Well said. I particularly like the way you lumped the Taliban and the Republican Party together as lunatic extremists........

Designed with a slide rule and drawn with a pencil on paper....by pipe-smoking chaps wearing trilbys. Old fashioned auto boxes are masterpieces of miniature hydraulic engineering.

Maybe, but I thought 'Mitsubishi' actually meant 'three red diamonds' in Japanese, so which came first, the name, the logo or the aircraft?

I had a 1990 Sport Wagon 1.7 cloverleaf . Just about the best engine I have ever driven behind. Four Webers that you could actually hear slurping whenever you prodded the right pedal. The torque to weight ratio was insane - you could spin the front wheels in third gear..... And the torque steer was incredible. …

Looks legit to me, too. I don't remember this particular one, but I do remember other adverts or leaflets that were all about imagination. One memorable one had a description of a multi-storey ambulance built out of lego.

Brian's a bit of a cult celebrity in the UK.

A whole stack of anthropologists would agree... All organized team sports are a stylized form of tribal behaviour. Loads of books have been written on the subject. We like to do all our tribal violence by using (obscenely overpaid) proxies these days.

I only ever saw two spiders in the UK, and they were LHD, so I think you're right - they would never have bothered with an RHD version, with a total production run of only about 1800. Apart from the 'windscreen is an option' thing, they were beautifully designed and made. Renault must have lost a fortune on them.

wow. $55k is a lot for a 15 year old car. That's a nice thing about Canada,though. Foreign-spec imports are permitted after 15 years, not the 35,000 years or so that the USA requires. BTW , It would probably have come direct from France.

You forgot a few from Europe:

I would have given that a 9.5 out of 10, but the last ten seconds is in portrait mode: unforgivable!

Just....just...Fuck the napkin!!!

Couldn't help thinking of this........

Scooby Doo FTW

I'd forgotten how sixties-tastic those cars looked. I wonder if there are any left or did they all rust out in about 1976? BTW, a whole pile of Renaults of this era had asymmetric wheelbases. I think the 16 was the biggest.

Not true! Architects loved cars from the 1920s right up until they stopped making the Saab 900 and the Citroen CX. Since then, there hasn't really been much to live for, Jalop-wise.

...and the hatchback Aveo wasn't exactly jaw-droppingly beautiful either. I have had the misfortune to own one for the past 4 years, and I can confirm that just about everything else about this car is crap as well.

I think we should have a 'nice hatchbacks that were totally crapped up by making a sedan version' feature soon. I nominate Toyota Echo/Yaris and Suzuki SX4.

Nice tabloid reference !

Clarkson is indeed a douche, and takes great pleasure in offending as many people who aren't him as he can. Will the BBC fire him? Of course not. Top Gear makes millions for the BBC every year.