Chris Harris, former Top Gear star, laments the show’s reckless stunts—like Andrew Flintoff’s 25–30 mph Morgan crash and Thailand’s unsafe wooden go-karts—which ended its UK run after his warnings were ignored. He contrasts EVs’ impracticality with restomods like Kodori’s 11,000-RPM 911K, criticizing corporate betrayals (Dieselgate, VW’s emissions fraud) and motorsport’s "playground politics" (Red Bull’s ground-effect cheating). Harris’s upcoming Chris Harris and Friends Car Podcast rejects scripted absurdity, embracing raw passion for cars and aviation, including F-35 stunts and Andy Green’s 600+ mph aerobatics. His frustration with the BBC’s lack of accountability mirrors broader skepticism about tech and entertainment industries prioritizing spectacle over integrity. [Automatically generated summary]
And I know that Top Gear is a weird thing in the U.S. because I think many U.S. people are aware that it exists, but they've never really seen it because it never was put on a big network here.
Yeah, but if you leave, they'll have people at the border waiting in the bushes to arrest you the moment you cross over if you don't have an EV. In California, they have a mandate.
In 2035, after 2035, no internal combustion engine vehicles are allowed to be sold in this state.
I'm so torn on this because everyone looks to me as the ultimate petrolhead and I'll sit there and go, they're all shit.
They're not all shit.
They have a place.
And the most sophisticated assessment of this that I've come across was just a very normal person I was talking to one day in an airport who said, surely the solution is that you just use...
What's pertinent to the energy that's easiest where you live?
And I think it's the best way of explaining it.
If you live here, you drill a hole in the ground.
There's oil around here.
If you live in Iceland, you drill a hole in the ground.
No, and there's this religious ideology that's attached to climate change.
It has that sort of fever-pitched religious aspect to it.
And most people, when you corner them, even the real zealots, most people really don't understand How much data there is on the impact that human beings have on climate change?
How much is being done in China and India that will not change at all and is only going to get more extreme?
And like what little impact you have comparatively.
That's a really interesting point because it's like being a parent.
On the one hand, you can respond to that by saying, well, yeah, I'm going to make no difference.
I'll just carry on driving around in my Raptor.
But then it could be suggested that That means that you should make a difference.
But I find it really difficult that we can't understand that if there has to ultimately be a change at some point, if it's rational, I don't know if it's now or it's certainly not 2035, that's not reasonable.
We need to prepare ourselves to make logical and progressive changes.
First of all, we have a long history of internal combustion engines as recreation vehicles, and we love them.
I think it's completely unfair if you're still running coal plants that power electric vehicles, which is a fact in America.
They have coal plants that power electric vehicles.
They do far more damage to the environment.
And if you tell me I can't have an internal combustion engine while you're doing that to power electric vehicles, I'm going to say fuck you.
Because fuck you is the right thing to say, because that doesn't make any sense.
And there's also this weird thing that is attached to this.
This is a business, the green energy business.
And these people that are involved in the green energy business have done a tremendous job in pushing these politicians to promote this very specific propaganda about what you can and what you can't do and what we need to do and where we need to get to and what bills we need to pass in order to get to this position.
And they're all profitable.
And that's the problem that nobody wants to talk about.
I think I agree, and there are some basic tests you can apply to it.
If you gave most people that love the internal combustion engine an electric vehicle that could do exactly the same thing as well but be electric, they'd take it.
Well, do you know that they, I believe it was the UN, passed some sort of regulations on cargo ships, and because of these regulations to make them more, pollute less, the side effect, the unintended consequences were the ocean got warmer.
The surface of the ocean where it was measured got warmer because there's no longer a pollution layer over the ocean where these things are traveling.
Which is so crazy.
So, I know.
Do you know that there's more green on Earth today than there was in the last 100 years?
Because I... Some days, you don't have so many diesel vehicles here, but some days I drive around in the UK and I see a diesel throwing some shit out the back of it.
And the internal combustion engine has ironically reached a point where it's Really quite efficient.
It's quite a clever thing.
If you were to invite an alien down in that vehicle there and try and show off what we're capable of, you might show them a Raptor R and go, we did that.
So I view those like I do that sort of bloke in the corner of the bar that's just a bit shuffly, gets up, does the one-legged walk, comes back from the urinal with a bit of piss down his leg.
Well, I actually have a little contract with them.
So I've actually professionally got to say I ignore that vehicle.
But actually, I love the Resto Mod thing.
I think we might be at peak Resto Mod because there's so much of it going on.
But it does...
It segues into a point I wanted to make about the way we're travelling.
One of the ways I find to appease myself, if I do wake up some days and think I'm a pretty wasteful individual or whatever it is, even I have moments where I think Just have a look at yourself in the mirror.
Just buy a used car.
Then you're not having another one built.
There are so many great old cars out there.
I just go out and buy something that's 10 years old.
Go and look at a 10-year-old AMG. What a machine.
That's a vehicle that's already been built.
Its wastefulness has already been absorbed into this weird world we live in.
Go and buy it.
It's there for you.
With its 500 horsepower, it's ready to go.
The greenest thing you can do is to go and buy an old Ferrari.
No, no, because there's something about, like, seeing the improvement on a vehicle.
Like, getting a vehicle and going, yeah, you know, this suspension is okay, but these shocks are like, I could adjust this, and maybe this, and maybe I can get a little wider wheel in this, and...
One of these gangs that steals motorcycles in the UK got me.
So I was doing a voiceover in the centre of London.
I probably told...
I might have written this story.
I don't know if I told it or not.
And I had a new Ducati I'd bought.
I like bikes.
I'm not very good on them.
But I like bikes.
And I was trying to get better.
And Matt's a very good rider.
And I had this Ducati Panigale...
Anniversary with all the...
It's the kind of shit you buy when you've just got a TV job, you know, and you think you're the dog's bollocks.
