With Jeremy Clarkson suspended, here's my vision for an eco-feminist Top Gear
Let’s seize the chance to make an intelligent series about the cool cars of the future, without the heedless fossil fuel use, mindless racial slurs and scientific illiteracy
The
problem with Jeremy Clarkson, apart from him being a dick, is that he’s on the wrong side of history. There is a future for cars. There is a brilliant future for cars. There is even a future for programmes about cars. But for people doing stupid stunts in cars, while insisting that they are for petrol heads, who by definition don’t accept the bald facts of anthropogenic climate change? Not so much.
The next five years might be the most exciting the car industry has ever encountered. The coolest car in the world right now
is the BMW i8, a part electric, part petrol dreamscape of silent majesty. Car manufacturing, weirdly, has not just caught up with but superseded the world’s environmental concerns. Vehicles that give off few emissions and use modest amounts of petrol look like dinosaurs now, compared to the ones that use no petrol at all.
I’ve sat in cars whose electric cells were regenerated by the kinetic energy of the car going downhill, while feeling like I was in a Hummer. The solar industry’s work on battery storage is about to rip the whole industry a new tank. We’re standing on the precipice of electric and, in the near term, renewable transport. It will change everything; especially in the US, where personal transport accounts for a third of oil use, it will reshape the geopolitics of everything we know.
A true programme about cars would be one that roped all this like a steed, and said: look. Look at what we’ve discovered. We can take the shapes of the old and the power of the new and create something that is basically free, running on limitless energy, like in Star Trek.
Top Gear, being so far behind the curve, would only be able to catch up if it undertook a radical rethink of its value system. I suggest an eco-feminist approach. In the first place, they need to incorporate the obvious concerns of the entire industry, to produce cars that get you places without needless waste. It’s not wholemeal and boring. What does an intelligent species do, faced with a problem? It finds daring answers. It doesn’t plough into a ditch and laugh.
Feminism is relevant because only a macho culture would have allowed a bunch of idiots to elide heedless fossil fuel use with mindless racial slurs and scientific illiteracy. I wouldn’t accidentally
call someone a slope. I wouldn’t
charge around Argentina
spewing asinine triumphalism about some long-gone war. Why not? Because the impetus behind those actions is territorial, and that’s not what feminism or, for that matter, human beings are about.
What would my Top Gear look like? Cool cars. Some cars that were not cool. Intelligent people saying things that were not facile. A vision for the future; a vision that baffled belief, a little like Tomorrow’s World, except, you know, just around the corner. Realistically, possibly, about to happen tomorrow.
