By the time you’re reading this, my much-troubled Richard Hammond documentary should finally, touch wood, be out.
I wanted to make this a Twitter thread (that wasn’t originally anywhere near this long, don’t worry), but given how long it would take even in a reduced form and the headaches I’d endure in getting it posted, I decided why not here? More than high time to kick off the dust anyway. This is going to be quite a bit inflammatory, but not unwarranted. I’ve needed to get this completely and totally out of my system for a very long time now. I do not dish out slatings to those who don’t deserve it. That’s not the way I roll. I give everything and everyone its fair chance.
I dedicate this article to a deterministically-named brown-noser like Ant Brown, who I’ll call ‘Berkshire Ant‘ from here on in if he decides to come up with any snappy reprisals, with whom I might have been friends with in another life due to the fleet of cars he maintains, but his flagrant lack of respect for his fellow man and inability to learn who I was speaks to the general mediocrity of his journalistic skills, integrity, and reveals the sort of person Mr. Brown is. And out of principle, I do not deal with disgusting, feckless cretins like him. No matter what cars he owns or stories he writes, I have a beyond zero interest in associating with him, and that’s the bottom line on that particular time-wasting tosser and any other two-bit pulp peddler who wants to cowardly drag dirt on my name without directly confronting me or at least bothering to learn who I am first before you go pathetically on the attack. Scripting and producing a 2 hour long video documentary as a one-man production team takes a hell of a lot more effort than puttering about some B-Roads in a shonky old motor for some irrelevant magazine read by a couple hundred coffin dodgers who gave their Rileys to the scrappy in ’09 for a Ford Kuga. That’s really all I’ll say about him, since it’s not good to fret about every last little coat-tail rider green with envy that you’ve made a bigger impact in 2 years than they have in perhaps 20 or more.
You made it personal with that little quip – ‘odd-bod’ I’m sure you thought was scathing. I’ve never read anything you’ve ever wrote, yet if a friend of mine told you you were crap, I wouldn’t take his word at face value. I’d still assess it for myself. But no. You’re just a lackey. You’re undeserving of any respect.
I do want to iterate I have nothing personal against him per se; merely that his decision to partake in a personal attack against me has forced me to yield an appropriate response to stick up for myself. I’m simply treating him with the level of respect he prefers to treat others with. Furthermore, the only reason I singled out Brown in particular was because it was the first reply that popped up and that was all I could stomach. And for those wondering, I don’t do blocking. If you’re the sort of insecure little egotist that doesn’t like having your bullcrap challenged, that’s your problem, not mine.
The state of car journalism on the whole is a disgrace these days anyway. People like Ant Brown would not have had jobs shining shoes in the days of Setright, pre-fame Clarkson, Cropley, Meaden, Barker and Metcalfe. Licking them would have been too good of a privilege. I will not name specific examples to avoid triggering a bigger flamewar, but you know the industry’s in its death spiral when we now have people whose job it is to market hulking great 5000lb electrified SUVs as they rust and rot on dealership forecourts are having to result to more unsavoury means of making a name for themselves because no-one’s bothering to follow their main hustle.
And why should they? Most of you have the same damn opinions as everyone else. We’ve already had to put up with two decades of revisionistic “Malaise Bad!” droning even though the Mustang II was the highest-selling Mustang for a single year in its six-decade history in a manner which many of these publications fruitlessly try to explain away as people thinking they were getting its predecessor and helped to save its nameplate, all the while having zero problem with the mere existence of the Mustang “Mach-E”, and now we’ve got people like Doug Demuro from their highly American-centric perspective crowing that there were no good cars issued in the 1980s. So many articles filled with the same misinformed opinions and legends passed off as ‘fact’ telling readers about stuff they otherwise learned in error years ago. If, for instance, you still believe John DeLorean, the man that designed the GTO and Firebird was a cocaine trafficker who turned to a life of crime after his cars struggled to sell – congrats, you bought the US Federal Government’s story hook, line, and sinker, as did every other journalist who continues to peddle it. DeLorean was not the sort of man who would have become a crook.
