The Sun Never Sets on Top Gear: Cars, Cads, and the Exhaust of Empire

The Sun Never Sets on “Top Gear”

Think the American auto industry has had a rough couple generations?

As late as 1980, a typical British consumer looking for a mainstream British car built under a typically British brand, in Britain, could have cross-shopped Austins, Rovers, Standards, Triumphs, Sunbeams, MGs, Morrises, Reliants, and, in Scotland, Argylls (seriously). Though alive, most of these marques had by then been on some sort of state support for decades; it took Mrs. Thatcher to sign the final Do Not Resuscitate order.

Today, Britain's car industry is like its royal family—kept around as an over-the-top pantomime of Britishness, and more or less German by blood. Volkswagen, which sells about six million vehicles a year, owns Bentley, which sells about 5,000. The horrific retractable hood ornament, and all the rest, of your Rolls-Royce was built by otherwise understated BMW, as was your Union Jack-bedecked Mini. Foreign parent companies love treating their British luxury brands as canvasses for Regency excess. The Americans (Ford) who used to own Jaguar and Land Rover were never terribly good at this; they've since sold the pair to the (east) Indians, an altogether more energetic and colorful colonial people.

It was, ironically or poetically or both, against this backdrop of inexorable decline—the workshop of the world turned North Sea hatchery of Beckhams and Poshes—that U.K. automobilia developed the single greatest export in its long, checkered history. Indeed, postmodern nationhood, and its discontents, is among the basic subtexts of Top Gear, which for 15 seasons now has been the BBC's most lucrative program and also, somewhat more problematically, British civil society's loudest ambassador, plenipotentiary, and viceroy of, and to, the present century.

Alpha host Jeremy Clarkson and his wingmen Peter May and Richard Hammond aren't really Anglo-Saxon jingoists or even, in the parlance of E.U. ascension talks, "eurosceptics" by any means. While Jags and Range Rovers and Aston-Martins do receive on Top Gear the sort of extended, rose-tinted appraisals "legacies" get in ivy-league admissions departments, the factual supremacy of Ferraris, Audis, and Porsches (as Sex, Brains, and Guts, respectively) is never denied or decried. The pertinent point, rather, is that Clarkson and company deeply believe, in the discredited common sense of a Herodotus or a Montesquieu, that geo-ethnic origin is the final spiritual determinant of all mechanical character, including virtue. Thus the show, in both its commentary and its signature, cinematographically stunning road trips around the island and the Continent, ever maintains the explanatory reality of such formulas as Italian concupiscence (sultry Alfa Romeos unreliable but worth loving), dour German fastidiousness (BMW hyper-competent but hard to love), and Japanese lunacy ("It's like a video game inside!").

If that axis of countries with stronger car industries than Britain's seems pointed, well, that's the point. Clarkson's faux-boorish swagger—basically toothless and good-natured compared, say, to anything on U.S. talk radio—amounts to an auto-themed reformulation of that resigned, ironical plaint peculiar to post-empire British: Didn't we win the war?

In point of fact, no. The Soviets won the war, with American vehicles. As it happens, America, and the American way of car, stands as the inchoate white-whale locus of Top Gear's real belligerence. If the show is a sideways chronicle of the final comic phases of national decline, it's also a work of serious moral snobbery against the geopolitical usurpers, the civilizationally nouveaux. American models are, when spoken of at all, imagined as something like internally combusting Rush Limbaughs (strangely perhaps Clarkson's closest stateside equivalent, at least in attracting his country's eco-feminist animosity): that is, body bloated, engine sputtering bile, and the whole numb works wallowing around on an OxyContin suspension. (Conversely, the not-altogether-world-class-anymore French—Peugeots, Citroëns, Renaults—are typically reviewed on the program with the deference befitting one's Norman overlords.)

