Wheelwobble Wallflowers 3 - Fiat Croma 2

Snapped this one when I was in Italy a month or two back. You hardly ever see them in the UK and they're fairly thin on the ground in Fiat's home market, too.


Once again, an example of a car that's perfectly adequate but which, because it doesn't have a fancy badge, is completely ignored by most buyers. Actually what's under the skin is pretty good - the GM Epsilon platform that's shared with cars such as the Saab 93 - and the semi-MPV body is roomy and practical too. The only drawbacks I recall from our Verdict test of the Croma were the surfeit of light grey plastic in the cabin and the rather bland styling. I have to confess to rather liking it once I'd put in a few hundred miles behind the wheel.

The Croma was removed from the UK price lists earlier this year, although I think officially it's still available to special order.

UK bioethanol update

As I mentioned below, when I was out for a spin yesterday in the 93 BioPower, I filled up with E85 at Morrisons in Norwich. Morrisons is still maintaining the 2p per litre differential between E85 and unleaded (E85 is the cheaper) that it set at the launch of the new fuel over a year ago, at least in Norwich.

As I've said before, Morrisons and Saab, as well as Ford and Volvo have done their bit by making the cars and the fuel available but we probably still need the Treasury to give E85 a bigger tax break than it enjoys at the moment for the fuel really to have a chance of taking off (cars deliver far fewer mpg when running on E85).

I was slightly depressed to see that Morrisons had actually had to resort to padlocking the E85 pumps at Norwich, presumably to prevent motorists accidentally filling unsuitable cars with it. I didn't exactly get the impression that they were doing a roaring trade in the stuff, although one of the Morrisons staff told me that quite a lot of police vehicles were now using E85. I knew that Somerset and Avon police were using E85-capable cars but this was the first time I'd heard of Norfolk police adopting them as well. As usual, I got the feeling that the Morrisons staff had been well briefed about E85.

I'm doing this week's Verdict in Somerset/Wiltshire which is where one of the main clusters of Morrisons E85 pumps is, but I notice that the company has now opened its first outlet for the fuel in Scotland - a good excuse to get up there for the Verdict the next time a suitable car comes up.

What's outside today 15 - Saab 93 BioPower

This is the BioPower version of the Saab 93. That means it can run either on normal unleaded or E85, a mix of 85% bioethanol and 15% unleaded. Externally, it's more or less indistinguishable from the standard model - apart, that is, from the enormous BioPower stickers attached to the sides of this test example.


Yesterday, I took it out on one of my favourite test routes - setting out from Cambridgshire to Norwich on the A11 before heading north to Cromer on the North Norfolk coast and than back home via Cley, Fakenham and Swaffham.

All jolly agreeable, and a route that allowed me to take in a stop-off at a Morrison E85 pump for a quick top-up - the one at the Norwich store, which lies within the shadow of the Carrow Road football ground, in fact.


Got back home in a good mood late in the evening, my head full of moderately warm thoughts towards the comfy, inoffensive if rather bare Saab. Made a cup of tea and casually picked up my copy of the delivery note for the 93 in order to take a closer look at it. What followed was the worst case of what Americans call 'sticker shock' I've had in connection with a Verdict test car since Ford sent us an admittedly very impressive Focus diesel estate about two years ago that had been specced up to the eyeballs for an on the road price of about 25 grand. The Saab - which I should, in fairness, mention is the priciest Vector Sport variant fitted with a few options like metallic paint - comes out at a scarcely believable GBP28,000.


I've always had a soft spot for Saabs and I'm a strong supporter of what the company is doing in promoting E85 with its BioPower models. But that price seems to be hopelessly ambitious to me. Remember that a Skoda Octavia is probably at least as well built as a Saab and, despite being Golf-based, is probably as roomy (in particular where luggage, as opposed to passenger space is concerned) as a 93. But Octavia prices start at about 11 grand; the deeply impressive and very rapid vRS estate version costs about GBP18,500.