All this endlessly milquetoast “the past sucked” drivel seems to stem from a need to draw attention away from the fact that the 2010s were generally devoid of interesting cars outside of evolutions of cars already introduced the decade prior, and that the 2020s are proving to be the worst decade for new cars in the 140 year history of the automobile. In the first two – three years of the decade alone, we’ve had Dodge effectively commit suicide, Ford kill its family saloon and hatchbacks to focus on more on crossovers in between bouts of stabbing its longterm fans in the back by using hilariously out-of-touch memes (and BMW following in an even more braindead manner after charging their drivers to pay for features they already owned), Alfa Romeo suffering an aneurysm shortly after its owner and shelved what could have been among the most important drivers’ cars of the century for some motorised slop, Seat’s special snowflake luxury brand Cupra oxymoronically proclaim you didn’t need to drive to enjoy driving (hint: you do), and angry journalists (and I use that term on EV lobby shills lightly) who had never worked an honest day in the automotive industry mald in unison that Toyota, the biggest car company on the planet, had “no idea” what they were doing when they decided they wanted to break away from the pack and focus on development of hydrogen fuel cells (and not because they were hitting a little too close to home). Chinese manufacturers are back to their old tricks now that they own half of Europe’s carmakers, shamelessly ripping existing designs off, except now they’ve got the tech and the safety to match the looks at a price they can undercut Western manufacturers at due to making everything themselves, and we’re effectively rolling out the red carpet for them.
Modern cars are a shitshow, and the people that write about them aren’t far off.
It’s a real shame, too. From the ’50s to the ’90s, if you got a job as an automotive journalist, it was a job you held for life and one that commanded a great deal of respect. You would never want to quit. There was so much variety. Seemingly-humdrum family saloons and hatchbacks powered by rotary engines. Road-going homologation specials that would bite your head off at a moments’ notice. Utes, along with an Australian car market that actually existed (as well as a thriving British one) that made the driving experience a noticeably different one depending on what part of the world you lived in or vacationed to. Scientific experiments like the Chrysler Turbine, GM EV-1 and coal-powered Oldsmobile that sounded like a fighter jet. SAABs whose quirky appearance, robust build quality and green aviation-inspired cockpit made you feel like you were in a fighter jet. There were objectively bad cars like your Yugos, FSOs and Allegros you either had to royally slate or justify by stretching the truth to its tearing point yet in the funniest way possible, still had some form of character, and if you lasted long enough and did your job to the best of your ability, you’d be rewarded with the early 2000s supercar boom that our non-crippled economy helped to beget, the last of the quick cars not oriented around performing good at a piece of tarmacked German forest. At one point in time, there were only two supercars on sale brand new in the United Kingdom; the Lamborghini Diablo and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, both of which were geriatric and on their last legs at that point in time. Pundits thought the supercar was dead once those shaky stalwarts finally fell off their respective perches.
But they didn’t cause the quiet die-off of the Supercar, when only a decade earlier the likes of the F40, 959, XJ220, EB110 and the formidable McLaren F1 roamed the Earth. In the span of less than 50 months after supercars experienced their Millennial nadir, we got the Murciélago. The Vanquish, as well as the DB9 and eventually DBS grand tourers. The SLR engineered by McLaren. The Carrera GT. The Enzo and its Maserati-flavoured spawn that went on to dominate GT racing, the MC12. The new Ford GT as well as the even more exotic twin-turbocharged Saleen S7 representing the finest in Anglo-American partnerships. VAG finally dropped their bombshell of a Bugatti, the Veyron, after nearly a decade of development, and Koenigsegg set to work on conquering the world with its CC series from a carbon-fibre shed in the heart of Sweden. And let us not forget the Gumperts, the Edonises, the Paganis, the Spykers and all the other, smaller marques popping up all over the place to make sure we didn’t just have a mere handful of aging supercars in production, but an abundance of the latest and greatest in carbon fibre and unobtainium.