Looking back, it's fucking embarrassing.
So I've parked it up in Soho, right in the centre of London, where the voiceover studio was.
And I was a bit early, so I was milling about, wearing my leathers still.
And I saw this bike moving past me, and I thought, that's a nice bike.
Oh shit, that's my bike.
And I saw these guys, all in black, with stuff.
Sort of tinted visors, black everything.
What they do is they basically angle grind off the...
The steering lock, the male part that goes into the headstock, the angle ground that off, break the steering, and then they have a moped behind or something quite powerful with a leg out and another guy and push your bike away in neutral.
And they get it around the corner into a van and away it goes.
And maybe if I was Porsche or another car maker, I'd be starting to cry foul.
Because what's happened is the Restomod thing is actually a movement that reminds car makers that they're not being given or being offered a fair crack at the whip now.
Because you can come along.
You and I could establish the Monkey and Joe car company tomorrow.
We could say, right, we're going to make an E46 M3. We're going to buy 100 good E46 M3s and we're going to turn them into the Joe and Monkey M3. And we're going to sell them for $300,000.
They're going to have a nice new interior.
They're not going to stray too far from the original philosophy of the car.
Everyone's going to love them.
And we wouldn't have to meet any kind of crash legislation.
Smog would be, according to the vehicle, age.
In Europe, there's even less to do.
It comes under very low volume approval.
You don't have to do anything.
We don't have to meet any emissions regs, really, in Europe.
You can do what you want.
But if you're called BMW, you cannot make that car.
Anyhow, he crashed a Lamborghini when we were filming and it was all over the press in the UK. It helped it was red, like proper dog-knob red Lamborghini goes off the road.
Anyhow, at the end of it all, the car's on a low loader and I look at the tyres.
It's probably a performance issue, too, because by manipulating the tire pressure, you can get it just right, whereas you're not going to be able to manipulate anything once the compound is...
The accident that my friend Andrew had, known as Fred, I won't go into too much because it's sort of out there what happened.
He rolled a Morgan three-wheeler.
He wasn't wearing a crash helmet.
And if you do that, even at 25, 30 miles an hour, the injuries that you sustain are profound.
I was there on the day.
I was the only presenter with Fred that day.
I wasn't actually right by him, but I was close by.
I remember the radio message that I heard.
I always used to have a radio in my little room at the test track where I was sitting inside so I could hear what was going on.
And I heard someone say, there's been a real accident here.
The car's upside down.
So I ran to the window, looked out, and he wasn't moving, so I thought he was dead.
I assumed he was.
Then he moved.
I can tell you now that he...
Unless he's a physical specimen, Fred.
He's a big guy.
Six foot five, six foot six, strong.
And if he wasn't so strong, he wouldn't have survived.
He's a great advert for physical strength and conditioning, because if he hadn't been that strong, he'd have just snapped his neck, he'd be dead.
So I couldn't believe he survived.
And that sort of, that moment of realisation that he'd survived has kind of defined my thoughts on the subject since.
Because I believe that anything after that is a bit of a bonus, you know?
He should be dead, really.
And the fact that he survived it is remarkable, and it's given him and his family a chance to move on under very difficult circumstances.
So that day was very difficult, made even more difficult by the fact that the build-up to that particular shoot...
I knew that we were, at the last minute I knew we were using a Morgan three-wheeler.
It's a very, it's a difficult car.
You know, it's by, it just, the name tells you its physics is complicated.
It doesn't mean it's inherently dangerous.
You just drive it according to what it is.
You have to be aware of its limitations.
And I think that, that really was difficult.
There were, and you need experience.
There were two people that had driven a Morgan three-wheeler before, present that day.
Me and someone else, a pro driver.
And we were sitting inside at that time.
No one had asked us anything about the car.
They'd just gone on and shot it without us.
And I think, if I'm looking in the mirror, I find it very difficult, even now, that Andrew, who I love to bits, a lovely man, he...
He was a pro cricket player.
He wasn't an automotive guy.
But he was a real enthusiast.
He was great.
Much like you.
He loved cars.
And he would always come up to me before a shoot and say, tell me how it is.
I've got all the advice.
Give me the last bit of advice on what I should do, what I should expect.
And that was the first, because of the call times that day, that was the first time we'd never had the chance to talk about How he might approach a difficult vehicle.
And that was the one day that it went wrong.
I find that very difficult to live with.
And I feel partly responsible because I didn't get the chance to talk to him.
But my situation is nothing compared to his.
Anyhow, the bit that I find really difficult is that In the aftermath of that accident, the show was put on hold.
Andrew had to recover from, frankly, awful injuries, and has done so, but profound injuries.
We all kept quiet.
We said nothing, and I said nothing because I wanted to look after him.
It wasn't my story, was it?
I was caught up in the collateral damage.
I lost my job immediately because they cancelled the show and my contract was up.
So suddenly I haven't got a job.
But again, you look in the mirror and think I'm alive.
I've got three beautiful children.
I'm not in Fred's position.
Andrew and Fred are the same person.
Sorry, that's his nickname.
And I just sort of got my head down.
But I had seen this coming.
There was a big inquiry, a lot of soul searching.
The BBC's good at that.
But what was never spoken about was that three months before the accident, I'd gone to the BBC and said, unless you change something, someone's going to die on this show.
So I went to them.
I went to the BBC and I told them of my concerns from what I'd seen.
As the most experienced driver on the show by a mile, I said, if we carry on, at the very least we're going to have a serious injury.
At the very worst, we're going to have a fatality.
Let's explain to people that aren't aware of what Top Gear is and how Top Gear works, because I know there's a lot of Americans that never watch the show.
You guys do a lot of really crazy stunts with automobiles, not necessarily just cars, but big trucks and all kinds of crazy things, and some of them are quite ridiculous.
They had two inquiries into the accident commissioned, neither of which I had access to.
