What's outside today 35 - Volvo C30 F

This one went back today. It's the bioethanol-capable version of the C30 - it uses the same 1.8 litre engine as the Ford Fusion FFV that featured on the Verdict last autumn. The fuel itself is called E85 because it's 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol (the petrol is required for cold starting in northern Europe, apparently).


I had a chance to do the standard C30 about a year ago and I think its a fairly nice machine - and a good-looking one as well. I have to say I'm a bit surprised there aren't more on the roads, although pricing that's a little bit on the high side may be holding it back.


Unusual colour scheme - it's a sort of off-white pearlescent paint. More evidence, I suppose that the manufacturers are trying to find, if not the new black, then the new silver metallic.


Anyway, I've been testing and reporting on E85 capable cars since they first appeared in the UK about two and a half years ago and progress has been painfully slow - the car manufacturers and the supermarkets are often held up as the bad guys when it comes to environmental matters but in this case they've done their bit by making the cars and the fuel available. It's the government that's let the side down by not providing bigger tax incentives for renewable fuels, along with us, the car-buying public, for not buying the cars or the E85.

What's outside today 31 - Volvo V70

Volvo's big new estate.


I must admit I rather like modern Volvos' styling - the strong shoulder line inspired by that on the old 140/240 mixed with smooth curves produces a look that's both handsome and distinctive.


Not sure about the back end though, which looks a bit awkward.


Still, as I discovered on my recent trip to Gothenburg, there's no better car than this to have a crash in. Heading west with this one for the Verdict.

More Volvo safety stuff

Just about to embark on a second day of finding out about some of Volvo's new safety technology.

Yesterday was all about Volvo's emerging active safety applications - stuff that helps you to avoid an accident or minimise your speed on impact, rather than protecting you once you are in one.

This included hands-on demonstrations of systems that either warn you about conditions - for example the presence or behaviour or other road users - that may cause an accident, or intervene in order to take over the braking or even steering of the car in such a way that an accident is avoided or takes place at a lower speed. Much of this involved deliberately driving cars at large obstacles and relying on Volvo's technology to avoid a collision. It's actually quite difficult to do this without instinctively braking or steering away, rather than letting the car do the work, even when pedestrians are represented by dummies and other cars by huge inflatables - hitting those is enormous fun, by the way. I'm sure there's a market for some sort of car-based game that uses those.

Volvo Cars Safety Seminar

A night at Heathrow before nipping over to Sweden tomorrow for Volvo Cars' Safety Seminar. Back in the seventies and eighties, if there was a single manufacturer whose name was synonymous with safety, it was Volvo. That link seems to have faded a bit since then; Mercedes, if anything a more important safety pioneer than Volvo, has probably been less shy than it was about its role in important advances, while, more recently, manufacturers such as Renault have established their own safety credentials through their success with the modern NCAP crash tests.

Perhaps Volvo wasn't too sad to lose some of its prominence in the area of passive safety as this was probably also associated in buyers' minds with less positive attributes such as tank-like styling and stodgy handling.

Now that Volvo may be on the block - I know no more than has appeared in the papers on this subject - perhaps it wants to put some of its expertise in this area in the window in order to increase its attractiveness to potential buyers.

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.

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.

E85 in Sweden

Just arrived in Sweden to see what Ford and Volvo in particular are doing with bioethanol/E85 here.

Sweden is a long way ahead of everywhere else in Europe when it comes to this sort of thing, so looking forward to an interesting couple of days - including, and this is the hot subject at the moment in this area, a visit to a second-generation bioethanol plant. Second generation = using e.g. wood waste etc. instead of plants that could otherwise be used as food. It's back to that distinction between good bioethanol and bad bioethanol again.

What's outside today 7 - Nissan Qashqai

An unusual one this - not quite sure what to make of it.


Nissan has been dropping cars that fit traditional market categories such as the Golf-class Almera and the Mondeo-sized Primera and is instead following what could be described as an all-niche or multi-niche strategy. Just hope the niches are large enough to support this approach, given that the UK Nissan plant at Washington is relying on the Qashqai for much of its future output. The Qashqai was also designed in the UK, by the way.


The Qashqai is a sort of SUV/MPV cross, and its styling, especially at the rear, has overtones of the larger Murano. Brief impressions from the shortest of drives - strong, quiet diesel engine, very impressive interior, apart from the leather seats on our particular test example, which are the same 'bright brown' shade I was grumbling about in connection with the Volvo S80 the other day. Spacious too.