In perhaps the classic Top Gear installment, from 2007, the lads finally make it to the new world after nine seasons and excursions as far afield as Iceland (three times!). The conceit of "_Top Gear_: U.S. Special" was that'd it'd be less expensive buying and reselling American beaters, presumably strewn all over the landscape and fed by dirt-cheap petrol, than paying for rental cars for a drive from Miami to New Orleans. And what American cars: for $1000, Clarkson picked up a 1991 Camaro; May, a 1989 Cadillac; Hammond, a Dodge Ram pickup. They famously painted each other's rides with what we might call European slogans—"Man-love rules ok," "NASCAR sucks," "Hillary for President," "I'm bi"—and were promptly run out of town by rock-throwing Alabamans, looking legitimately terrified.

The fleeing of BBC cast and crew made for a brilliant television moment but to this viewer at least, it was eclipsed by a revelation earlier in the episode. This Deep South bull-baiting trip is, we find out in a tossed-off aside about the truck, the first time Richard Hammond has been to America, ever. (Clarkson and May seem just barely better traveled trans-pond.) Then 38, albeit with a haircut closer to 14, Hammond's remarkable status as a figure of (or aspirant to) global infotainment entirely ignorant of—apparently uninterested in —the sordid epicenter and underbelly of the same showed something of the odd intimacy between sophistication and provincialism, snobbish élan and parochial myopia. The spirit of any age (or machine) starts and ends as a localized haunting. Imagine, say, a financier or communist or social novelist in the nineteenth century who never makes it to London.

Still, for all its malign neglect of our auto(-)chthonous culture—something like 75% of the new cars featured are ones we can't buy—_Top Gear_ has more than cracked the mindspace of American gearheads, keeping BBC America afloat in the process.#

Beyond the seriously pretty pictures, why? Because Clarkson's view of American motoring is, of course, mostly right, whatever its geopsychosocial provenance. But nobody knows he's right more than the odd American car-lover inclined toward the cosmopolitan; we've watched precisely for the three-fourths of Top Gear which should, by all rights, be total irrelevance.

In England and Europe, Top Gear's pornography of unattainability is straightforwardly aspirational and antisocial. For its biggest critics and loudest fanboys alike, the show's purest expression is the gag that invariably has one or another middle-aged host racing a Bugatti Veyron, the world's fastest production car, against a Cessna 182, a Eurofighter Typhoon, some land-speed record, his own over-wound biological clock. Call these scenes with VW's supercar sound and fury or sturm und drang, signifying the same thing. Also the world's most expensive production car, the Veyron's universality as consumer fantasy is modulated only by exchange rate and destination charges: at last count, around 1.7 million dollars, 1.2 million euros, 900,000 pounds sterling for the base model.

But for the American commodity fetishist, Top Gear's smut appeals more as ambiguous guilt–longing than as 16-cylinder lust—to further carburet the metaphor, more Last Tango in Paris than Debbie Does Dallas (or Clarkson Does 'Bama). What's unsettling for these Americans about Clarkson's proudly gargantuan carbon footprint and roué worldview is less the Bugatti Veyrons, McLaren F1s, Lamborghini Gallardos, et al. than the models populating his most servicey segments—that is, of service to the middle-income European car buyer not considering a two-seater with the speed (and running costs) of a small jet. A glance at a Top Gear episode guide Clarkson's written reminiscences of his car-ownership history—suggests the real avatar of the show's passions isn't the supercar, but the so-called "hot hatch." If, Hitlerite origins aside, there's a modern Volkswagen that wakes Britons' souls, it's not the Veyron Supersport but the Golf GTI.

It takes an American to notice this, because only for Americans (and perhaps provincial Australians) would it be notable. Adding a hotter engine and sport handling bits to an efficient, lightweight, moderately priced, and smartly packaged hatchback is an engineering and marketing no-brainer; these models have become the entrées to connoisseurship for most of the world's motorists. Their general unattainability in the U.S. is about national character, not personal finance.

Or rather, a conditioned impression of national character: after decades of zippy sales flops, the world auto industry more or less concluded that American car values would remain at an arrested, essentially phallic stage of development, at least till the next real oil shock. One pays for wheelbase, girth, under-hood horses, and in-cabin cup-holders, however crude; asking a premium for quality in a small car is open effrontery to a country founded on manifest quantity, everywhere, all the time.