I pushed very hard to have access to the second one and saw some of it.
This is one of the most bizarre interactions I've had.
I sat down with someone from the BBC who was going to talk me through bits of the second inquiry into the accident.
And I'd already been told that I no longer had a job.
So I'd been told that Top Gear was done.
And at the beginning of it, he said to me, I won't name him, he said, I want to thank you so much for taking part in this, because it's really going to help us as an organisation going forwards.
unidentified
I said, well, it doesn't really help me, I've lost my job.
And I'm always reminded of that old adage from a very brilliant BBC comedy show, which was, never commit an inquiry that you don't know the outcome of in the first place.
So, I don't...
The whole thing...
The whole situation was ridiculous.
And I've never told anyone that.
You know, I think...
And I want to tell people that I did...
Because a bit of me thought, as the experienced driver, do members of the public think that I didn't do enough to protect Andrew?
But I... And Paddy as well.
well they both had they both experienced other incidents on that show that i think were unacceptable and that's coming as someone who loves a bit of risk you know if you and i went outside now and there were two quad bikes i'd happily roll it for a laugh with you i'm that guy and even me as that guy thought it had gone too far which i think is important to say right um Well, that is the problem with those shows, is they always want to keep pushing the limit.
My experience of that now is that if you establish really big stunts that have big vision and are ambitious, they tend to come with them a level of rigor that means they are executed well.
The difficult area is the kind of just being at a test track with a smaller crew and someone says, give that a go.
That's when it goes wrong.
Because no one's really thought about it.
They're saying, well, we've done the risk assessment, but just give that a go while you're here.
I think that goes wrong.
And also, my experience, and this is why everyone that's shot with me will be reminded of this now and again.
Close or play.
End of the day.
That's when it goes wrong.
If you're on a test track, the light's coming down, there's 10 minutes to go, and the director says, just do that.
I go, no.
Because everyone's tired.
Someone's going to have ignored the lockdown on the circuit.
There'll be someone coming driving the other way with the coffee cups over there.
Or it's the end of the day.
If it's 6 o'clock, 5.30, I'm gone.
I'm not because I'm work shy.
I'll stay around and pick stuff up.
But at the end of the day, when you start rushing, And I think there was an element of that day at Dunsfold, that was a shoot that was rushed for me.
I know that that was a, we need to use this day shoot.
That's another one that's another red flag for me.
And I look back, some of the stuff that we did on Top Gear, I look back, that was dangerous, visually dangerous, and definitely was in practical terms, I'm very proud of because we executed it well.
Like, Andrew, Fred Flintoff went off a dam in a metro and did a car bungee.
It was an extraordinary piece of footage.
You can see it.
It was just an amazing film.
But it was rigorous.
It was done properly.
There has an amazing stunt crew that did it.
I mean, I couldn't have done it.
It was brave and it was a really memorable piece of television.
That.
What a legend.
And he's got me in his ear.
He sat like that for 45 minutes.
Look how far down that thing goes.
And I think I'm very proud of what the team did there.
One thing we did do, which, again, on reflection, was just madness.
There are these guys that go to motorcycle meets and shows in the UK that have these titanium skid plates on their boots, and they hold onto the back of the bike.
You might have seen them.
And they go really fast, and the sparks go out the back.
And...
We decided it would be a good idea if we did this.
So each of us had a vehicle we were using, or you were the person that was pushing that vehicle.
You're an advocate for that car in the film.
And I think I had the new Land Rover Defender.
You've seen those.
I had a short wheelbase Defender.
And I had to hang off the back of it wearing these shoes.
The big problem with some of these ones is that Andrew was so brave, he would go first, and set such a high benchmark, you'd have to go, shit, I need to really go here.
So he went out and did like, I thought he'd do 40 miles an hour, I think he did 75 miles an hour, hanging on the back, wearing these titanium shoes.
Anyhow, Paddy gets in and tries to go really fast, and he falls off.
And he's okay, but someone goes, Paddy's over.
I look left, the ambulance driver was having a cigarette.
At our end of the runway, and he was two miles down there.
And that was one of those moments where I thought, this has got a bit loose.
If you're going to do these things, that guy should have been running parallel.
It is, but all you need is one thing to take off, and then all of a sudden you're being suggested to millions and millions of people, which is interesting about the algorithm.
And if you just look at one type of vehicle, then you're...
I really just got interested recently in the Ineos Grenadier.
And the thing you pointed out there, this idea of having to alter things or add sort of ancillary comedy to them to make them appeal to the masses, is what I found very difficult Because I came there, I arrived as the rigorous car tester.
You put me with some comedians, put me with whoever.
I don't need to do that.
They'll do the heavy lifting.
They'll make people laugh.
But if you want to know whether the new M2 is any good or not, please give it to me and I'll tell you.
And the M2 is a good example.
When the first M2 came out, I was giving it to review for Top Gear.
And I just said, well, I'd like to just do a review of the car.
We've got a test track.
I'll slide it around and tell you what it's like.
Then move on.
Someone else can make them laugh.
But that wasn't enough.
They had a section of this where I was given this piece of testing equipment called the Pantometer 3000 or something just made up.
I had to put on these underpants which were going to tell people...
You know, whether my sphincter was moving faster in this vehicle.
I don't know what it was.
I look back and I should have just said, fuck off.
I don't do that.
It's just an embarrassing moment in my life.
But that was exactly...
They felt the need to augment the test.
With something stupid to draw in the casual viewer.
And that's where YouTube is brilliant.
Because YouTube doesn't feel the need to do that.
It can just cater for us nerds.
Whatever you're into, YouTube can deliver it without someone from a network messing with it.
They don't think there's anything wrong with that at all.
I mean, you have to take the Chinese car industry seriously now.
But 15 years ago, there used to be a sort of underground recess at the Detroit Motor Show where the Chinese car companies would be.
