Top Gear reminder

Reminder set and Mrs_D set ;-)

Lee D

Its on sky + auto record already :)

cant wait.

"Used" to be able to get it over here :-(( bmc

Good start to the new season - Prius less eco-huggy than a Land Rover Discovery, or an M3 - Good show... :-)

(Prius is a heap of eco-hype-s**te anyway...)

The tree-huggy types at work are trying to buy a fleet of the horrid things and take our Monaros and VXR8s (and even diesel Pugs) off us as they are "not green enough". That episode will be more useful ammunition to throw at them to stop the lunacy.

Top Gear have had a down on the Prius since it came out and Clarkson had one for a week and found it drank more juice than a Volkswagen Golf GT on his commute into London.

My personal view is that a car with a five grand battery pack that is guaranteed for only eight years is a liability.

You can bet your life that about one day after the guarantee expires you're going to need to buy a new battery...

On the other hand it's perfect for the job some get used for around here, an urban taxi cab.

These mustn't be more than three years old, they use the battery most of the time in town and they're reasononably comfortable and very quiet, and very suitable indeed for my 82 year old mother...

I'm a bit of a tree-huggy type as far as it goes - which is why I have Grumble, who causes far less damage to the environment than any of the hot-boxes or eco-wankmobiles - plus will still be around long after all the fuckwits are trying to work out how to recycle the eco-wankmobiles purchased to save our planet.

I REALLY would like to see an objective reality check wake these politicogreenies up, or just that they'd find something more sexy for a while and f*ck off and leave us to our harmless ambitions.

Oh, and the Ramblers - hmm, let me see... Nope, not going there...

I think you'd be the cause of your own little localised patch of global warming if you started on that subject!

Greenway Machos. Ramblers get trapped in the studs.

Steve

I'm of a similar outlook (my father being a world renowned conservationist has a bearing on this) and live in a country that displays itself to the world as being fairly tree-huggy. The reality is that I inhabit a hypocritical country that trades on it's green image but has zero vehicle emissions testing, imports LPG (with consequent environmental costs to get it here) now that we've exported all the LPG that we already had here, is building fossil fuel power generation rather than new hydro generation, and has just signed away the rights to about 15% of our existing hydro-electricity until 2030 so a foreign company can run an aluminium smelter here. Elections are later this year and I have a feeling there is going to be some serious reality checks for various politicians.

The only objective reality check I can see working for them is euthanasia; they don't listen to anyone else's viewpoint and have a better stocked excuse generator than the BOFH.

We don't have Ramblers, and if we did we'd have an annual open season on them. ;-)

That was a brilliant season opener ... if the rest of the series is as good then we're in for a treat :-)

If anyone wants to see some research from the USA (God bless 'em) on lifetime costs for various cars then take a peek here ~

I wasn't too impressed tbh. The Ferrari Scudario test went on way too long and got (ulp) boring, and the "star in the reasonably priced car" item was hopeless. Neither guest seemed to have any interest in cars, and I had no idea who they were anyway. No banter, no humour, no point. All I could think was "is that the best you can do for the first show of a new season?"

On the other hand, the backwards jump in the All-aggro was inspired, and I laughed my head off at the police car item.

A fair start, but I hope they sharpen it up a bit next time. Hammond is looking better.

Don't laugh... I've been trawling the net for Rav 4's and carpet off cuts all day! It's been hell!

Thank god I've finished work ;-)

I agree the Ferrari test was too long, but put Clarkson in one and he'll talk forever .. even if it's drivel:-)

The items on fuel economy were good too. I can't wait to see one of my clients next week, he's always dripping on about how the Prius is going to save the planet. I've got some great satellite photos of the mine in Canada where they extract the zinc ore from. Talk about an ecological disaster!

:-)

Clarkson's drivel is usually better than most people's common sense, but there was too much of it here :-)

I'm surprised they didn't say the obvious thing - a vehicle is only going to perform well when it is used in the way it was designed. The Pious was never meant to blast round a racetrack, and you shouldn't criticise it for not being very good at it. It was being used in the very conditions where it is most inefficient. You might as well criticise a Series Landy for being rubbish on motorways. The Beemer, on the other hand, was right at home. A similar test across central London in heavy traffic would have produced the opposite results. Clarkson said it was all about *how* you drive, which isn't quite the same thing.

In the interests of fairness (which I am not inclined to do for the Pious, but I'll try), a friend has one and gets 53 mpg average in normal commuting driving. For a medium-sized saloon car, that isn't bad going, although it's hardly going to save the planet. In real-world conditions, I doubt if the M3 could come close to that.

Now then, you're not allowed to say that. It may be factually true, but it doesn't fit with "the truth about global warming", so it's close to illegal to say it these days.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the best line in the whole programme - on the side of May's Lexus: "The Rozzers: Catching Crims and Locking Them Up - wait for it, cursive script on a diagonal - In The Community". Brilliant. Almost as good as that gay paintjob they took through the States.

On or around Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:30:46 +0100, "Rich B" enlightened us thusly:

So, wonder what the TDCi focus will do? That's nominally the same class of car. Anyone got one (that they'll admit to) ?

Just seems to me that the Pious is a slegehammmer for a nut, takes a lot of resources to build and then the batteries don't last forever - so when they're all 10 years old and the batteries are getting f***ed, they'll be even less eco-plus than they are to start with, and they're not *that* good out of the box. In fact, if you consider whole-life eco cost, they may even be worse - especially if it needs 3 sets of batteries, say in 15 years.

Incidentally, anyone know how much the battery pack weighs? It's got to be at least as much as all the ropes, shackles etc. that I carry around unnecessarily.

How recyclable/remanufacturable are the batteries ?

Steve