Of course, taking consumer preference to equal real cultural difference is a self-reinforcing formula. Why import what the natives won't buy? In its six generations, the GTI and its Golf underpinnings have basically been available in the U.S., though in limited configurations and subject to leporidian identity crises (twice, the American Golf inexplicably became a Rabbit).1

But VW's an anomaly; the company's routinely complained about the strain of producing and pricing their midrange bestsellers for a country that insists on cross-shopping them against cut-rate compacts. American Honda, for instance, sells a frumpy Civic sedan completely distinct from the techno-futurist three- and five-doors the company offers in Europe and Japan. Then there are the diminutive models—and major makes—entirely alien to U.S. buyers, but considered potent enough to make it on Top Gear multiple times: Nissan Micras, Citroën C2s and C3s, Alfa 159s/Breras, Fiat Pandas and 500s. Or for that matter, the best product lines that Ford and GM have mustered over the last two decades—Vauxhalls, Opels, and Euro-Fords so good, and worth the money, that they were obviously withheld from the rubes in the home country.

Consider the press epithet "Mondeo Man," which since the first Blair years has identified the petit bourgeois swing voters of Middle England in the way "soccer mom" covered Bill Clinton's base. As the name might suggest, the unimpeachably solid, surprisingly sporty Mondeo was developed in the mid-90s as Ford's first so-called "world car," which could be sold (and eventually built) in all markets. In Europe, Asia, and most of Latin America, the Mondeo is now in its fourth generation. The U.S. version never made it past the first; sold as the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique, the world's car was roundly rejected by American consumers (and dealers) attached to the less sophisticated but much roomier Taurus, sold on the same lots for about the same price.

The critically lauded Mondeo line—sedans, hatches, wagons, performance variants—won't soon be returning to the U.S., where the larger sedan-only Fusion occupies the slot below the current Taurus, yet bigger and moved up-market. But a funny thing happened as America began its own slide down the world-historical apex, greased less by imperial insecurity than illiquid securities. Twenty-four months since its government bailout, the American auto industry is now looking stable, even healthy. GM and Ford's surprising recovery speaks to the uneven course of the disease—it was really only their North American business that was desperately uncompetitive and bleeding cash. Thus GM has turned German-engineered Opels into upscale Buicks; in the mass-market, U.S. Chevrolets are now at the core of its global product pipeline. Ford is already selling the subcompact Fiesta and, for the 2012 model year, will finally bring the rest of the world the Focus—which the company's spent a decade saying was more small car than Americans want or are willing to pay for. (The current U.S. Focus is evolved from the "Mk1" model, over ten years old. The new global version is Mk3; North America never got the second generation.)

Downtrodden Chrysler, without a single bright spot anywhere in the world in 2008, effectively sold itself to Italy's Fiat Group. Which may yet make it the big winner of the Big Three's near death. Fiat executives, like their Gallic counterparts at PSA Peugeot Citroën, have long hinted vaguely (and rather ruefully2) about returning to cardom's biggest market. With access to Chrysler's sprawling network of dealerships, the conglomerate is finally plotting an all-out American blitz, to start 2011.

The iconic, tiny 500 (say: "cinquecento") is set to arrive first, followed by a stable of next-generation Fiats, Alfa Romeos, and Lancias—some branded as such, others morphed into crypto-Chryslers and demi-Dodges. To hook early-adopters and tastemakers, these models won't have to elide their foreignness, like, say, the first Hondas or recent Hyundais. Quite the opposite: Chrysler–Fiat is banking on pent-up enthusiast demand for mainstream products made exotic by unavailability—and familiar thanks to a borderless motoring media of encyclopedic videogames3, bloggers trading "spy shots", and, on top of it all, the program said to be seen by 350 million viewers a week in more than 100 countries, Top Gear.