And it was a sort of...
it was a grim catacomb of of imitation so you'd go underneath and there'd be like their version of a bnw x5 which was literally like someone had gone with a bnw x5 to draw one and done their own version of it they would just shamelessly copy stuff because there was no there were no ip laws over there culturally they didn't acknowledge imitation you just do what you want i've i reacted I sort of understand now that if you don't get that from the age of one, you can't learn it afterwards.
Maybe the point I didn't make earlier, I have to excuse myself for a bit of jet lag for my confused thoughts sometimes, is that the electric car has one unspoken fact about it.
It's for rich people.
That's what I find quite difficult.
There's a meritocracy about the motor car that I find appealing.
You can have a Bugatti Veyron or Chiron, or you could be some guy that lives in India that's got a little thing that costs 100 quid or $100.
You're ultimately getting the same thing.
You have the freedom to travel, to choose where you're going.
And I think, like you, I don't want to be told what to do.
And I think it's really important that that vehicle can take you where you want to go.
But the electric vehicle is for rich people, isn't it?
You think about it.
You show me the electric vehicle for normal people.
People that work in an organization, they want to expose corruption, they want to expose something, they want to expose some illegal thing they're doing in regards to the environment.
It's very important.
You have to have people.
They want to expose the government.
It's very important to allow people to be anonymous.
When you're in a dark place, as I was 18 months ago, you can feel that very pertinently.
There was a lot of very unkind things said about Andrew's accident and Top Gear afterwards.
I thought to myself, all those anonymous keyboard warriors, fuck you.
And you know this, I was almost at that state, which is the ultimate low, the Kelvin of human behaviour, which is, I'll meet you in that car park so we can have a fight.
You know how bad that is?
I couldn't do it as well as you.
unidentified
But when you step back from it, Yeah, but I don't engage in any of that stuff.
I don't read negative things and I don't engage in it.
I'm not afraid of it.
I know what it is and I don't like it.
I don't think it's necessary.
I don't think it's good for you.
I don't think anybody gets any benefit out of it.
I don't think the person gets benefit out of you calling them a cocksucker.
I don't think you get any benefit out of calling them a cocksucker.
I don't think it helps.
And I just look at it.
I do what I call post and ghost.
Post things and I go away and I don't care what happens in the comments and and also I'm very aware of bots I'm very aware because we've done a lot of research and research We've done a lot of com we'd have a lot of conversations and done a lot of reading about the amount of content that's on especially Twitter and That's not organic.
And it's an extraordinary amount.
There's an FBI analyst that estimated it to be in the range of 80%.
Eighty percent of all the accounts he thinks are bullshit.
And they're used to promote specific narratives.
They're used to argue and shame people.
They're used to attack certain political figures and public figures.
And then that conversation becomes completely changed because there's a swarm of people that have a very specific narrative and then the casual person really, well, maybe they're right.
Hey, this guy is a piece of shit.
I always thought he was a nice guy.
And then everything changes.
Just don't engage.
I'm interested in reading people and their toxic opinions sometimes, but oftentimes I'll go, that doesn't seem real.
And then I'll go to their account and sure enough, they have 39 followers and it looks like they're probably in, you know, fucking Russia somewhere in a troll farm.
We're communicating in text to a person that you don't see their face, you don't look in their eyes, you don't feel the pain of what you're saying to them.
It's not the way human beings are meant to communicate with each other.
We're meant to communicate with each other like this.
That's one of the reasons why podcasts are so successful, and one of the reasons why I only do them with people in the room also, because the only person I've done without that in recent times is Edward Snowden, for obvious reasons.
But you don't want to...
That's not a good way to communicate.
It's not even a good way to communicate with your friends through text message.
So you have to be a person who's objective and introspective, and you have to be able to honestly assess whether or not what you've done is good or bad.
And we've all done good things, and we've all had bad work.
And when you put out bad work, and you know it's bad...
Just accept the fact that it's bad, feel that pain, grow because of it, use it as fuel to be better in the next thing that you do, and that's it.
But don't wallow in other people telling you you suck or other people attacking you.
Because then you're like, I'm pretty fucking amazing.
You know, that's bad for everybody too.
That's not good.
Nobody benefits from being told they're amazing.
You know if you did something that's good.
So congratulations.
You worked hard.
You put out something that's good.
Leave it alone.
Keep moving.
Keep moving.
Don't read all that positive shit and blow your head up.
And that happens to a lot of people.
They get enamored.
It's called audience capture.
One of the things that happens, particularly with comedians, you see, especially if they start getting involved in political commentary, they start getting audience capture.
You see it a lot with people who lean right.
Because there's not as many right-wing voices on the internet.
You get a tremendous amount of support.
All these people say, you're the only one out there speaking the truth.
And they're like, you're out there speaking the truth.
And you start believing that bullshit and then you change your perspective.
Yeah, when you're becoming conditioned by the environment you're in without realising it.
I think, actually, without a segue back to the BBC, I've seen that with that network I work with.
I think there's a lot of high-quality people that work at the BBC. And at the moment, they're under a lot of pressure, and everyone's judging them as individuals within the organisation.
I think the organisation, that environment, is almost impossible to work in now.
Well, they're also – it's like it's an unhealthy relationship in the first place because you have executives and producers who want to make a thing, but they're not the talent.
And so they're also not the experts.
So they have their own ideas, and they have to have some sort of an impact on it to justify their position.
So you see people having ridiculous suggestions that everybody has to entertain because Bob is an executive.
Okay, Bob is the fucking co-producer.
We've got to listen to Bob.
And Bob's got some stupid fucking idea that you have to hear out.
And if you say, Bob, it's not going to work because of this, now you're in an argument with Bob and Bob's mad at you.
One, because I want to be on this podcast, see you.
The other thing I've come to do in this state, and I'm going to need some help with this, and I'm not here for much longer, is I saw a bumper sticker advertised on That I think is the greatest bumper sticker ever created.
