

[Dandock]

JC thinks of a joke or an agenda item, that makes a car review fit it, ...

As it is silly season he probably prepared it some while ago and left it for names to be inserted as and when

[Wing Commander]

How to write 19 paragraphs while saying practically nothing about the car that you are allegedly ‘reviewing’.

[Dandock]

How to write 19 paragraphs while saying practically nothing about the car that you are allegedly ‘reviewing’.

Switches +
Interior +
Green +

Peripheral to say the least!

[Wing Commander]

On the subject of its green-ness, that picture isn’t the 2.0 he drove, as you can’t spec PCCBs on the base Macan. Not sure about the colour either. Looks brighter and flatter (non-metallic) compared to Mamba Green. Probably a computer-generated image.

[Dandock]

On the subject of its green-ness, that picture isn’t the 2.0 he drove, as you can’t spec PCCBs on the base Macan. Not sure about the colour either. Looks brighter and flatter (non-metallic) compared to Mamba Green. Probably a computer-generated image.

Probably just poor / budget pre-press processing and average weekend supplement printing

[mjrennie]

The vanity of Jeremy Clarkson. Revolting. Stopped watching him many years ago.