It may have taken financial catastrophe, but within 12 or 24 months, the self-professed last superpower will have a car culture—or at least a car marketplace—substantially similar to the rest of the world's longstanding automotive modernity. Its consumer–citizens, thought barbarous if not savage, have taken well to civilization, to go by early sales returns. An American (counter-)revolution? Goodbye "there's no replacement for displacement"; hello, hyper-efficient four-cylinder engines, luxuriously fitted subcompacts, competent handling, standardized CO2 emission scores – in short, the Enlightenment?

All of which poses the question: Whither Top Gear U.S.A.? Why bother, and why now?
An Americanized Top Gear first entered a certain development purgatory almost half a decade ago, when the two poles of Anglophone automobilia may well have seemed to be pulling further apart—like, say, the lived experience of post-industrial workplaces (necessitating an American Office) and teenage libertinism (thus MTV's upcoming Skins). The Clarkson spot on Top Gear U.S.A. was among the many post-Tonight Show gigs Jay Leno was offered by NBC, and rejected, before taking on his ill-fated 10 PM talk show. Even without Leno—as hulking a carnut as Clarkson, if significantly more bovine—NBC officially placed the program on its schedule in 2008 as a midseason replacement. Well before the middle of the next season, however, the network reversed course, rather hilariously citing the then-recent failure of the Knight Rider reboot as evidence of American aversion to car-based programming. (The concurrent collapse in auto advertising seems a better explanation.)

Left for dead—and why not, with the original drawing record stateside audiences and its favorites poised to enter the American market?—_Top Gear U.S.A._ inexplicably reappeared last year on the fall lineup of, of all places, History (née the History Channel). After ten episodes (the season's last episode aired January 23; it's been renewed for a second), History's show has proven as awkwardly, ambivalently American as BBC's is chauvinistically English. This doesn't make it worth watching, but the parameters of its unwatchability might say as much about the end times of American exceptionalism as the compulsive appeal of its namesake said about the last ghosts of British hegemony.

At its base is the problem that, for all its recent advances—indeed, because of them—American car consciousness is a bifurcated, even bipolar, faculty. A homegrown auto program might appeal to one or another end of this divide, but Top Gear U.S.A. must implicitly, chaffingly straddle them. To justify a specifically U.S.A. version of Top Gear means tapping into those veins of American automotive culture the international version ignores or lambasts—at the limit, to make a program the Alabaman NASCAR aficionado could get behind. (Not for nothing, it's the lead-in to History's Ice Road Truckers.)

But to make a new U.S. television series about cars sufficiently Top Gear means channeling the original's basic Clarksonian irony: a prototypically (but no longer exclusively) English system of class, more rigid and more elastic than most, wherein three adult men can establish their cultural capital by weekly conducting boneheaded chemistry experiments with gasoline and testosterone. Elitism, strangely, is what humanizes the hosts, particularly Clarkson and May: however extravagant their pranks or salaries, they forever have the sheepishness of public-school (that is, private-school) boys playing hooky from noblesse oblige expectations of social responsibility.

As it happens, sheepish also describes the operative demeanor of Tanner Foust, the most interesting of Top Gear U.S.A.'s three hosts and the only holdover from its NBC incarnation. (He's joined by Adam Ferrara and Rutledge Wood, a comedian and auto-racing analyst this viewer's found impossible to distinguish.) But the effect is more adolescent mortification than boyish glee: A professional driver of the West Coast school, the winningly obnoxious Foust previously shined as the host of Supercars Exposed on the Speed Channel—an obscure, absurd, perfectly pitched meditation on douchey dorkdom. (A typical episode has him using an impossibly sultry AMG Mercedes to land a date with an impossibly shiny blonde, which he spends haltingly chatting her up about cars).

On Top Gear U.S.A., Foust's most natural performance has come in a second episode segment on drifting, which happens to be one of his competitive disciplines. (Picture the tricked-out Japanese economy cars sliding sideways in The Fast and the Furious). Plucked from the youth bulges of the Pacific Rim, drifters form one of those motoring subcultures stuck in old man Clarkson's blind spot, which might conceivably validate, say, a Top Gear California that emerges naturally from the predilections of its central host.