And it simply says, Texas is bigger than France.
That's it.
It's the statement.
And it's for sale online.
And I've got eight hours now to go and find it before I fly back.
And one of the reasons is the history of this place.
Like, for the longest time, the Comanche dominated this territory, and you couldn't get across the land.
And so the people that eventually figured out how to fight off the Comanche and settle down, they're the craziest, most rugged individuals ever.
That's the Texas Rangers.
They figured out how to cold camp, and there's a photograph of Jack Hayes, who's the original Texas Ranger, out in the lobby, and that's why he's there.
Like, without those psychopaths that figured out a way to fight off the most ferocious band of Indians that ever existed in the Plains.
No one would be here.
So they were very reluctant to join this whole union thing.
And you see the consequences of not having the Second Amendment in the UK because they can tell you, we're going to lock you in jail for a Facebook post.
What's transpired for me, having travelled here so many times and worked here so often in the last 25 years, is that because we speak the same language and we all look quite similar, we assume our countries are really, really similar, but they're not.
There's something about all of the states I've visited that I love.
And I have no strong opinions.
Maybe this is the older you get.
I no longer have strong opinions, really, about the way other people live their lives.
So that's what you do.
I don't have any opinion about that at all, really.
It's what you do.
It works for you.
And in the UK, we're different as well.
The older I get, the more emollient I become, I think, about that.
When I was young, I would have had stronger opinions about that.
But, you know, the way that Texas operates is Texas' stuff.
It's the way you do things.
And I'd have to be here a long time to fully understand the layers of it, the nuances of it.
And if you came to North Somerset, where I live, there's aspects of it that look, because we speak the same language, that look like they're straightforward, but they're not.
I think the idea that we've created a system where you get promoted because you're inexpert is ridiculous.
And in my world, that manifests itself in transport.
I've never come across a transport minister in the UK that really has any idea what's going on or any interest or even uses fucking transport other than being driven around.
Because of that, because there's these shitty opinions and nasty people and all this information flowing around and bots and all this other stuff, it makes you consider the nature of speech.
And it makes you consider, like, what...
It gives you a choice.
Do I choose to engage in this kind of stuff?
Do I choose to read this kind of stuff?
Or do I just recognize it for what it is?
Like, I don't drink moonshine.
I don't go to the...
If I go to the supermarket and there's a jug of Moonshine, I'll go, well, I need to buy that and start drinking it.
No, I don't want it.
I know it's there.
I don't drink it, right?
So you can choose to avoid the things that suck in life.
And I agree with you that I want to have a sensible view of this world we live in.
But when you've experienced those things, or when you've had to sit down and speak to your kids' teachers about the awful things that are being said to them, just because their dad happens to present a TV show, it does change you a bit.
Yeah, the original one, which is a cool looking little car.
And they pretended that it died on them.
And they did it for a sketch and they got away with it because it's entertainment.
And they were allowed to create a script.
And apparently someone had got a hold of the script and read in the script before they even filmed it.
Then the car dies.
And then we have to figure out why the car died.
So what kind of an impact do you think that had on the sales of his car?
I mean, it had to be extraordinary.
You're watching the most popular automobile show in the world, and they say your car sucked so bad that it died when they were testing it, when it didn't die.
And actually, I lobbed a bomb on Instagram the other day by saying, I drive around in my Land Cruiser feeling sorry for Range Rover drivers.
And I just got a whole lot of...
I didn't read it.
But I do think that...
I have some sympathy for people that make television because, you know, they say they don't work with children and animals, but working with cars can be difficult.
And one side of Top Gear that I found unpalatable, not just the sort of silly comedy bit, which I didn't like, was quite often you'd be given a script.
There's an emotional sensitivity to these animals as well.
That thing there you've just seen a picture of.
I mean, yeah, it was bred to fight.
Bulls and bears.
That was what it was bred to do.
But if, let's just say, at certain times in the month, if my girlfriend is feeling down, my dog will go and cuddle her and sit with her all night and provide heat to the part of her body that's in pain.
And I do find myself sometimes at four in the morning when I can't sleep, Googling just the size of them, their potential power, the potential statistics of what they can and can't do.
Are they as awe-inspiring as I should think they are?
There's a great story that you can find that's on YouTube.
There's a clip of my friend Steve Rinella and he was on a Fognac Island and they were elk hunting and they had shot an elk and And a Fognac Island is an incredibly difficult place to traverse.
The bush is dense and thick and the bears are enormous.
A Fognac is connected to Kodiak.
By a small land strip, I believe.
It's certainly, like, right next to Kodiak.
I might be wrong about the—I think it maybe used to be—I'm not sure.
But the point is, they are coastal brown bears.
And coastal brown bears are the same thing as a grizzly bear, but their diet is very different.
So their diet is so rich in protein from salmon.
They're enormous.
They could be 1,800 pounds.
They could be 11 feet tall.
They're fucking huge.
They're preposterously big.
And you can't imagine how big they are unless you really encounter them.
So my friend Steve...
He was with a group of friends, they had shot this elk, and he was filming it for a television show called Meat Eater.
They shot this elk, and they put most of it up in the tree, and they carry some of it back to camp, and camp is six hours of trekking through the train.
So then they come back the next day, they trek six hours, they find the spot, they sit down, and they start eating lunch.
They don't realize that a bear has claimed that meat.
And so the bear charged through the camp and one of the guys winds up on top of the bear.
The bear barrels through the people and this guy is literally riding the back of the bear for about 30 yards before he falls off of it.
One of my friends, my friend Giannis, it is gnashing its teeth about 18 inches from his face as it runs by.
And there's an actual animal called Gigantopithecus that existed alongside human beings that was an 8 to 10 foot tall bipedal ape that lived in Asia and could have come across the Bering Land Bridge.
You could literally shoot it in the forehead and it'll probably bounce off its forehead.
