My name is Richard and I am a very boring man. I tried to prove as much to Dan and Andrew when they invited me onto The Intercooler podcast late last year, droning on about my four volume Boring Car Trivia book series and at one point instigating a short conversation about favourite motorway service areas. Gloucester and Tebay since you ask. Honourable mention for Oxford on the M40.
Then I got carried away and claimed that there’s no such thing as a boring car. Andrew was aghast. As a reader of The Intercooler, you’ll know Frankel lives his life at the edge of adhesion and sometimes can’t sleep for thinking of steering response and tread shuffle. There are, I could sense him thinking, hundreds of cars that are soul witheringly boring to drive and he’d be right about that. If you love driving, the car firmament is dotted with dreary fun sponges. But that doesn’t make them totally boring overall.
Every car, I boldly claimed, has something interesting about it. At this point Frankel whipped out an ace card; ‘What about the Vauxhall Grandland?’ he asked. Normally this can silence a person as quickly as being asked to remember anything whatsoever about the Vauxhall Grandland, surely an impossible task even if you’ve driven one, owned one, or been a chief engineer for Vauxhall (Grandland department). But as I said, I’m a terribly dull man and arcane information leaks from my brain like fetid water off a broken drain pipe. So yes, there’s something slightly interesting about the Vauxhall Grandland – please mentally place emphasis on the word ‘slightly’ – and that thing is, it’s got a shark in it. All modern Vauxhalls do.