Unfortunately, the transatlantic producers pursue the U.S.A. in Top Gear with an ethnographic avidity: Episode 3 finds the boys in the Deep South with $1000 beaters purchased not as punchlines but platforms for a reverent obstacle course of "moonshine running"—which, of course, is the origin myth of NASCAR itself. Foust can barely contain his eye-rolls here; he's about as related to this automotive America as Richard Hammond.

But even in segments that directly ape the U.K. show—four-wheel drive sedans against downhill skiers; some European exotic versus some jet plane—Foust comes off as fatally nonplussed, becoming the viewer's POV character in the process. To understand what's missing here, see Jeremy Clarkson, in perhaps his most direct salvo of class warfare, wrote in the Times of London about the decline and fall of British comedy:

"'Novel Writing' is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset, while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don't find in comedy very much any more. To get the point you need to know that while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there's no escaping the fact his novels are dirge…Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honor."

Imagine Leno saying the same of Henry James.

The appeal to Python is instructive. For all the nation's postwar discontents, U.K. Top Gear feeds on a laudably and distinctly British tradition of genteel infantilism. Like John Cleese, Clarkson is a jester whose physical-comedy antics only elevate his standing for the intelligentsia at court: in asides and raised eyebrows and intonation, he and his cohorts somehow turn their super-awesome stunts into high-concept problematizations of the aging white-male psyche.

Meanwhile, at 37, albeit with a psyche closer to 19, Tanner Foust (or rather, his audience) lacks the ready store of cultural cues to elevate him above the surface idiocy. As he feigns, weakly, to care about how a Mitsubishi EVO X would acquit itself against those aforementioned skiers, one can't help but sympathize with his puzzlement: Wouldn't it be more helpful to find out how this car compares with other cars or, at the very least, its propensity to pick up chicks?

This matter of American pragmatism shades into an aesthetic question, and ultimately a moral one. It's only appropriate that Top Gear U.S.A. is based in southern California, the epicenter of American car culture. But in these environs, the oversaturated Top Gear visuals that give such otherworldly grandeur to gloomy south England become an ideologically lazy trope: this is the same sunstroked SoCal palette that MTV's Laguna Beach used to tell us that the kids were alright and Larry Clark employs to say they're fucked up beyond all reason. Its semiotic vacuity speaks to the mirage of American difference that remains even as Ford Fiestas and Fiat 500s and Buick-branded Opels arrive at the container ports.

To watch Top Gear U.S.A. is to suddenly recognize the real Top Gear's real politics, to see that its best moments are charged with the guilty frisson of close-quarters combat: May racing a tiny Peugeot 207 through the packed streets of Liverpool against hipster parkour artists. Clarkson cursing the iniquity of some bumper-to-bumper E.U. motorway. Growling 12-mpg supercars ripping down English back roads designed for horses. A laissez-faire Aston Martin against France's socialist bullet trains; the Fiat Panda versus a marathon runner. The primal male urges of Clarkson's Top Gear continually announce their own vulgarity against the urban backdrop of a crowded, exhausted, ecologically-fretting, historically overdetermined Europe.

Removed to a Golden State Valhalla, the American facsimile traffics in empty desert stretches and infinitely unfurling Pacific Coast Highways. It's a visual and thematic purity—cars only please!—that obscures Top Gear's deep pathos about the modern culture of the automobile: That it's never been as irresistible, and never more indefensible.

1. Volkswagen of America's real interest in the Golf is as organ donor for its Jetta—the less practical, materially de-contented sedan version which, owing to its possession of a trunk, sells in roughly seven times the numbers to economy-car buyers hobbled with the vestigial 1970s shame accorded penalty-box hatches and wagons. (In the rest of the world, the Jetta-to-Golf ratio is just about reversed.)
2. The Graduate notwithstanding, all the non-exotic makes from "Latin Europe" limped out of North America in the 1980s and '90s with a reputation for absurd mechanical flakiness (When indigenous Chevys or Pontiacs invariably broke down, they were cheap to fix; not so Peugeots).
3. The latest Gran Turismo's 1000-plus drivable cars include five Focuses, 13 Civics, and 40 Nissan Skylines.

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