Yes, but was it as good as superior butt?

I quite enjoyed it, a strong start to the new series. It was very much in the magazine style of 'classic new top gear'. The 'drive fast cars around Italy' piece was a good example of the type - OK, it wasn't anything really new, but how many TV series to something genuinely new every show? All shows have their tropes, as it were. I did like the intro a lot, because it gave us a glimpse of what Top Gear would be like if all the people who moan incessantly about 'how Top Gear isn't about cars that anyone can actually afford any more' got their way i.e. tedious beyond redemption. Even if it is fairly politically incorrect I do like the running 'Stig's (some nationality) Cousin!' gag (although The Fiver does that gag better).

The one bit of it I do wish they'd rethink is 'A Star In A Reasonably Priced Car'. I appreciate the reason for having it (clue : it's a thematic break, because it's not actually about cars) but it's really flogging a dead horse now. The celebrities are now rarely worth the time - Will.iam turned out to be startlingly dull and in fact the last one I remember seeing where the celeb(s) were actually worth the time was the Cameron Diaz & Tom Cruise one, which I think is now what three series ago? - and the novelty of it has long worn off. I'm not saying give up on it entirely, but I think the time for it being a weekly feature is gone. Have it as an occasional treat, when you have a genuinely decent celeb with something to actually say, who maybe actually does care a little about cars. Maybe mix it up a bit with say some researched pieces about the history of motoring or motorsport - I still regard the piece Clarkson did about Senna as being as good a piece as New Top gear have ever done, yet they do far too little of that while we have some nomark with little useful to say driving the RPC around the track getting a time that's somewhere vaguely in the middle. I appreciate it's cheap and quick to film, but still...

Jon

I agree. If I recorded it, and it wasn’t being watched by others in the house, I’d skip that bit. That segment in the USA version is even less relevant to me, and I don’t think they do it every episode. In some areas, I find the US version better than the UK one. Probably because they are not mucking about as much (though the need to have a drag race every ep. is tedious).

I'm starting to warm back up to TG. However sometimes there are things I really don't get. For instance with the Supercar test, why call it a test if you're not actually going to evaluate the cars?

That piece would have been superb if they'd just kept it about the joys and perils of driving supercars across Italy. It's an entertainment and aspirational show and so it's perfectly okay to present outlandish segments - they're the motoring equivalent of Grand Designs. They no more need to do a weekly Ford/Vauxhall segment than one would expect Kevin McCloud to spend big chunks of each episode walking around council flats in Leicester. And, in the same way energy conservation and the front door are not always primary considerations in outlandish design, neither does every TG episode have to include fuel consumption or drag-racing.

[edit] I think what I'm getting at is that what I want to see - the personality of the cars - is constantly overshadowed by the personalities of JC & May (Hammond doesn't seem to have a personality).

I enjoyed this most recent episode. It was one of the best I've seen from the last couple of series.

Here's hoping they can maintain it.

I would have to agree on both points. Top Gear, when it's good can be great to watch TV. Sadly, I am finding a lot of it to be less than that.

It was far more enjoyable than that India one. Hated that.

I don't mind something like this at the start of every new series.

I still wish they had a proper format of 20 mins proper road testing a car, 20 mins news/celeb laps etc, and 20 mins "challenges". Each week, the challenges could be based on a theme eg MPVs, hot hatches, saloons etc. They could then ditch a 20 min segment for something like "silly stuff" etc.

Last night's was quite good again I thought. May getting a kick in the gentleman's vegetables by The Stig's Chinese cousin was both painful and amusing.

I wasn't so sure about their conclusion to the Chinese car market segment though. The history part (i.e.; how Chinese car making got from 'cart with motor' to 'Vauxhall Vectra') was fascinating but I'm not sure I agree with their prediction. The fact is, especially if you're copying someone else rather than progressing through your own innovation, the leap from 'OK' to 'good' is actually much more difficult than the one from 'rubbish' to 'OK'. Put it this way - you can take someone who can't cook at all, literally someone who could burn a salad, and train them to be able to follow a recipe and do a competent job in, well, relatively little time. Now, do you think that, in the same period of time, you could take that person from 'could knock up a spag bol' to 'could cook in a michelin starred restaurant'? Of course not. The same increase in quality takes an incrementally longer period of time the higher up the scale you go. So to get from where they are to premium standards will take longer than it took to get to here. There is also the obvious point that while China may soon become the biggest nation of car makers in the world, it is also likely to become the biggest buyer of cars in the world. And most of them are only going to be able to buy locally produced cars. Which are produced to the standard of the cars shown in the program. So that's what the demand is going to be, not expensive european-quality cars that the domestic market can't afford and don't really want. So there's not as much commercial pressure to improve the quality, when peopel will perfectly happily buy what they make now.

Other bits; Star in a reasonably priced car - didn't watch, apparently Matt Le Blanc was quite good at the driving thing? Richard Hammond's was barely interesting - I still genuinely don't care about NASCAR regardless of the hampster's protestations. It's just stock car racing with bigger budgets. I thought the news was one of the better ones for a while.

Overall, diverting enough for a Sunday evening and still maintaing a higher standard that the last series, which was quite weak.

Jon

Matt LeBlanc is top of the leader board with a 1.42.1
He made it look effortless plus he threw in a couple of "Joey" faces as well.

