Original subtitles

The shape of the Boeing B29 Super Fortress is deeply etched on the conscience of humankind,

being the only aircraft ever to have delivered an atomic weapon in anger.

And it bears little comparison with this:

a humble, mid-sized Japanese hatchback.

And yet you could argue that, long term, this has been the more

destructive weapon, one that lay waste to acres and acres of industry.

And it gives rise to a curious new maxim for the modern age:

to win at cars, first you must lose at war.

Go!

'This week, how conquered superpowers conquered all...'

That's amazing!

'..how British classics...'

It is perfect!

'..became British clunkers...'

You all right? No, I'm a loser.

'..and how American powerhouses got left in the dust.'

The Big Three, they were just so arrogant.

Also, I murder a tradesman.

Shoot the man in the plumbing van.

1945: Britain had won the war.

Hip hip hooray!

We still had our empire, we still had our reputation

for engineering excellence, we were still the workshop of the world.

Thank God we won the war.

Once the war was over, our car factories could stop churning out

Spitfires and get back to cars.

Immediately post-war, Britain was the world's second-biggest car-maker,

and the world's biggest car exporter.

For many people in Britain, however, the end of the war

simply meant dusting off whatever was up on bricks in the garage,

and then going for a first spin in the new broad, sunlit uplands.

And for thousands of people, that car was this.

The Austin 7 had launched right back in 1922 and it was Britain's very first people's car.

It was like our Ford Model T, but a bit more modest,

and cheaper and easier to run, as you'd expect.

Was one of them Austin big 7s

That do 60 on top and no buts

Developing 25 horsepower

Not only got looks but got guts.

The Austin 7 was sold all over the world.

There were licensed built versions made in Germany, France, America.

Australia used its chassis. It was copied by Nissan in Japan.

And an Austin 7 formed the basis of the first car from the company we now know as Jaguar.

It was also the basis of the first Lotus.

This was one hell of a car.

America had also won the war. Victory had left her with

massive manufacturing capacity, loads of money, a lot of it

owed to America, in fact, and control of the vanquished nations.

Their Marshall Plan could dictate to the losers what

they had to do to get back into the global goodies gang.

America had not been bombed.

America could go back to making things like this.

This, I'm sure you know, is a 1937 Buick Special two-door sedan slope back.

Ahem.

This was the cheapest car in Buick's Series 40 range,

but even so it had a straight-eight engine giving 100 horsepower,

modern overhead valves, hydraulic brakes, a heater, a defroster

and even, if you paid a bit extra, a dash mounted radio.

There was just no stopping Buzz and Chuck and Hank.

During the war, Buick's factory was given over to making munitions,

usual sort of thing, but in 1946 the Special went back into production.

It would do for now.

Thank God we won the war.

Now imagine if you'd lived in Germany in that immediate post-war period.

Everything was bombed to bits, much worse than Britain.

Millions were dead. The Allies were in control of everything.

The great dream of the VW Beetle factory:

that was all smashed up and in the hands of the British.

But it could have been worse. You could have been Japanese.

Food was in woefully short supply.

Roads were largely unmade. There were virtually no materials.

The occupying powers had been charged with changing the Japanese system

from a military to an economic one. The Emperor had become a puppet.

But the production of passenger cars was virtually outlawed.

If you were lucky, you might get a bicycle.

If you were very lucky, it might have a small engine on it, but that was it.

And yet, a lifetime later, we buy more and more of the cars we covet

from the supposedly defeated nations, Germany and Japan.

So who really won?

It took only 30 years or so for Japan to transform itself

from a knackered nation of powered bicyclists

into a world-conquering, car-making superpower,

and that, despite being the world's first, and so far only, victims of atomic war.

It took only 20 years for Germany to transform itself

into a maker of great cars, and more to the point

the roots of this turnaround were happening just as the

old Allies thought their global position was completely unassailable.

So how did that happen?

Britain will launch a ship a day,

more than the rest of the world put together.

Britain now leads the world in aviation.

The problem wasn't that Britain and America didn't innovate.

Post-war, they led the world in aviation, electronics, machinery.

We had Nobel Prize winners.

We'd invented modern computer science and discovered DNA.

The slumps of pre-war years must never return.

I mean, cripes, by 1952 we had a new Queen, and America

still had its dream, which we could all see on the silver screen.

More to the point, it had Detroit which was a Mecca,

a city built on the automobile and the desire to possess it.

By the late '40s, Britain had moved on from the Austin 7 and was building new stuff.

Cars like Ford of Britain's V8 Pilot.