Likewise, in another life, I could have been an automotive journalist. A very damned good one by my own over-inflated estimations. But modern cars do not interest me. I cannot get passionate about the slow death of a hobby as it reaches full casualisation and mentally well-adjusted people like JaxsonTheFurry (who belongs in an insane asylum, the eco-fascist punk) who want to oppress us under their pale-skinned, chubby, middle-class feet think you’re Satan incarnate. Face it, the only real difference between the NIO EP9 and a Tesla Model Y is that one will tear your bones from your innards if you try to take a corner at G-Forces exceeding human limits, and the other will flip like a NASCAR at Daytona before it even gets the chance to turn at that sort of speed. We live in an era of gratuitous speed, where cars look unnecessarily angry and are unnecessarily fast even if they don’t have to be and aren’t consciously engineered to be that fast, and companies like Lotus will freely pervert their founding tenets, building cars like the Evija that would have Colin Chapman able to power the world through the friction generated in his coffin alone. The Ferrari ‘Purosangue’ is more of an automotive mongrel than any of its kind before it.
And yet people treat the slightest bad thing you say about modern cars as sacrilege, and use it to slag off any alternative choices that may pop up on the market. For instance, I know there’s a rather sad fellow on Twitter who uses every opportunity he gets to publicly slate the Ineos Grenadier from its BMW powerplant to its lacklustre sales figures while viciously defending (heh) the new Land Rover Defender, which he just so coincidentally happens to own.
No shit. It’s like pointing out more people will eat a Big Mac than a sirloin steak today, or that more people will listen to a Taylor Swift song than one from Toni Halliday. Quality does not beget popularity, even if it’s the same type of product. Casual car consumers are a dumb, fat bunch of money-wasting troglodytes who want a car with a commanding road presence, yet a colour that does not stick out in a crowd because they’re already focusing on maximising the resale value as they aimlessly hop to their next one, as part of a bigger obsession this generation has with the future to come, as opposed to living in the moment. They want the ability to go off-road, even if the only off-roading they’ll do is the occasional grass verge. They want a “work horse”, even if the only work they’ll ever do with it is haul a few measly tins of house paint and some pre-cut 2x4s. And they want something that looks “new”, even if the present day GR Corolla, one of the few good cars on sale today, looks like it could have conceivably come out alongside the Mk2 Ford Focus RS 15 years ago.
Add to that the fact INEOS have never built a car ever, and don’t have any of the brand and model heritage that a comparative giant like Land Rover does, and I think they’re doing a marvellous job appeasing all the necessary regulations yet building a car with as few compromises as possible. They didn’t (and will likely never) buck to trends the same way Land Rover did. Besides, mind telling me how well Jaguar’s doing these days? Interesting how the downfall of the brand almost directly correlates with the replacement of the old XJ with a platform that dated back to the ’60s with a newer version that looked like a cheap imitation, followed by a more complete freefall once the successor to that car came out that was ‘XJ’ in name only before its total discontinuation a decade later, leaving the brand without a flagship saloon for the first time since the end of World War II.
Cars like the Defender and Nissan Juke are perfect for people who want the convenience of cars, but don’t actually like them. Come the year 2124, there will still be many original series Land Rovers in fully-functioning condition, a rare few perhaps on their original mechanicals and underpinnings. There will probably be a fair few Grenadiers kicking about, especially if they get a more bulletproof engine fitted and the build quality improves. But the only 2019-onwards LR Defenders you’ll see at that point in history will be in a museum, a dusty barn, or heritage examples kept running out of a foundation’s pocket. It is simply not a car that’s built to last a significant amount of time, like many modern cars are. They are designed to satisfy crash and emissions regulations, last the required tenure of its first owner (i.e. ~6 years, with some of the earliest examples just starting to have their first hiccups), then gradually break down during the next 3 – 10 as its subsequent owners take far less care of it. Until it ends up in a scrapheap and recycled into a bunch of Pepsi cans. Because car manufacturers have now more or less perfected the planned obsolescence cycle by making engines impossible to work on, self-repair voiding the warranty, and alloy wheels along with complex bodywork that’s colour-coded even at the lowest trim levels so if you so much as scratch it, you’ll need to fork out for a new part instead of rubbing on some T-Cut.
To summarize, I’ve been watching the programme ardently since June of 2004 – the 1st, to be precise. Over 20 years almost exactly to the day. Because it was the Monday after its maiden airing, taped overnight while I slept a mere six days before my 7th birthday. I regularly visited FinalGear from as early as 2007 once I got an internet connection. I got my mother to subscribe to the TG Magazine. And from there, Top Gear completely changed my life.
Why is it so wrong for me to simply state my appreciation?
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