Re. The China prediction. Japan's first cars were terrible. Japan's manufacturing industry has a long history of copying, understanding, then refining the design of others products. We've gone from the terrible Datsuns of the 70s to the Nissan GTR or the Leaf.
Seems to me that given Chinas larger resources for R&D, will to succeed internationally and deep pockets there is no reason to doubt the rise of the Chinese motor industry.

I wasn't assuming they couldn't do it, although I don't think they can in the timescales the TG boys suggested - the step you describe took Japan 50 years, it's going to take China more than 5. That was my first point. The first leap forward is easy, the second harder, the next harder still. I'm not sure simply throwing more man-hours at the problem will reduce that to a linear progression. That is even assuming the european car industry stands still, which it certainly wont. However, I'm fairly sure they would eventually catch up, if they wanted to.

But I'm not at all sure they will want to. Japan accelerated it's car industry because it's vehicles had to compete for the european and US markets - Japan's domestic car market simply isn't big enough to sustain a whole industry, so they were required to produce goods of a quality to match that which the export markets expected. China is, as you say, huge. It's entirely possible for a car maker to survive only on the domestic market. And, as the show demonstrated, the quality required to do that is not as high. The emission regulations aren't as tight, the cars don't have to be as safe, the fit and finish may not need to be as good. All that is part of why their cars are cheaper. Obviously, labour is a relatively fixed cost, so if you took a given design of car and made it in Brighton and Beijing, the latter would still be cheaper. But not that much cheaper. And therefore more expensive for the domestic market, unless they make two entirely different ranges of vehicle. So the Chinese car industry has a choice - it can cater primarily to the domestic market by building to the specification it expects, making relatively cheap cars that will sell very well domestically but won't really compete internationally. Or it can make 'european' spec cars, which will sell better internationally but will be more expensive and therefore less popular domestically. China as a culture has always been quite inward looking (has been so for centuries, even before the revolution) so it seems to me that, unless things change radically, they're likely to go for the former. I'm not sure they actually have a 'will to succeed internationally' as you suggest. They seem to wish to have influence and power, but you don't have to compete to get that, and they seem to be doing OK so far.

I don't think they can (in the relatively short term anyway) compete for both markets at once. The requirements are too different and will remain so until a much larger portion of the chinese population become as affluent as the populations of Europe and the US - and this is a bit of a catch-22, because the only way you make people more affluent is to give them more money, and you do that by paying them higher wages, and if you pay them higher wages Chinese goods then cost more to make and the price advantage you have over European manufacturers erodes away.

Basically put, the only way China can more directly compete for the European market is by becoming more European, and if they become more European then the advantage they have in 'being Chinese' gets reduced.

Obviously, economies of scale do still apply and eventually it will happen - the populations of the west will get a poorer and the populations of the east will get richer. At that point, there probably won't be any obvious difference between a Chinese car and a German car. But that kind of economic drift is quite slow, and it doesn't always happen in fact - if it did, China would have controlled the world by 1960.

It might happen but, as I hope I've illustrated, the situation is much more complex than TG made it out to be. That's fair enough, it's TG not the Money Programme after all. But just 'cos Jezza says it, doesn't make it true.

Jon

I'm pretty sure the Chinese can do an averagely luxurious 4 door Euro-style luxobarge to compete with Mercedes and BMW. The domestic market copies are, as you say, less safe and not as strictly controlled for their emissions, but those aren't because they can't do it, it's because they don't need to.
The Chinese have an Humvee that's been copied, exactly, from the original in the US. (Interesting story of the Dongfeng here.)
So the technology isn't beyond them, it's deciding if it's economically what they want to do, or as you say, play it safe at home.
Ultimately, I think a combination of national pride and economic necessity will mean the Chinese are going to start shipping cars abroad, certainly inside 5 years. Whether they'll be the next Hyundai (who are going from strength to strength in the US) or the next Proton we can only speculate on.

As you say, there will always be a badge snobbery, but give them time, enough motor sports victories (surely there's enough cash and technical know-how to build a winning F1 team race in China?) and I think things might change.

Don’t forget, we copied too. The original Range Rover was built after a twerp down of a Jeep.

Anyway, it seems that someone has discovered the Quality Button in the Top Gear office. That’s two above average episodes in a row.

Watched it on iPlayer last night. Another good episode, in my opinion.

I could take or leave the NASCAR bit, not so much because of the subject even though I'm not a fan; but Hammond solo doesn't work at that well for me. Top Gear gets it's strength from the group dynamic, which is why the things like the news section or shared challenges consistently seem to be the better parts of a show.

The Chinese have been infringing copyright law on a large scale for decades, I really don't see any of the big brands hiring out the expertise to kick-start their quality motor manufacturing industry. Japan did it right, they watched and listened, and then went away and improved on the existing techniques; but they did start off by buying/hiring expertise. I suppose money talks though, and departing executives could make themselves a nice nest egg by spending their twilight years in China.

Star in a car is getting a bit dull, even though I do like the idea. Maybe they do need to rethink that section.

Overall, as already mentioned, two good episodes in a row. I dare to dream...

Loved the Chinese car testing.

Both episodes have had me laughing at some point so that's a good start. I agree with you Dave about the star/car section, it is getting a bit tired. Mind you Matt Le Blanc isn't the most energetic bundle of laughs to get enthused about. Part of the trouble is what JC mentioned, the quick laps look dull.

Perhaps a change needed there.