By Michael Booth
Specifications
Would suit:
Felons.
Price:
£31 535 (about R444 000).
Performance:
250km/h, 0-100km/h 6.1sec.
Combined fuel consumption:
10.43 litres/100km.
You may have noticed that this column has become as much a platform for me to spout my opinions on stuff as it has a place of rational contemplation of contemporary automobiles and their role in society.
But as Paul McCartney sang with searing self-awareness in "No More Silly Love Songs", well, here I go again...
Isn't it about time we calculated prison sentences on a sliding scale according to the age of the felon? You're familiar, I'm sure, with the idea that time passes with increasing speed the older one gets?
Surely then, while a three-year stretch for robbery will seem an eternity for an 18-year-old, to an 80-year-old it will be two Sidney Sheldons and an afternoon nap.*
Let's get a little balance here: why not weight sentencing according to age with, say, 70 as the threshold for significant sentencing reductions?
Sentences could be reduced by perhaps a month or two for every year below that figure so that if you are, say, 35 (coincidentally, my age) you can knock off 35 months from a standard sentence for, for argument's sake say, car theft.
I raise this now mainly for the altruistic reasons that lie behind all of my writing (or, as I call it, my "giving"), but also because I have just been driving the new Audi TT V6 convertible and I now want one so badly that a little insurance fraud, a few covert raids on my wife's bank account, or even just plain stealing will get in the way of raising the £31 530 shortfall in my current budget.
It's a cracker, the new TT, not only subtly sexy, but at last now a proper, tight sports car. I tried the entry-level, two-litre coupé a few months ago and loved it, rashly pronouncing it far superior to the larger-engined, V6 despite never having driven that car (I do the same with films I've never seen and books I've never read).
I claimed the two-litre handled better because it had less weight over the front wheels. I was guessing but I was right though what I had forgotten was that, in most circumstances, more power means more fun, and damn the consequences.
The new TT is taut, agile, fast and extremely well made; it's so very nearly perfect that it's annoying. In fact the only criticism to be levelled against it is that, if the ubiquity of its predecessor is anything to go by, we will be sick of the sight of them in a couple of years.
Slowly - but less of it
That's not Audi's fault, of course - the iPod is still a work of genius even though there are now more of them than grains of sand on Bondi Beach - but it might well be all the likes of Alfa and Mazda have to hold on to if they are to remain sane.
*My wife has pointed out that, although time does seem to go by more slowly for the young, old people have far less of it ahead of them, so time is more precious to them and so their sentences should be shorter. Or the same as they are now.
She is also changing her bank-card passwords. - The Independent, London
- The Audi Roadster will be launched in South Africa shortly. motoring.co.za will be there... - Editor