10 Oct 07
It's busy A-road and quiet motorway all the way from Edinburgh to Blackburn, via Carlisle and Lancaster. At motorway cruising speeds our Clubman was quite noisy. Some of that's down to the 118bhp engine having to work quite hard, but a lot of it's wind noise. The 17" wheels probably don't help; they certainly don't improve the ride.
It's also on motorways that the rear doors become a bit annoying - not because they swing open or anything, but because you keep catching sight of their vertical meeting point in your rear-view mirror. Like a Civic's spoiler, it's something you should get used to but don't - in the case of the Civic you think it's a car driving way too close your rear bumper, in the Clubman you think it's a motorcyclist about to overtake.
Our approach to Lancaster coincided with shop-shutting time and the end of a home game for Morecambe, the local team newly arrived in the Football League. It was beyond busy; it was approaching gridlock. In this stop-start-stop-start traffic the Automatic Start-Stop system stopped feeling like a sensible, natural feature, and started getting annoying.
We'd stop and engage neutral, the engine would switch off and moments later the queue would start moving again so I'd depress the clutch pedal to engage gear and the engine would restart. Over and over and over. If someone turned their engine on and off this often manually you'd soon snap and tell them to stop wearing out their starter motor. No doubt BMW knows exactly what's it's doing, but it felt wrong. I didn't want to start sitting in stationary traffic with the clutch pedal down, which would keep the engine running, so instead I just turned Auto Start-Stop off.