And Ford were so confident of it,

it was given its own cinema sing-along.

This was pre pah-pah-pah-pah, obviously.

And anyway, it was another hit from the late '40s that we remember today.

You will have spotted that this is a Morris Minor.

The Minor, though modest, was very middle class

and it's interesting to know that in this golden era of 1950s Britain,

any car worth its salt would be named after an establishment figure.

There was never a Ford Flatcap or an Armstrong Sydney Jobcentre.

No, no, no. Things were called the Austin Cambridge,

the Austin Westminster.

The Ford Consul, the Ford Squire, the Viceroy,

the Standard Ensign, the Ford Prefect, the Princess,

the Cambridge, the Austin Cambridge, the Daimler Regency...

I think you get the idea here.

Bill Anderson tells me the Minor's the best car he ever had.

Marvellous on corners. Gosh! Everyone's got a Minor.

But don't just take Bill Anderson's word for it.

Here's a woman's view.

Style and value interest me most.

That's why I like the new Morris car.

Rather in the way that the 2CV symbolises

everything about the condition of being French,

the Morris Minor has come to be regarded as everything that's good and proper about being British.

Let's imagine for a moment that overnight the Morris Minor

suddenly disappeared from the British conscience, would it matter?

I think we would struggle with it.

If you did a survey: should we get rid of the Morris Minor?

No! But actually, would we really notice?

Would it in fact give us a chance to move on?

It might be a little bit...

As if a very popular and very well-liked television programme

suddenly came to an end,

everybody would think it was a disaster but after a while,

well, they'd get over it,

probably find something else.

There must have been something good about the Minor as this was

the first British car to sell more than a million.

In the end, 1.6 million were made

right here at the Cowley factory near Oxford.

But the Morris Minor was not perfect.

In fact, it's something of a lasting monument to the sort

of timorousness and disorganisation

that would come to characterise so much of our motor industry.

When the designer Alec Issigonis had finished his prototype design,

he realised he'd made it a bit too narrow.

Now we have a model of it here.

This is an original one from the time and if you have a look at it

you can see he was dead right, he'd cocked it up a bit.

It was a bit too narrow.

So he took the full size prototype design

and he sawed it in half lengthways like that

and then he experimented adding different size strips

to see what would make it look right and, in the end,

he decided it needed an extra four inches down the middle.

Great! But the press shop, the people designing the tooling for this thing

had already made some of the tooling for the original narrow versions.

So in the final car they had to come up with this:

this strip that runs down the bonnet to there and then spreads out

nicely along there.

That is a fudge and I know we like to think of it as

an interesting Morris Minor design feature but I'm afraid it is, and

I know this is a bit like burping in the Queen's face, it's a bodge.

We will have to learn to live with that. OK?

And it gets worse under the bonnet.

The Minor was supposed to have a brand-new flat four engine

driving the front wheels.

But penny-pinching meant it was lumped with wheezy inline jobs,

driving the rear wheels.

A pity, isn't it?

Let's shut the bonnet on this travesty

and pretend it never happened.

Morris put quality first.

Look, I'm not being down on it, the Morris Minor was brilliant,

despite a bit of management myopia.

And let's not forget that because he couldn't realise

his front wheel dream of a Minor, Issigonis went on to design the Mini,

one of the most significant small cars ever.

And with the Minor and the Mini,

he is responsible for a sizeable slice

of our British sense of automotive identity.

That's not bad for a Greek.

£100 million worth of cars

exported since the war ended.

So despite a slapdash motor here and a bodged bonnet there,

the UK motor industry post-war was booming.

And America's was too.

Before the war had even finished,

US car-makers, encouraged by the government and working in secret,

had already started creating a new era of cars.

By the 1950s, the American car was a gobsmacking monument

to the new culture of ownership.

Goodbye, three-speed manual transmissions and Art Deco fixings,

hello, the jet age, neon lights and the automatic.

Nothing could go wrong.

Could it?

Well...not yet.

The first Japanese raiding party to the UK barely registered.

This is the 1964 Daihatsu Compagno.

It was overpriced, it was breathtakingly slow,

it was surely nothing to worry about.

This car, however, not just this model

but this actual car you're looking at now

was the very first Japanese import to the UK.

I was only one year old when the Compagno arrived

so I couldn't reach the pedals to try it out.

But even ten years later, I remember that we as British schoolboys

still thought that Japanese cars were a bit of a joke.

I have here the actual Top Trumps sports cars pack that

I was given for my 11th birthday back in 1974

and there is only two Japanese cars in the pack

and one of them is this.