I mean, they bite each other.
You've seen them go to war with each other when they bite each other.
They have insane amounts of power and bite force and they're just clamping down on each other's face and they'll do it for half an hour and walk away like it was nothing.
And anthropomorphizing is a really fascinating aspect of it.
And I think in America it happened with Teddy Roosevelt, with the teddy bear.
I think that's the beginning of the end.
And then Disney movies were a huge problem.
Disney movies are a huge problem.
Because all the bears are your friend.
They all talk to everybody and say, why would you kill the bear?
That is a giant forest dog.
That's an evil animal that it doesn't give a fuck about you or your kids.
It'll pull you out of your tent.
It'll eat you.
100%.
And they're wonderful, and they're beautiful, and we should definitely keep a healthy population of them.
I'm not saying we should eradicate them, but know what they are, and don't be influenced by these goddamn cartoons, cartoons and movies, which have fucked people's heads up.
particularly in the UK we have you know we don't have dangerous species of animals like that but we we do through anthropomorphizing them in films and cartoons we make we make things cute that might not be cute sure We have a real urban fox population in the UK.
And they actually started in my hometown of Bristol, the fox is a clever creature.
And it worked out that it was much easier to come into town and raid bins than it was to stay out there trying to find rabbits in the countryside.
And these nighttime foxes, they were very clever.
No one really knew they were there.
The BBC made a fantastic documentary, I think, against Attenborough in the early 80s about urban foxes.
And they've spread throughout the UK. And the fox is this, you know, in most cartoons, it's a lovely, cuddly thing with a bushy tail.
It's a beautiful colour.
But they're predators.
They're a real problem for farmers and they eat a lot of poultry.
I'm not even going into fox hunting.
That's not my world.
But there's been a few stories recently of foxes going into people's houses and, you know, attacking babies and stuff like that.
And then you see on Instagram people feeding the foxes in their back gardens and you think, that's not a domesticated animal.
Also, if you feed them, then they become accustomed to getting food from that particular area and then you kind of fuck them up because then they lose their ability to hunt.
Yeah.
If you do it too often, if you provide them with food every day, you're going to fuck them up.
I've just had my holiday down in Newquay on the north coast of Cornwall, which is just one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
And when you buy fish and chips from the fish and chips outlets, they all have a seagull warning now on the shop front saying, when you buy your fish and chips, protect it.
There's that lovely guy on Instagram who's a fisherman who does the experiments with the lobsters and he gets the lobster crushing claw and he puts stuff in the claw and works out what they can chop in half.
I find that thoroughly addictive.
But crustacea like that, that's my ultimate nightmare.
You know, it's not something that's been allowed to develop.
a country should have developed over the last 40, 50 years.
So you have a society that has limited technology and has evolved the way that it does.
And then you see how resourceful human beings can be.
With reference to the automobile, yes, it's fascinating.
Because there's really-- it's a strange mashup of weird Soviet intervention and Americana from the '50s and-- well, up to '50s.
So they've kept these American cars going that should have died.
They've also got a whole load of Soviet-era ladders that came in when the Russians wanted to help them out.
And also, that's where their power stations come from.
Their power station, they have a coal-fired power station on the north side of the island that, when it's operating, has a plume of smoke that goes as far as the eye can see.
It's an amazing thing.
I couldn't believe it.
It's sort of slightly hidden from all the tourists.
Yes, it's a country that hasn't been allowed to develop at the same speed as the rest of the world.
And it's, what, 100 miles from the coast of the US or something?
I think you can get them now in limited quantities, but it used to be if you got a hold of Cuban cigars, I would get them.
I'm going to tell you a thing I did that was illegal.
I used to get them from England, and I used to get Cuban cigars.
I had a friend who lived in England, and he would send me Cuban cigars, and then later he would send me the labels.
So he would send me the cigars with no labels, like in a Ziploc bag, send me a few cigars, and then he would send me the labels in an envelope a couple days later.
We went to one of the best things I did with Top Gear again, a repeat phrase, maybe only to reconsider my negativity, was the Kazakhstan thing with Matt.
So we went there, and Rory was there as well, and we ended up at Baikonur, which is the Cosmodrome.
Where the Russian space program is based.
And it's an incredible area.
I mean, it's just mind-bendingly brilliant.
The vastness of that part of the world, the Soviet Union, if we think that the United States of America is big, the Soviet Union was on a scale that you cannot comprehend.
Kazakhstan was just a small bolt-on to Russia, but in itself has, I think, the fourth longest border of any country with Russia.
It's enormous.
And this area called Baikonur, the way that the Russians worked was once they'd used the launch site, they'd just go somewhere else.
Because it was so big, they'd just abandon that one and move on to another one.
It's a bit like rabbit warrens, you know, just move on.
And they plotted all of it in a map.
Anyhow, we went there and we watched, well, when we got close, you were aware of the amount of heavy industry.
It was just, the place was, it was the first place I'd been to where I thought, I'm not sure I should be breathing this.
It just felt like you were breathing in stuff that was hurting you.
I'd never, I've been to, you know, Indian cities where there's heavy pollution, but that's just sort of diesel and petrol fumes.
There's something else here, you know, you're like going, what is that?
But they, it culminated with us watching a Soyuz rocket take off.
And they let us get much closer to film it than you would normally be allowed to be.
And I've never watched a rocket take off before.
I haven't been to Cape Canaveral or anywhere in the US. It was one of the most awe-inspiring things I've ever seen.
Sounds like such a cliché.
But watching a vehicle that has enough power to leave our atmosphere...
It's something I'd advise anyone to do if they have the chance.
There's a sort of ripping sound in the air that people who have seen it will understand.
It does feel like just the power of this thing is shredding the atmosphere around you.
And it hits you in the solar plexus.
You have no control over this sort of rattling in your chest.
I think we were less than a kilometre away from where it went off.
