MINI has Christmas all wrapped up

MINI has this week shown it hasn’t lost the creative touch when it comes to marketing. If you’re looking for something last minute and unique for the MINI fan in your life, this might do the trick. It’s not an actual present, but might liven up an otherwise dull one! Available through MINI UK’s Facebook page, the app allows you to devise and customise your own wrapping paper. Starting with a blank page, visitors choose the background colour then ‘drag-and-drop’ from a selection of festive icons to create their own design. These include images of snowmen, mistletoe and Santa. Message options include ‘It was alive when I wrapped it’ and ‘Isn’t it amazing what you can find in skips these days’. Once the paper is designed, simply print it out. Genius. This is the last post before Christmas, so have a great one and thanks for supporting me during 2011.

Taking Italian cars to a new level

So to the Panda, which I really liked. The design has kept all the character of the outgoing model, on sale since 2003. This new Panda is only the third one in 31 years and Fiat bosses hope it will help banish the reputation of iffy reliability in Italian cars for good. The above picture was taken in a whole new department at the Pomigliano plant just outside Naples, where the Panda is now being built (previously it was in Poland). It’s essentially a quality control division, which Fiat has had before but never to this sort of standard and attention to detail. The plant, formerly the home of the Alfa 159, has been given a massive and hugely expensive overhaul to bring it into the 21^st century. Staff have also undergone a major retraining programme. If anything is going to help save the Italian economy it’s initiatives like this. The Panda goes on sale in the UK from late February. The issue is going to be finding customers; back in 2003 Hyundai and Kia were nowhere. Now, cars like the excellent i20 and Rio are going head to head with the Panda and have a headstart.

Driven: Mercedes SLS AMG

The head-turning power of a rare car never ceases to amaze me. Add into the equation an ability to offer something genuinely extraordinary – a party trick that no one else can perform – and there’s literally no end to the queue of people who will leave a sticky noseprint on the glass. This week’s wheels belong to the Mercedes SLS AMG, a car launched a couple of years ago but which I never got to drive at the time. Its ‘party trick’ is the gullwing doors, harking back to the classic 300SL of the mid-Fifties. So far I’ve driven it as far as Gatwick Airport (I’m writing this in a hotel room in Naples, where I’m driving the all-new Fiat Panda. More on that next week). But after a brief trip to our village school on Tuesday I returned to the car park to find a small crowd. Same story yesterday at the cashpoint. It’s all the usual questions; how much, how powerful, how fast. I answer happily then swiftly follow up with the truth – it’s not mine. Looking forward to the journey home later today when I’m back in the UK. Let’s just say I won’t be going the most direct route home.

Do we know how to treat two-wheelers?

Keep seeing stuff on Twitter about the number of cyclists being killed on London’s roads this year. AA president Edmund King has been quite vocal on the issue (along with how many goals his young sons score each weekend in their football matches. They seem to average about six a game.) Don’t know if fatalities are higher than last year, but some reseach for an article I was writing last week dragged up some interesting cycling facts. Bike use was up 12 per cent between 2009 and 2010 – which can only be a good thing – when almost every other type of vehicle use was down. What’s worrying the insurance companies – I was writing for the customer magazine of one – is that riders’ lack of protection means massive claims and pay-outs. It’s not fixing bikes but bones that’s expensive, and in some cases paying out on life policies. Do car drivers know how to treat people on two wheels? Many riders would say not. It’s a fair point, and why does the Government’s long-standing THINK! road safety campaign feature no advice for drivers on how to deal with cyclists? There’s nothing about it all; no adverts, no posters, no guidance, nothing. That seems plain wrong to me.

Indians head here as MINI heads for India

Interested to learn that MINI UK is entertaining a group of top journalists from India ahead of the brand’s launch there next year. January’s Delhi Motor Show is the formal announcement of what’s happening and when, so 17 hacks have travelled here to visit the Plant Oxford factory and the MINI Park Lane showroom in central London. Wonder how the cars will go down there? If it’s like the rest of the world, a storm. MINI is now on sale in 90 countries, and sources tell me it could go live in anything up to another 12 next year. Vietnam and the Bahamas are apparently high on the list. The MINI is about as far away from India’s best known car – and supposedly the world’s cheapest, the Tata Nano – as it’s possible to get. But the middle-classes are apparently growing like Topsy. So will they want to personalise their MINIs with vast numbers of options as the Brits do? Will they go for the budget One model, or the flagship JCW? I don’t imagine Indian roads are the best in the world so the ride might be pretty harsh. I’d have thought it would be the ideal opportunity to launch the MINI Scooter, seen as a concept a couple of years ago!

Driven: Audi Q3

Is Audi running out of niches to fill? You have to wonder. The latest model is the Q3, which I had the chance to drive for the first time yesterday. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that it fits in beneath the Q5 and Q7 as the smallest SUV in the range, but how much smaller is it? The Q5 is 4.62 metres long while the Q3 is 4.38 metres, so just 24 cms difference bumper to bumper. Get a tape measure out or just hold your fingers up. Is that enough to justify a whole new car? I’m not sure. Audi says the Q3 will appeal to a younger buyer but it seems a moot point to me. That said, Audi is having another excellent year; sales and market share are at a record high and 14 new or replacement vehicles due in 2012. Unsurprisingly it drives very well and is full of premium features. One element that interested me was the driver’s seat, as it always does because I’m 6ft 4ins tall. Opt for the electric adjusting chair and there’s a far smaller range of movement than if you pick the one with levers to manually pull and push. In the former my head was brushing the ceiling lining when on the lowest setting, on the latter I had clear space. Bizarre.

End of the road for Maybach

To the surprise of no one, Daimler has killed off Maybach. I’ve been around the industry long enough to remember the ridiculous launch of the brand back in summer 2002. It involved craning a car in a glass case on to the QEII’s sun deck (pictured), then taking a load of journalists on a trans-atlantic cruise with it. When they arrived in New York harbour, a helicopter lifted the case off the ship and carried it to Wall Street where the car went on show. I wasn’t important enough to get the invitation back then, but I do remember my colleagues didn’t come back on the boat – they took Concorde. At every major motor show of the five years I’ve wondered how long Maybach had left. To be honest I’m surprised it has lasted as long as it has. Maybach always had a tiny little stand, always in a corner and always in the shadow of the much larger Mercedes one. It must have been massively galling for the Germans of Daimler to see just how much more successful their rivals at BMW were being with Rolls-Royce, which always had an enormous stand. How much more successful? Since 2003, Maybach has sold 3,000 cars globally, with around 115 coming to the UK. In the same period R-R has shifted more than 12,000 units. It might sound like a daft thing to say, but somehow Maybach always lacked the class of R-R. It’s been an expensive folly.