It's the Toyota Celica GT.

Now you didn't want this card in a game of Top Trumps

because it's only got a 1600cc engine,

only makes 92 horsepower,

it's the second cheapest car in the pack.

And as 11-year-olds we weren't interested in or

worried by Japanese cars with their silly names.

We'd already been told by our elders and betters that the Japanese

would make cheap runabouts for people who weren't really interested in cars

but the British would continue to make the sort of stuff

that really mattered.

We were basically car racists.

On the other hand, if you wanted to win a game of Top Trumps,

the car you needed...

was this one:

the Jaguar E-Type.

Look at it!

No lesser man than Enzo Ferrari himself

said that this was the most beautiful car ever made.

In fact, there is nothing new for me to say about the E-Type Jaguar,

it's like trying to have an opinion on the weather

that you've never heard before.

So let's just... Well, I'll tell you what, I'll shut up

and you can just look at it for a bit.

♪ Tell me all the things that I wanna hear

♪ Cos that's true

♪ That's what I like about you

♪ What I like about you... ♪

Over half a century has passed

but I still think that is the best down the bonnet view

that the motor car has ever provided for us,

it has that lovely bulge in the middle, that's very feminine,

the wings rise very slightly, at each side,

but it's those louvres that really do it for me.

Look at that, that is the machine aesthetic

and it comes with a reflection of heaven.

It is perfect!

Perfect!

♪ That's what I like about you... ♪

The E-Type being long, lascivious and affordable

became the perfect statement of the British male machismo

and it remains it.

Doesn't it?

This, by the way, is a Series 1, 4.2 Jaguar E-Type.

The trouble is within ten years of its launch in 1961,

the E-Type had been...

well, improved into...

this:

the Series 3.

The Jaguar Series 3 E-Type has become a bit of a fatty.

It's 20% heavier than the original car,

it's a bit bigger all round, the styling has become fussier

and it's actually slightly slower,

especially in the case of this one which was

a three-speed automatic.

It isn't the pure, lissom sports car it once was,

it's become a bit middle-aged.

It has become, heaven forefend,

a GT.

Meanwhile there was a second Japanese car in my Top Trumps deck.

And here it is:

the Datsun 260Z.

And here it is for real.

Definitely not a cheap economical runabout for people who don't

really care, very definitely and obviously a sports car.

Another clue we blissfully ignored.

The Datsun had done a better job than

the E-Type of maintaining its figure through the years.

It arrived in 1969 and by the time I was Trumping in the school cloakroom

in 1974 the engine had grown a bit

but its weight had hardly increased.

But how does the Datsun compare with the Jag in the real world,

rather than in a subversive card-swapping exercise

in a schoolboys' lavatory in Rotherham?

Time to find out. I mean, I quite fancy the Datsun myself

but maybe I should ask someone who knows better.

This man's lineage has almost as much E-Type provenance as the car itself.

His dad was the first man ever to race an E-Type

right here at Oulton Park in 1961.

That man was Graham Hill,

so this must be...

Damon Hill, and here he is. Good morning.

James, how are you? Very, very well, thank you.

E-Type Jags, does it resonate?

Well, I think they just mean speed, don't they?

E-Type: there was all these kind of jokes about E-Type

this, that and the other. E-Type bananas and things like that.

When we were growing up it meant fast, didn't it? E-Type.

I'd forgotten the E-Type banana joke. What's yellow?

What's fast and yellow? Fast and yellow, that's it.

An E-Type banana. And what's white and wears tartan trousers,

No, that was Rupert the fridge. Yeah. I don't know that one.

But the E-Type, this is svelte, this is curvaceous and it was our...

It was like suddenly this was a Ferrari and we didn't have a Ferrari,

we had English cars and then suddenly this thing arrived and

I think it gave everyone a bit of a sense that, hey, we can be sexy too.

Come and have a look at, erm,

this, which is what it became.

So this is a decade later:

that's all it took for it to become...

..just not as nice

but it's got a V12 now.

It's a bit swollen here, there's some bigger bits,

some of this is to do with American legislation.

I mean, the grille is totally different. What a swizz.

Yeah, total. If I could just turn your attention to the

Datsun 260Z which is...

Now this is the second generation of this car so the engine has become

bigger but it's otherwise pretty much unchanged

and, yeah, we were a bit dismissive of this when I was a teenager

because we thought, "Well, it's Japanese they can't...

"The E-Type is brilliant, it's the best thing in the world.

£The Japanese can't possibly know," but it's a got straight six,

it's light, it's simple, it's sort of...it's like the E-Type philosophy

was and that had happened to the E-Type and this was still like this.