Some other yardsticks - Mercedes C Class prices start at GBP23 thousand, BMW 3 Series prices at less than GBP21 thousand. And the Vauxhall Vectra estate starts at less than GBP16K - that's relevant because, as General Motors products, the 93 and the Vectra have quite a lot in common under the skin.

Anorak Corner 3 - Saab, Ford and their differing approaches to E85

Ford and Saab have so far been the front-runners in promoting the use of E85, a blend consisting of 15% unleaded and 85% renewable bioethanol. Both have introduced cars to the UK market that have been modified to run on this fuel. I understand that the main differences between these cars and the equivalent standard models are changes to the materials used in the various bits of pipework that make up the fuel system - E85 is more corrosive than the unleaded fuel most cars run on.

E85 also has a higher octane rating than unleaded - 105 is the figure that is usually quoted, compared with 95 for standard unleaded and 97 to 99 for super unleaded. Ford and Saab differ in how they handle this characteristic of E85. Ford sets up its engines so that they don't develop significantly more power when running on E85. Perhaps the company takes the view that there will be a higher degree of acceptance for E85 if the experience of driving a car running on the fuel doesn't feel different to that of driving one running on unleaded - a question, perhaps of not scaring the horses by giving them too many horsepower to play with.

Saab, by contrast, has years of experience with knock sensors and turbo-charging to fall back on and sets its engines up to exploit the higher octane rating of E85 - its 2.0t BioPower unit, for example, delivers 20% more horsepower and 16% more torque than the equivalent unleaded-only engine. This difference certainly makes itself felt on the road.


So which of these approaches is correct? I don't think it's possible to answer that question clearly at the moment. Saab's and Ford's current engines are very much the first generation of E85-capable power units; they are adapted from existing designs and aren't fully optimised to run on E85 as they still need to be capable of running on standard unleaded as well. But if E85, or even pure bioethanol becomes universally available, it looks like more drastic changes to engines could be introduced to exploit the higher octane ratings - small turbocharged engines with lots of power that minimise the fuel consumption penalty of running on bioethanol look like the way it's going.

Wheelwobble wallflowers 2 - Cadillac BLS

The Swedish theme continues with Cadillac's slow-selling baby model. A couple of days ago, when I was discussing the Ursaab, I issued the usual cheap shot about Saabs being reskinned Opels or Vauxhalls. The BLS is, if anything, a re-reskin because despite its all-American looks, it's based on Saab's 9-3 and is, in fact, built at Trollhattan on the same production line.


I've always found the BLS's styling and soft, understated character fairly appealing, but like a lot of stuff that's OK rather than startlingly good this car has struggled for attention in the UK. I think only a few dozen have been sold since it was launched last year. Not having a German badge is a real handicap these days, although I suspect that the BLS's pricing was probably a bit too ambitious as well. A pity, as the BLS is nothing like as ropey an effort as the 1981 J-Car based Cimarron, Cadillac's previous go at producing a posh small (by its standards) car via platform sharing.

Anyway, it looks as though Cadillac has not been put off because an estate version appears to be in the offing, although I don't know whether that will make it to the UK.

A couple more points from Sweden

A very full and interesting day finding out about renewable fuels in Sweden - more detail later but just a couple of quick thoughts for now.

The first is that Britain is a long way behind not just Sweden but several other countries when it comes to policies on renewables. Remember that for all its faults, the UK is usually several years ahead of continental Europe in most areas of public policy debate. Privatisation, deregulation, public-private partnerships, labour market reforms and a genuinely open market for corporate control; all were invented or reinvented in the UK, and eventually copied just about everywhere else.

But when it comes to facing what is probably the biggest challenge of the lot, climate change, Sweden's impressively comprehensive package of measures is far superior to the UK's miserably timid and piecemeal efforts. Ford, Saab and now Volvo have done their bit by offering cars in the UK market that can run on bioethanol-based E85, while Morrisons has been offering the fuel for over a year now at a limited number of forecourts at a modest 2p per litre price advantage compared with unleaded. That's all that's left of the smallish 17p per litre tax break E85 enjoys when other factors such as the underlying price of E85 and the cost disadvantages of distributing comparatively small amounts of the fuel are factored in.

