A long day on the road, hour by hour

The best part of the day. You are properly settled, the motorway is doing what motorways do, and there is no decision to make for a hundred miles. If you are going to read, deal with something, make calls or watch the country go by, this is when it happens, and it passes faster than any other part of the journey.

Somewhere in the third hour the first genuine restlessness arrives. It is not discomfort exactly; it is the body noticing it has been in one position for a while. That is the signal for the stop, and taking it then rather than pushing on for another forty minutes is what keeps the rest of the day pleasant.

• The easiest two hours of any long journey
• The point where reading or calls actually happen
• Restlessness arrives late in the third hour
• Take the stop then rather than pushing on

After the stop the journey feels new for about twenty minutes and then settles into the long middle. This is where the specification of the car stops being a matter of taste and becomes a matter of consequence: a seat with lumbar adjustment and a few degrees of recline is a different object from a fixed bench angle, and the difference is imperceptible at nine in the morning and very perceptible at half past one.

Cabin noise does the same thing. At seventy the gap between a well-insulated saloon and an ordinary one is a few decibels, which sounds trivial and accumulates into the tiredness people arrive with. It is the strongest single argument for stepping up a class on a genuinely long day.

• Lumbar adjustment matters from about the fourth hour
• A few degrees of recline changes the second half of a day
• Cabin noise accumulates into tiredness you cannot locate
• Cabin temperature drifts more than people expect over hours

On a genuinely long day there is a second stop, shorter than the first, and it exists mostly for the driver. Ten minutes is enough. By this point most passengers have stopped watching the country and are counting junctions, and the useful thing a chauffeur can do is say honestly how long is left rather than being encouraging about it.

This is also where the plan can change usefully. If the last hour is going to be slow because of the time of day, a longer break and a later arrival is often better than sitting in traffic at the end. That decision is worth making at the second stop rather than at the last junction.

Beyond about six hours of driving, a single day becomes hard work for everybody including the chauffeur, and the returns diminish sharply. London to Inverness, London to the far west of Cornwall in summer traffic, or Edinburgh to Penzance are journeys where the honest advice is to fly, to break overnight, or to take a train for the middle section.

The other case is a same-day return. Four hundred miles up and four hundred back inside one day is eight or nine hours of driving, which is more than one chauffeur should do with a meeting in the middle. Where that is genuinely necessary it needs two drivers or an overnight, and we would rather propose that than agree to something we should not.

And where the passenger simply does not enjoy car travel, none of this helps. Six hours in a car is six hours in a car. A train for the long section with a chauffeur at each end is a better day, and it is frequently cheaper as well.