This has definitely got the '70s lines to it and that:

that is almost starting to look old-fashioned now.

'So after a quick Trump to decide who drove what...'

240 kilometres an hour.

Oh!

'..we decide to have a race.

'The classic Series 3 E-Type versus the Japanese upstart Datsun.

'I'd drive the Datsun and then Damon the E-Type for one lap

'and then we'd swap to cancel out his advantage from,

'um, knowing the track.'

And they're off.

Well, we left him behind.

He's buggered off already.

The Datsun has 150 horsepower against 272 for the Jag.

Bit of a slow acceleration there.

But the Jag weighs 450-something kilograms more.

Oh, it's very soft, it's a very soft, floaty feel to the handling.

Lovely.

And it's almost like I'm on a flying mattress.

I can't feel any bumps at all.

Going over the start and finish line now,

I'm looking in my mirror and I can't see James at all.

Brake, you bastard.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Let's just edit that bit out.

Time to swap.

This time I would have the upper hand.

Spoiler alert. Damon Hill is a faster driver than me.

But what we now need to do now is add the pro Damon Hill lap

for each car to my average doddering man on the street lap

to find out which car was truly better.

Thank you.

Do you want to know the lap times?

Erm, go on.

In the Jag...

Damon Hill: 1:29:06.

James May 1:... Really?

Yeah.

1:49:97. In the Datsun...

Wait a minute, that's, that's 20 seconds slower? Yes, it is.

That's an awful lot. Yes, I know.

In the Datsun: Damon Hill 1:30:05.

Oh, right. James May: 1:47:81.

So if you, if you aggregate the whole thing,

you kind of take us as a cross section of the driving community.

Very well put, yes.

Then, erm, then which comes out on top?

Well, hang on a minute, if we add together...

No, it actually goes to the Datsun...

just.

The Datsun has just squeaked it by less than a second.

Actually, there's a third thing that this demonstrates other than that

the Datsun was a better sports car and you're a better racing driver than me,

Top Trumps is not real life and we believed that game:

that meant everything to us when I was 10, 11 years old.

The E-Type Jag was a great car for winning that game therefore

it was a better car but that's not true. No.

They sold us a lie but that's... You'll be all right.

But that's something I'll have tocome to terms with. It's only Top Trumps.

I spent years stuck with misconceptions about Japanese cars,

the greatness of Britain, commando war stories

and pictures, all sorts of things.

They promised us the world and they gave us tinsel.

The bastards, I knew there was something wrong with my life

and I've lost at that and I've lost at Top Trumps.

Are you all right? No, I'm a loser, goodbye.

So the Japanese invasion had begun in earnest

and America had it even worse than the UK.

I suggest we don't be fuelish.

The world's great gift to the Japanese car industry was

the oil crisis of 1973.

Suddenly the USA's "bigger is better" philosophy

wasn't looking too big or clever.

The Mustang, you may remember from series one, was the gas-guzzling

powerhouse that democratised style and performance in the US.

But the market was changing,

economy and size were the buzz words,

so Ford came up...

with this.

The Mustang 2 was designed to meet boring everyday concerns,

gas mileage mainly, absolutely head on and it looked a bit rubbish.

And there was worse because the original Mustang was based

on an everyday family car, the Ford Falcon, this was also based on

an everyday family car but this time it was the rather unloved Ford Pinto.

Built to run and run and run.

Japan, on the other hand, had no oil of its own

and so small, efficient engines were their bread and butter.

Would Detroit and the US rise to the challenge?

Only one way to find out. Time for a real world test.

When the Mustang 2 was launched, it came with a V6 engine,

but after a year or so, they gave it the big five litre V8,

which is of course the one that the vast majority of Americans

bought because if you didn't have a V8,

you were fundamentally a goddamned Communist.

Now, I have one US gallon of gas with which to drive around Detroit

and whilst I'm doing that, these fine gentlemen are going to tell me

everything they know about the city, the motor industry,

the culture, all the rest of it.

They are Ralph, who used to work on the Ford production line,

Steve, who is a local historian with a particular

interest in the motor industry, and Jerome, who was a steel supplier

to the motor industry in that vital 1970s, 1980s period.

Happy, chaps?

Let's burn rubber.

While I'm doing that, I am also in Japan with this,

the original Toyota Celica GT 1600,

straight from the Top Trumps pack of lies, same colour and everything.

How about that? However, in the interest of fairness

and because we have the larger engine Mustang, I'm going

to be driving this version of the Celica, which is

the more popular and more powerful 2000 GT lift back.