It's difficult to see E85 taking off in a big way in the UK unless a far more attractive tax regime is introduced - in particular, some way needs to be found to shift the basis of the UK car taxation system and the London Congestion Charge from tailpipe CO2 emissions (in fairness, this was considered a rather bold and imaginative approach when it was introduced) to some sort of 'well to wheel' measure that reflects the 'built-in' carbon offset provided when the crops that are used to make bioethanol absorb CO2.

The second thought is this. We've now covered a number of cars that can run on E85 on the Verdict, and this has provided an opportunity to explain the issues involved - namely the limited number of refueling points, the higher octane rating E85 provides compared with unleaded, the mpg penalty of running on E85 and the small per litre price advantage E85 enjoys. More E85-capable cars are coming onto the market but the pros and cons of these models compared with their petrol-powered counterparts are always the same, so it's difficult to take the story forward. I think it may make more sense from now on for us to treat the E85-capable version of any car as our default choice for testing so that we can be as green as possible, but no longer to make such a fuss of the fact that a particular car runs on the stuff.

Blast from the past 7 - 'Ursaab'

Just getting ready to go to Sweden tomorrow, and this has put me in a Swedish sort of mood.

So here's the most Swedish of cars, the so-called 'Ursaab' of 1946. I think the prefix 'Ur' plays the same role in Swedish as it does in German; it's difficult to translate but in German, at least, it usually denotes that anything to which it is applied is very old, or a true original. That contraption that looks like a park bench with bicycle wheels that Mercedes claims was the first proper car, for example, is sometimes called the 'Ur-Benz'.

Anyway - back to the Ursaab. Project 92 was the first Saab passenger car and was developed over the years into the 93, 95 and 96 lines, which only finally bowed out in 1980.


Nobody could accuse this Saab of being a re-skinned Vauxhall - in those days, the design teams leant on Saab's aircraft experts for ideas rather than Opel, a fact that shows in the remarkable purity of the Ursaab's sleek bodywork. But let's not be too harsh on today's models for their part-sharing; Saab was always a small company before it was taken over by GM, and despite its distinctive identity, it often relied on links with other manufacturers to keep going. In 1966, when the two-stroke engine fitted to the 95 and 96 needed to be replaced, Saab bought in a V4 four-stroke from the German end of Ford. A little later, it asked Triumph to design the overhead-cam engine for the 99; this power unit, related to that fitted to the Dolomite, survived in heavily developed form until comparatively recently. And in the 1980s, the 9000 was the result of a joint development effort that also produced the Fiat Croma, Alfa 164 and Lancia Thema.

So Saabs have never really been quite the pure thoroughbreds some of us might like to imagine - but it would still be nice if they could recover a bit more of their former individuality.

Greenery. There are other ways - perhaps

When it comes to green PR, Toyota seems to be making most of the running at the moment. Hollywood stars have been flocking to the Prius for a good few years now, and Toyota's hybrid also enjoys an exemption from the London congestion charge - evidence of some effective lobbying work, I guess. Honda gets quite a bit of kudos for going down the hybrid route too, while Ford, and especially Saab, have also won a certain amount of recognition for offering cars that can run on E85, which is 85% renewable bioethanol.

But a couple of other manufacturers are now starting to pipe up, and are politely pointing out that you can get some pretty good results in terms of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions without resorting to drastic solutions like stuffing a car full of batteries and electric motors, or switching to alternative fuels.