Talking about ropey fuels, I was talking to some guys that used to race sports cars and Formula One back in the 80s when they were using some very funky fuels.
Because there was lots of technology left over in the Second World War that the Germans had for jet engines that they had pioneered that had weird lubricants in them that allowed them to run at very high temperatures or have properties that normal fuel didn't have.
And they would use it for qualifying, particularly in Formula One.
And the drivers after one lap were gone.
They were just spent.
There was also great stories about the fact that they'd sometimes have a sort of area outside the Formula One garage.
It wasn't as developed as a sport then, but they still had sponsors and guests.
And one particular team had, you know, all the trees they put outside just died in an afternoon.
LAUGHTER Because this fuel was so obnoxious.
And I think actually a guy called Andy Wallace, who's a fantastic racing driver, who's now the chief test driver for Bugatti, tells some amazing stories about literally being hauled out of Group C race cars after qualifying because the fuel was just impossible, just poisoning them.
But what we've learned about metallurgy Is fascinating.
And it does mean that that's why we have to apply that to what we currently witness in the motor car, in the automobile industry.
There's technology out there that will change something at some point.
We just don't know what it is yet.
It's going to happen because we're having to relearn so much of what we thought was facts in other areas of our lives.
And I think maybe that's what I get frustrated by.
You can't wait for that unprecedented change to come.
Necessarily, but you have to assume at some point, someone's going to make a battery that runs on wasp piss or fucking water or something, aren't they?
It's going to happen.
Scientists are clever.
They have big foreheads for a reason.
At the moment, the argument is where there's not enough cobalt or where to get the lithium from.
It's a slightly speechless argument because I think it won't always be like that.
Someone will invent something that means that we won't need the cobalt and the lithium.
So, his bizarre death at age 57 ended work that, if proved valid, scroll up, could have ended reliance on fossil fuels.
People who knew him said his work drew worldwide attention, mysterious visitors from overseas, government spying, and lucrative buyout offers.
I know that.
He was offered money to sell.
I think the Y Files did an episode on this.
The Myers death was laced with all sorts of story and conspiracy, cloak and dagger stories.
Grove City Police Lieutenant Steve Robinette How did it run on water?
I don't know.
Stephen Meyers featured in numerous internet sites, a significant portion of the 1995 documentary, It Runs on Water, narrated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, aired on BBC, focused on his water fuel cell invention.
But I have to believe that A piece of technology will emerge in the next 50 years that will make us all wonder why we all got so freaked out, you know?
The volatile gases explode and prove that water is separated into its components.
Meyer said his invention did so by using much less electricity than physicists say is possible.
Videos show his contraption turning water into a frothy mix within seconds.
Takes so much energy to separate H2 from the O, said Ohio State University professor emeritus Neville Rieh.
Physicists for more than 41 years that energy is pretty much not changed with time It's a fixed amount and nothing changes that Myers work defies the laws of conservation of energy Which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed?
Basically, it says you cannot get something for nothing He may have had a nice way to store hydrogen and use it to make a very effective motor But there is no way to do something fancy and separate hydrogen with less energy hmm So who knows?
But when he said, the Lord sent me, okay, now it gets odd.
His first few words were, the Lord sent me here to this home.
I'd like to use your home as an experiment.
Okay, hold on.
Meyer's creativity seemed to peak when he met Charles and Valerie Hughes, truck drivers who lived in the Jackson Township.
Julia Hughes, the youngest of the seven children, was five years old when Meyer rang the doorbell of her home on Mar Lane Drive.
His first few words were, the Lord sent me here to this home.
I'd like to use your home as an experiment, she said.
Maybe it was just a two-story garage shop or the privacy of towering oak and sycamore trees.
Julia isn't sure what Meyer saw there, but she knew her parents didn't have room for a struggling inventor.
Yet after visiting with the family for several hours, Meyer stayed the night and then the next few years in the late 1970s.
In return, Meyer built the family a solar silo designed to both heat and cool the home.
The structure required thousands of clear resin light guides, a crude form of fiber optics which Meyer baked and molded in the family kitchen.
Jesus.
Julia Hughes recalled the chemical stench the system was supposed to channel the sun's rays into the tower base to heat water and generate electricity for an air conditioner.
Despite extensive efforts that included re-plumbing the house, the invention never worked.
Able to put software into their vehicles that allowed them to cheat in emissions tests.
And a load of vehicles that had stated emissions qualities didn't have them when they were not on the test rig.
And actually that process had been going on in many different ways for most motorcars forever.
But the scale on which they offended and the fact they did it in the US meant they got absolutely hammered for it.
But if you have an Audi RS4 from 2007 and you start the engine up, it idles in an odd way.
The car feels very aggressive for the first 30 seconds that you start it.
That's because there's an air pump inside the car that is basically forcing air through the exhaust faster than it needs to, so that when you put it on a test rig, it has lower emissions than it should do.
This has been going on for a long time.
But the scale of it was, I suppose, an industrial subterfuge that I didn't think could happen.
No, some of them sneak through and manage to be effective.
Do you know the latest one about this gentleman who was a billionaire who had apparently overvalued his company and went to court for it and the possibility of him...
Winning this court battle was something like one half of one percent.
And then right after he gets out, the guy who he's with, the co-defendant, gets hit by a car, and then he gets hit by a freak water spout and sinks his yacht.
There were quite a lot of things that happened in Formula One, a sport that I follow the most closely probably, in the 90s and noughties, that looking back...
You think there must have been, someone had a button that could make things happen.
Because it was so beyond a coincidence.
And I never stopped to think of the implications of that thought.
But if someone could do that in a sport, they can do it in the rest of your lives, aren't they?
There's a controversy about a certain trainer that was involved in betting and an online discord.