As before, I'll have exactly one US gallon of gas

and my passengers for this trip are

Mr Kuroyonami, who was one of the designers of the Celica,

Mr Furuichi, who maintained the Celica production line,

and Mr Sugisaki, who worked in prototyping for Toyota

for a massive 53 years.

Gentlemen, thank you very much. Shall we go?

Climb aboard.

Now, I'm not actually going to put just one gallon in each car

and then run them dry cos there could be all sorts of genuine '70s

rubbish in the bottom of the tank, like Boston's More Than A Feeling.

No, we did an earlier economy run, so I know when my gallon's gone.

We're making a right here and going to go onto these train tracks.

While in America, I'm getting a tour of Detroit.

Over in Japan, I'm driving around Detroit's sister city, Toyota.

Yes, Toyota City,

an entire city that was created just to manufacture Toyota cars.

Everything you can see here, from houses to fields to stadiums,

is designed to serve that one purpose alone.

Just to make everything absolutely clear,

I have an earpiece in on this side

and there is a translator in our film car, which is coming with us,

and he can also talk to my guests through an open radio down here

in the door, so my questions will be translated to them.

Their answers will be briefly translated to me.

So, translator man, could you please ask them

what it was like to work in Toyota in the 1970s?

'What?!'

I can't really hear what Christian's saying, I'm afraid.

It sounds very muffled in this little Walkman earpiece.

Could you say to them, "I like the Celica very much.

"It's a very fine car."

'If you think this seems like a phenomenally overcomplicated

'set-up just to see how much fuel these cars burn, you're right.

'When I conceived this plan, I thought

'I'd neatly sidestep the problem of not being able to speak Japanese.

'I was wrong.'

I worked at the Dearborn Assembly Plant

from 1977 to 1985, I think.

So, did you build this?

Chances are that I worked on the engine in this car.

Back in Japan, my translator is now speaking

Japanese into my earpiece, rather than out to the rest of the car.

Wrong channel.

Wrong channel.

Wrong channel.

Wrong...

No, you're doing that in my ear.

I don't understand any of it.

Let's just stick to America for a bit.

What went wrong with Detroit?

There were a combination of things that really came about to

bring a demise to Detroit.

One was the automotive industry had had 25 or 30 years of zero

competition. The cars had developed style and charisma

and had gotten away from reliable and durable and economical.

And... So they weren't reliable? Oh, no. The cars were disposable.

In a lot of ways,

the cars were designed to make you buy one every...

as soon as you had it paid off.

So the oil crisis: what was the main immediate impact of that?

Fuel price, I suppose?

You couldn't buy fuel on a Tuesday. Lines at gas stations... Yeah.

And all of a sudden, you had the rest of the world that had

been building reliable, practical, efficient vehicles...

So, you know, a 4,000 pound, 500 cubic inch Chevrolet Monte Carlo

became a completely undesirable car when you could...

It got five miles to the gallon.

Meanwhile, in Japan, we finally stopped getting lost in translation.

I guess for people overseas having Japanese cars

imported to their countries must be, you know, a little

defeating for their national pride, but for us,

it was a sense of, you know, excitement and pride.

I went to Detroit in the '70s

and the downtown was dangerous back then.

There were places where you couldn't park a Japanese car.

They wouldn't let you park it at Ford in the parking lot.

Especially like during the downturn,

when folks started getting laid off and...

You guys remember Vincent Chan?

Yeah, Vincent Chan was killed at a McDonald's. They thought he...

He was actually Korean.

I think he was Chinese and he was getting married the next day.

He was out at a bar

and some out-of-work autoworkers

assumed that he was Japanese

and part of the reason why they were laid off.

And they confronted him. I guess there was alcohol involved.

Bottom line is, they murdered Vincent Chan.

And they actually got away with it,

until the federal government prosecuted the people for, erm...

Violating civil rights. Violating civil rights. Wow.

So they thought he was Japanese... They assumed he was Japanese...

The entire Asian population was afraid to go out at night.

They had a parade on... The first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday...

What is it? Mardi Gras.

And they had a truck, flatbed truck with a Japanese car on the back

and a bunch of big strong guys beating it with a sledgehammer...

I remember that. ..you know, in the parade.

What started out as a simple fuel economy test has

turned into a genuinely eye-opening experience.

Being just Japanese, we're hardworking people,

you know, we do what we're told to do.

We do more than we're told to do.

I guess that's in our blood, so to speak.

These racist things you're talking about,

this was all sparked by the Japanese car because that was...