Citroen, for example, recently published a pamphlet listing some of its achievements in this area. This mentions its new C4 BioTech which can run on E85, and a prototype diesel hybrid C4, but the emphasis is very much on what it's already been able to do with smaller changes to mainstream cars - small diesel engines that have tailpipe emissions that are almost as low as those of the Prius, particulate filters, Sensodrive automated manual gearboxes and stop-start mechanisms that shut down the engine when a car is stationary and automatically restart when you go to set off.

BMW is another manufacturer that is introducing a lot of these smaller changes in its mainstream cars, as I discovered when I spent yesterday trying some of the company's revamped models in Wiltshire. The main visible changes are modest (to my eye barely noticeable) facelifts for the 1-series and the 5-series, and the introduction of a new pretty three door version of the 1. Under the skin, though, there is a bit more going on, a series of improvements that are being introduced piecemeal to different models under the general heading 'Efficient Dynamics'. This comprises stuff like better diesels, energy-saving electric power steering, regenerative braking and a stop-start system similar to Citroen's. The idea is to save fuel without cutting down on the sort of driving enjoyment that BMWs are famous for, and in this the company seems to have succeeded. I was able to try the revised 535d and 118d; the latter had the stop-start system, which works almost imperceptibly; the engine is cut out if you put the car into neutral with the brakes on, say when you stop for a traffic light. The engine restarts immediately as soon as you depress the clutch and put the car into gear. I was impressed to discover that a by-product of the new start system is the car's ability to restart automatically if you stall it as I did on one occasion.



It wasn't all incremental changes, though; for the longer term, BMW is betting on hydrogen in liquid form. I had a chance to see, but not to drive, a 7 series converted to run on the fuel; this had part of its bodywork cut away to show off the big hydrogen tank that sits between the boot and the back seat. There's a chance the Independent may get to try one of these priceless cars - there is a limited production run of 100 for the time being, with only a few making it to the UK - later this year, so I'll be eager to see whether I can get my hands on it.

Bioethanol conference at Imperial - a PS

Three more points from the seminar at Imperial.

Everyone I spoke to who had an opinion on the subject thought that the 18% fuel consumption penalty we recorded for running on bioethanol in the Saab BioPower was a bit on the low side. A man from Ford put the likely figure at 30% although I continue to hear suggestions - I'm not sure how well-founded they are - that this penalty can be smaller when cruising than in stop-start traffic, and that it may be lower in Saabs rather than in Ford's E85-capable models. Given that our test was in a Saab and didn't involve any town driving (it was a mix of motorways and twisty A roads but didn't really cover any town driving), perhaps our result wasn't too far out of line after all. Of course, our test was a simple brim to brim affair but at the seminar I met the man who used to do the AA's incredibly rigorous fuel consumption tests and now does similar work on an independent basis. He told me he was in the middle of carrying out one of his highly detailed tests on the BioPower. I will be interested to see what he comes up with, which I suspect will be the closest thing we get to an authoritative answer for the time being.

The second point concerns the possible damage to the Brazilian rain forest that may arise from increased demand for biofuels. Apparently this is a red herring because the rain forest isn't really very close to the best latitudes for growing sugar cane. What may do for the rain forest, so it is said, is the growing demand for protein and therefore soya. More generally, though, cultivation for ethanol is certainly in competition with cultivation for food, which could prove to be highly problematical in the long run.

The third thing to mention is that Britain is due shortly to get its first bioethanol plant using British sugar beet as a feedstock. It belongs to British Sugar and it's located in Norfolk.

Bioethanol and the Road to Sustainable Development

A fascinating day-long seminar on this subject at London's Imperial College today - I'm grateful to Saab for putting me on to this.

Several contributors from government, the private sector and the academic world explained the role of bioethanol in tackling climate change and future fossil fuel shortages. I can't possibly do all of the arguments justice here but I've picked out what I think are a few of the most interesting aspects.

