RICHARD LANE

Europe by E450d: it’s the closest you can get to flying by Concorde

Is strident, pragmatic, long-distance motoring now enjoying its Concorde moment? Is it all downhill from here? Having just returned from the Alps in something a bit special, I fear it might well be. I’ve loved big, car-based escapades ever since thrashing a mate’s Peugeot 206 down to Arezzo as a 17-year-old. It croaked on arrival (head gasket!) and we spent a king’s ransom in roaming charges chatting to the IRA, never mind the repair work. (I notice the RAC’s Italy Roadside Assistance has at some point since 2006 rebranded to Roadside Assistance Italy). But it was a hell of a lot of fun. Of course, Peugeot didn’t engineer the 206 1.6 GLX with crushing cross-continental ability in mind, as demonstrated by the car’s measly 90bhp, seats flatter than the straight at EhraLessien and a gearbox serving up 4000rpm at 80mph in top (the GLX did, thank goodness, get air-con). But other cars are forged for this sort of activity, and it’s these I’ll mourn when their time is up. Chuffing great diesel, huge boot, soft chairs with canyon-deep bolsters intended not for hard cornering but for hour-upon-hour comfort on the straights, a big tank: the ideal tools for touring. For obvious reasons, if not always the right ones, plush diesel wagons are dying out, and it’s hard to envisage superior touring apparatus in an electric future. Not until solid-state battery tech is here, at least. In the meantime, it will be the Concorde phenomenon. That airliner that could whisk you from London to New York in three hours, but since it was retired in 2003 the same flight has taken eight. Okay, this was never a serious issue for humanity, only one of minor convenience for the lucky few, but it still stung, because it was the killing off of technology that made an arduous task a lot easier. And cooler.