Yes. A loss of lifestyle.

The Japanese imports, they were actually making the better product.

It was perceived to be inferior because it was smaller,

but the finish was better and it was more refined.

I didn't feel any blue collar,

white collar difference when I worked at Toyota.

I felt like I was surrounded by experts.

Wherever I went, I felt like there were masters,

great masters around me, creating these things.

It was a joke when I was a kid, you know, "Where did that come from?"

"Made in Japan." I mean, no matter what it was.

The big three, they were just so arrogant, you know.

Too big to fail.

Too big to fail. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And less than a mile later...

That's 13.6 miles. That's one US gallon.

So, that's as far as I can take you, I'm afraid.

Sorry it couldn't have finished somewhere a bit more picturesque.

But...cheers.

Thanks, James.

What up, do'. What up, do'. What up, do'.

Thanks for your help. It's been tremendous.

Well, that was tremendous.

I've learned a lot of interesting things about the American

motor industry, about Detroit, about the teenage lives of those guys.

I've learned to say, "What up, do'".

I wonder how I'm getting on in Toyota City.

Like a battery-powered rabbit, the Celica just keeps going

and going and going.

The Mustang lasted just 13.5 miles.

The Celica keeps going for almost 26.

Ford Mustang, mmm or hmm?

Yes? Down? Oh, OK.

Incredible when you realise that a Mustang 2 would have cost you

over a third more than a Celica.

'When you add it up, a Toyota really gives you your money's worth.'

Well, I think what we've learned from that is that the Japanese were

taking the whole business of conquering the world with

the motor car very seriously indeed, whilst the Americans believed they'd

already done that and they were just dipsticking about,

having a laugh and doing stuff on the backseat of the Mustang 2,

without realising that its engine was too big, the car was too big,

it was too heavy, the factory was too old and all the rest of it.

But really, that was a very convoluted way of saying

the taut, efficient Japanese engine was more economical

than the old American iron, but fuel economy is boring on the television.

I hope that was useful.

So, bad news for the Mustang. But for the city of Detroit...

..it was devastating.

The post-war Mecca of US car making had fallen further

and further into ruin.

This is Detroit's once great Packard car factory, as it stands today.

♪ When the road gets dark

♪ And you can no longer see

♪ Just let my love grow a spark

♪ And have a little faith in me... ♪

It wasn't just Toyota and the Celica.

Datsun and Mazda and all the rest of them, they too were ready,

and then there was Honda, a name that Americans knew for having

changed the face of motorcycling with the all-conquering Super Cub.

We covered the phenomenal Super Cub in the last series.

Nothing can stop the noodles!

But in '72, Honda launched the Civic, and then, four years later,

the Accord.

Both were compact, economical, good to drive, cheap,

and could be used to stalk blonde female joggers.

What more could you ask for?

♪ Who built the road, who was the foolish one... ♪

And then something unthinkable to the older generation happened.

In 1982, Honda opened a factory in the US, in Marysville, Ohio,

to build the Accord in America's backyard.

By the time we arrive at this Accord, the fourth generation in 1990,

something truly remarkable has occurred.

The Accord, from a maker of cheap runabouts

and step-through scooters for preppy kids and moms,

has become the best-selling car in the United States.

Honda had taken over the American market, but in Britain,

we had a different problem altogether.

We were a small island with a small market.

To thrive as we had done before the war, we needed to export.

So, in 1973, Britain joined a free trade zone.

Two years later, a referendum confirmed it. We were in.

April 1975, we joined the Common Market,

and that meant we were free to sell our cars in places like Germany.

Germany were also free to sell their cars in places like England.

And theirs were better.

Nothing symbolises the might of the German car-making machine

quite like BMW's 3 Series.

This is the first of seven generations of the 3 Series.

The Germans launched this one on us in 1975,

literally three weeks after we'd voted to be part of Europe

to try to sell to them.

To be honest, the first 3 Series were a little bit po-faced

and not really that exciting to drive, but they did seem different.

The instrumentation and all the controls,

they're all very clear and logical and...German, yes,

of course.

This is industrial design. It's modern.

But UK car-makers weren't about to lie down without a fight.

We were ready. We had the Triumph Dolomite.

Especially this version, the Sprint.

I've always loved the Dolomite Sprint, ever since I was a kid.

And it was genuinely quick.

0-60, 8.7 seconds, top speed, 116 mph.

It was a little bit old school, but you got overdrive on third

and fourth.

So effectively, you've got six gears. This would give Hans a bloody nose!

Triumph should have had the upper hand.