The first thing you notice at any event on this subject is that a lot of the speakers are Swedes. That's because Sweden has aggressively embraced bio-fuels - the Swedish prime minister declared that the country would be independent of oil would by 2020, although it was a car dealer that got the ball rolling by importing suitably specced American Ford Tauruses in the nineties. This gave Ford an early lead that it was able to build on with bio-capable versions of the Focus produced in Europe. Saab is the other main player with the BioPower versions of its 9-3 and 9-5 models, while Scania has been promoting the use of bioethanol in bus and truck engines that operate on diesel principles. One of the best customers for buses running on bioethanol has been Stockholm's public transport company; buses with Scania's third generation ethanol engine - which should equip it to tackle longer out-of-town journeys - are eagerly awaited there. A Scania bioethanol bus trial is imminent in London too. Not every lesson from Sweden can be applied here, of course. The country has a low population density and a large forestry industry, for example, although I was slightly surprised to learn that the Swedish market uses bioethanol from Brazilian sugar cane (Brazil is the other trailblazer in the use of bio-fuels). I had thought the feedstock for Swedish bioethanol production was cellulose derived from the timber industry; this is however, expected to play a large role in future. Nevertheless, the Swedes' efforts put those of most other countries to shame.

An interesting snippet of information came from a representative of OKQ8, a fuel retailer with a 27% market share in petrol and a 40% share in bioethanol in Sweden - while flex-fuel cars that can run on E85 (a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol) get all the headlines, most of the use of bioethanol in cars in Sweden so far is accounted for by the small amount of bioethanol - 5% - that is added in to standard unleaded; this blend can be used by cars without modification. Bioethanol can already be added to standard unleaded in the UK I believe, and the forthcoming Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) will require us to be 5% renewable by 2010.

Another important point is that different sorts of bio-fuels are not all equally beneficial in their impact. Thanks to the work of academics like Dr Jeremy Woods at Imperial we seem to be getting a better understanding of the differences between so-called 'bad bioethanol' and 'good bioethanol', which is a function of a host of factors such as the crops used, the processes used and the extent to which fossil fuels are used in production and distribution. The UK RTFO can't stipulate that only good bioethanol be used as this would be against world trade rules. However, companies will have to document the provenance of their fuels under RTFO, and it will be up to us to keep them honest with our fuel buying decisions.

Saab Biopower

A quick post while stuck on the ground at Heathrow waiting to go to Germany to try some Audis.

Today's Indy carries the write-up of our fuel consumption test of Saab's 9-5 BioPower. Since Saab and Ford introduced cars to the UK market last year that are capable of running on E85, a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol, there has been a certain amount of discussion of the pros and cons of this fuel, which is available at a small but growing number of branches of Morrisons. On the one hand, E85 has a higher octane rating and a modest price advantage (usually 2p per litre). On the other, it delivers fewer mpg.

Estimates of the exact size of this penalty vary enormously, so we decided to do a test - the answer that we came up with was that Saab's 9-5 BioPower suffers an 18% mpg penalty when running on E85 over a wide range of road conditions. We did plan a more elaborate test involving two cars running in parallel, one on E85 and one on unleaded, but after months of trying, we just couldn't get two directly comparable cars together at the same time, so we settled for running a single car in one direction on E85 and then retracing our route on unleaded - not ideal, but hopefully fairly representative.

I've been following this subject for over a year now, and the more I look into it, the more complicated it seems to get. Official CO2 emissions data, for example, just look at tailpipe emissions for cars running on unleaded, not what is sometimes called the well-to-wheel impact, or the impact over the whole life of a car. That means cars running on E85 get no official credit for using a renewable fuel that has a built-in carbon offset in the form of the CO2 absorbed by the crops that are used to produce bioethanol. Take another example, the hybrid Toyota Prius, which delivers a very low tailpipe CO2 figure of 104g/km. What about the amount of energy that is used in manufacturing this immensely complicated car? What about the disposal of the large numbers of heavy batteries hybrids use?

I'm off to a day-long conference on the subject at Imperial College on Friday, which I hope will help me understand this a bit better. I'm not really expecting to come back with clear answers, though, just more insight into how complicated the whole thing is and why.