I've liked cars from the very beginning. Before bed at night I used park all my Hotwheels against the closet door and pick two of them to hold, one in each hand, as I fell asleep. After I got my driver's license the obsession kicked in to over-drive and I started consuming as much information about my favorite cars as I could. The true power of the Internet was really starting to erupt and nights of Googling and trolling around car forums lead me to a television program from across the pond. Top Gear.
Youtube didn't exist (or at least wasn't what we know it as today) and video clips were passed around the Internet via peer-to-peer services. I quickly learned that a show existed in the UK called Top Gear and it was hosted by people who knew how to drive, knew how to present a car, and didn't pull any punches in their criticism. The clips I was running in to had car reviews unlike any I had ever seen or read before. Honesty in the opinions expressed by the hosts was completely new and absolutely unique in automotive journalism.
The main reason the Top Gear presenters were able to talk about a car in a brutally honest way is because the show is a production of the BBC... The UK's government funded television channels. Why is that important to the formula of the show? It means the show, and the hosts, are not held accountable to powerful sponsors who wouldn't take too kindly to the show if their car ended up being unpopular with the hosts.
Car shows in the US are generally sponsored by auto manufacturers and accessories companies. Its because of this that you can never be too sure if the opinions about the cars on the show are truly genuine. On Top Gear, you don't have to worry about that as the viewer.
At the beginning of this millennium Top Gear went through a revamp. Jeremy Clarkson was joined by two new hosts, James May and Richard Hammond. These three couldn't be more different from each other if they tried. They each have a unique personality and look for different things in cars. Top Gear was good before this revamp, now, its great! However, its still difficult to get in the US. Its not a show that broadcasts here unless you can catch it on BBC America (requires cable). You could always do it the old fashioned way and download episodes from peers (torrents) but the best way to get a Top Gear fix now-a-days is to watch it via Netflix Streaming which has every season of the show since the revamp available.
I spent years watching low quality video clips of the show on a computer screen but Netflix Streaming brought the show to a bigger screen -- my TV.
Its been about ten years since I started watching Top Gear and the show still hasn't lost its edge. In fact, the edge seems to get sharper. The car reviews are one thing, but the other aspect of the show that supersedes the fast cars and loud exhausts is the unapologetic way each of the hosts talk about life, the world, and the strange circumstances humans have created around themselves. They aren't PC and they often get in trouble for saying something that offends one group or many. No one is safe from ridicule and being called out. We complain about the United States becoming too PC but it really isn't a problem faced only by our country. In some ways the UK suffers from over-sensitivity more than we do here. Top Gear exists as a rare, raw and rough edged opinion show that just happens to talk about cars a lot. Its important for entertainment like this to exist. It challenges the lemming movements that sweep pop-culture and questions whether what we're all saying is the right thing, really is.
Top Gear goes to great lengths to go directly against what pop-culture says is wrong. Hummer H2's get something around 9 miles per gallon. Ask anyone and they'll say this is horrible. What does Top Gear say? They say it doesn't matter and that what really matters is that when you drive the H2 you feel like a kid driving a life-sized Tonka truck. Trains are supposed to be efficient, cheap ways of moving lots of people from one place to another. Top Gear has completed several races where a car beats public transportation in races across Europe. Whats more, they also cite an interesting statistic about how trains use more fuel per person per mile than a car would... hmm... And finally, how about that Prius everyone goes wild over? It is the car that's supposed to save the world after-all. Well, Top Gear had a piece showing how much shipping, transport and manufacturing all over the world has to happen to get the body, batteries and parts assembled into a finished Prius. By the time a Prius is done being built, its helped to pollute the world worse than almost any other car currently being built.
Probably the best part of Top Gear is that it serves to remind us all that there is absolutely nothing wrong with liking big, powerful, fast cars that burn fossil fuels. Sometimes, tearing around a track in a loud bright red car is the most appropriate thing a person could be doing with their time. Political correctness be damned, driving great cars is a heck of a lot more fun. Life is too short to spend it constantly worrying about some catastrophe. Watch Top Gear, it will remind you there's still a lot of fun to be had in life.