The company had existed since before cars were even a thing,

having started off as an importer of bicycles and sewing machines.

They had a string of successful sports cars

and saloons to their name.

BMW, on the other hand, had their whole factory in Eissenach

nicked by the Russians after the war and had to start again.

BMW's first masterstroke in the '50s was a decision not to bother

with affordable runabouts or any of that rubbish.

They were going to make sports cars and nice, expensive,

well made saloons.

Big profit margins.

Clever.

Their second masterstroke came in 1960 when they decided

on the complete modernisation programme known as the Neue Klasse.

This demanded that all of their cars had unitary bodies,

new engines and modern independent suspension.

So, this looks like a pretty fair fight.

We have two companies, each with a sporting pedigree and an engineering

bent, and they're both making essentially posh mid-size cars.

Let's give these two some tap and see what's what.

Go!

Yes! That is a victory for Triumph and Great Britain!

But we all know how this really ends, don't we?

The Triumph might outperform the BMW when you're racing round a circuit,

but it was unreliable, it felt coarser,

the brakes were more wooden, and the wind noise was dreadful.

And it just got worse from there.

You see, this car was part of their Project Ajax range,

which began in 1965 with the 1300.

And then there was the 1500

and the Toledo and various versions of our car.

This range of supposedly related mid-sized cars came in two

different lengths and with front wheel drive and rear wheel drive.

It was completely baffling.

The 3 Series, meanwhile, slotted neatly into a growing range

of clearly related cars and that continues to this day, of course.

You have the 5 and the 3 Series, and also the 4 Series,

the 1 Series, the 2 Series, and so it goes on.

Even outside of the cars themselves,

the whole landscape of British car-marking was becoming apocalyptic.

'Right now, the five week old dispute at Triumph has robbed

'the firm of £20 million worth of turnover.'

We'd have preferred not to have gone on strike. We had no alternative.

The British Motor Corporation, who made Austins, Morris Minors,

and Jaguar E-Types, and the Leyland Motor Corporation,

who made buses and trucks, had merged and then gone bust

and ended up being bought by the British government.

The trade union strikes of the 1970s made everything even worse.

Successive models of the Triumph would be delayed by two years

because of industrial action.

Well, we all know how it ends. BMW triumph and Triumph faded away.

By 1984, it had gone, disappeared and gone.

And the next Triumph after the Dolomite was the Acclaim,

which was really just a licence-built Honda.

And that can be considered a bit of a defeat.

The UK just couldn't keep up.

The troubled British Leyland desperately flailed for a last

great hope. It would be a car of the future.

'A new concept in vehicle engineering.'

It would revitalise our expert business.

'The car will appeal to European tastes.'

It would show Germany and Japan what Britain was really made of.

'Five years' hard work, an enormous investment in money and skill.

'And throughout its development, nothing was left to chance.'

It's the Allegro.

The Allegro is one of the most reviled cars

in British automotive history.

The people who built it nicknamed it the Flying Pig because it was

supposed to be the car that saved British Leyland,

but I think that was just the British workers'

cruel Midlands humour cutting through the management's rousing rhetoric.

It's a car which we think will appeal not only to the sophisticated

British public, but to the sophisticated European public,

which, of course,

is very much greater now that we're in the Common Market.

It is not funky or modern. It is blobby, rounded and conservative.

It should very obviously have been a hatchback

because hatchbacks were all the rage in 1973 when this was launched,

but the management decided that the Allegro would have a boot,

like a proper car.

'From the essentially practical to the unashamedly glamorous.'

I sit in here, looking at this door fit and this bit of welding, this

bit of plastic, and I honestly think, "I could make it this well...

"in my shed."

Everything about the Allegro was wrong,

from the lack of a hatchback to the ghastly giant square steering wheel.

The German and Japanese cars felt like harbingers of a new

technical age. This car, like the Triumph before it,

felt like a shelf full of Grandma's knick-knacks.

The weird thing is the management at British Leyland at the time

must have actually believed that this car

was a winner, that this would save them, would save Britain effectively.

There must have come a point when it was all ready and they stood

back and looked at this shape in this baby poo colour and said, "Yeah!

"We've done it, chaps!"

'Lord Stokes has no doubt about its future.

'I'm absolutely convinced that they've got a car

'here which is quite outstanding in its class and its type.'

Something just doesn't make sense,

so I've agreed to meet the original designer of the Allegro, Harris Mann,

in a secret location, where no-one can throw things at him.

This had a rather unfortunate birth...

Right. ..in that it was supposed to be an 1100 replacement.

The Austin 1100.