Server and they would talk about bets and he'd make a lot of bets and he was making more money betting than other things and there was a fighter that he was taking care of and that fighter apparently had a knee injury and went into the fight and then all this money got bet on this guy losing in the first round and so he throws a kick in the first round, falls down, gets beat up, loses by TKO in the first round, blows his knee out.
His knee had apparently already been fucked.
And so this guy, who is the trainer, he's being investigated by the feds.
He gets kicked out of the sport.
No one from his gym is allowed to compete in the UFC anymore.
And he's under investigation.
And if it turns out that what they're saying about him is true, he's really rightly fucked.
I can remember hearing a guy called Wynne Percy, who was a touring car driver from the UK in the 60s and 70s, describing how there was a famous commentator we had called Murray Walker.
He was the voice of our motorsport for 40 years.
He had a very distinctive voice.
He was a lovely man.
Met him a few times.
And he'd often describe Wynne Percy getting out of this particular car he'd been racing covered in sweat because it was such a monster to drive.
But it turned out that it was a V12 and it was very, very thirsty.
So to make sure that when they did a fuel check at the end of the race, to make sure they were abiding by the rules, he would be furiously pumping a hand pump underneath the seat to inflate a bladder in the fuel tank to cut off a load of the volume.
Toyota was excluded from the World Running Championship because it just had a brilliantly simple piece of cheating.
All the world running cars were turbocharged, and you have what's called a restrictor, an intake restrictor, so you actually make sure that you can't take more than a certain amount of air into the turbocharger, which should limit the power and make it a level playing field.
But they created this brilliantly simple bypass valve that meant that when the car was running, the air would just go round, and the intake restrictor was completely redundant.
What they didn't realise was that the World Rally Championship had a couple of situations where the cars would run side by side.
It would be a drag race.
And so the Toyota just fucked off into the distance.
And everyone went, well, they're cheating, aren't they?
And then they found it.
But this was perpetrated by Toyota, by a car company.
I think it's this grey area of interpreting a rulebook that's complicated, but also trying not to get caught.
And just the way that they've, through the years, and it creates subterfuge.
It creates games.
Another great story, we covered this on Top Gear, was one of the great interpreters of the rulebook was Colin Chapman, who was the man that founded Lotus.
And he had found a way in something called the Lotus.
I think it was 77. It was a car that Andretti won the championship in.
They created something called ground effect.
So it's now a common thing.
But he worked out that if you sealed the sides of a car on the road, you could effectively accelerate air underneath the car and create a low-pressure area which basically sucked the car to the ground.
So you were generating downforce, not through wings, but through accelerating air under the car.
By the way, any engineers listen to this, I'm not an engineer, but I'm basically understanding of it, having driven these things.
But if my terminology is wrong, I apologise.
But effectively, you're generating downforce in a way that you can't see it on the vehicle.
It's not got wings.
And what they would do is they'd lower these...
There was a sort of a handle.
They'd lower these skirts when they went out onto the track.
So when the car went out on track, in the paddock, it looked like a normal car.
But they were going so much faster than everyone else, he needed to find a way of diverting the attention to the other teams.
So what he would do was, at the end of a test session, quite often, he'd have a guy scuttle from the back of the garage.
It was something underneath a piece of, like, cotton or something, or a blanket, and run over towards a service truck.
And everyone would see him do it.
So all the teams were like, they've got a trick differential, they've got something special.
But it wasn't.
It was a kettle.
It was a kettle this guy was running around with underneath the towel, just so everyone thought it was a component.
It was a total diversion.
And I met the guy that used to just run around with this.
It was like a teapotty kettle thing.
He was just told, at the end of the session, put that under there and run away with it.
So everyone thinks it's like a differential or something.
And I think that's where I love motorsport.
Because it brings out these bizarre competitive human behaviours.
But these are a bunch of people, 400 people in different parts of the world are told, this is the rule book, away you go and they are within a tenth of each other on a track.
I think direct crossover, there's some, but not as much as you'd hope.
But it's undeniable that the brains that are involved in that sport, when they go over to the road car side, carry with them a curiosity and a skill set that's been so enhanced by what they learned on the racetrack that we all benefit.
I believe that.
I think if you look for direct crossovers in all of these places, you come away disappointed.
But if you tell me that the person that has run Max Verstappen's car for the last three years If he went to be involved in the next Tesla Model 3, he's going to have a profound effect on it.
He's going to know shit.
He's going to have a way of looking at that project that's going to make it profoundly better.
I believe that.
I once wrote a story for some in-house magazine, I think for BAR Racing, when they had a race team, about the crossover between aeronautical engineering and Formula One.
That's profound.
That really is.
I mean...
The way a Formula One car sucks itself to the track is an upside down plane.
But there were further things as well.
The carbon ceramic brake disc was developed for what?
So actually, it was a bit like that bungee jump thing.
This was so serious that we had to be rigorous.
For example, in the theatre of war, I'm not sure you can decide whether the ground is full of chips of stones or not, but they have a decontaminated area.
You're not allowed to go in there and drop litter because it can get sucked up when it's doing that hovering thing.
So you go in there, you're decontaminated.
And we spent several days working out how to run this drag race.
It started out with a genuine drag race between me in a McLaren and this F-35.
And they had their data on how it accelerated.
And we had McLaren there with their data.
And they worked out that the car would get off the line much quicker than the plane would overtake at a certain point.
But I was told very clearly...
I couldn't get in the wash of the aircraft as it took off because it would just flip the car backwards.
And we had to sort of choreograph that bit.
Not fake it, but choreograph it.
So anyhow, first run we did, I was told that I'd be absolutely safe.
I'd be so far ahead of the plane.
That the plane would then be in the air by the time it went over me and we'd be away.
Anyhow, first run we do, I'm like this in this McLaren.
It's fucking fast.
And it accelerates and I look left and I hear a noise and there's a plane coming past me on the ground.
And I thought, I'm in trouble here.
And the front wheels of the car came off the ground.