The Austin 1100 replacement, but as it got developed,

it had various requests from engineering, in that...

Interfering is the word you're looking for, is it,

possibly? Always. Always interfering. Yes, OK. Yes.

So they wanted to put a much more robust heater into the car

and they wanted to also accommodate a 1500cc engine in here.

By the time you stuffed the carburettors on the side,

it started to gain height.

It should have looked like this.

Ah!

It's much better!

Well, I think it was.

But it just went through so many engineering disasters.

Why couldn't they just design a new heater that allowed you

to build your nice funky Allegro? Unfortunately, it cost millions.

So it had to come out of the parts bin.

So... This was the car that was supposed to save British Leyland.

That was its job.

Are you saying that the fortunes of this car

and therefore of a very large chunk of the British motor industry,

were all changed by the heater and a tall engine?

I suppose you could say that, yes. Whose fault was it?

I think it was engineering management.

I was party to sitting in some meetings

and they couldn't talk to each other.

One party was...

Like the union side were talking union speak

and the managers were talking management speak and between them,

it was like, you know, two computers that couldn't talk to each other.

Right. Well, that's a very, very sad... It's a very sorry tale.

Well, it is, to me, anyway, as somebody who likes cars,

to think that your vision was never realised, that it was

spoilt by interference and that it slightly spoiled your life as well.

So I'm going to give you back your artwork, for that is what it is.

Thank you. The best I can offer you, to be honest, is...

Well, would you like a lift?

No, thanks. I'd rather walk.

Oh. Thank you. Fine, thanks very much for coming. Thank you.

Thank you.

Maybe he's in a hurry.

I thought as much.

It was the bloody class system, something which my Japanese friends

back in the Celica said they didn't have to deal with.

'£20 million went into the new Allegro,

'but production has never hit the target of 4,000 a week.'

'It's stoppages like these that forced

'Leyland into near bankruptcy.'

The communication breakdown between management

and workers meant that despite the protests of people

like Harris Mann, Germany gave us a thorough spanking.

And for proof that class mucked this up,

you only have to look at what happened to the Allegro next.

British Leyland decided that the secret weapon that would turn their

great hope around would not be the quality or aesthetics of German

cars or the clever features and dependability of Japanese cars.

Oh, no. What would, without question,

save the Allegro would be a posh radiator grille.

Ha!

This, yes, it's the Vanden Plas.

The Vanden Plas was just an Allegro

but with even more Victorian trimmings

and a whopping great radiator grille stuck on the front:

like it had come last in a Rolls-Royce fancy dress competition.

I'm not sure how it's possible for a car to actually look embarrassed,

but this somehow manages it.

Just imagine you're German, you've just seen the Neue Klasse BMW

and then you see this.

Gott, vot are zese people doing?

There's also a really strange whirring sound going on in this car,

which I would like to be able to say

is probably the sound of Harris Mann

rotating rapidly in his grave:

except I've just met him and he's very much still alive.

I'm imagining a scene in sort of mid-1970s suburban Britain,

a Terry-and-June-type couple looking out of the window

and Terry, perhaps, saying,

"Oh, have you seen the neighbours have got a new car?

"Something dead posh and it's got a big radiator grille on the front,

"is it a Bentley?"

And June will say "Oh, I don't think so,

"it looks a bit like an Allegro to me."

"But it can't be an Allegro," says Terry,

"it's got a radiator grille on it, look at it.

"It must be a Rolls-Royce."

Nobody would have been fooled.

Yeah, I know, mate, it's ridiculous.

God, I hope he doesn't think it's my car.

What if he does a tweet that says,

"I saw James May today out in his Vanden Plas."

That's...

basically the end of me, isn't it?

Oh, no, he's taking a picture.

Somebody shoot him, he's taking a picture of me in it.

My life's over.

Production, shoot the man in the plumbing van.

I think the idea was to provide the social impact

and the on-the-road presence

of something like a Bentley,

but in a car for everyman:

but of course that doesn't really quite work,

because the body shape is too bulbous to appear truly imperious

and the radiator grille serves only to remind you, in fact,

of your relatively lowly status in life.

And more to the point, the Vanden Plas was around 26%

more expensive than a standard Allegro

with the same size engine:

an extra £534 to advertise to the world

exactly what was wrong with Britain.

In fact, the only good thing about the Vanden Plas

is that it makes the standard car look relatively good:

even in executive dysentery,

or whatever they called that.

But did it make Britain a player again in the export business?

Well, around 670,000 Allegros

were produced in total.

Only 25,000 or so ever left Britain.

More to the point of this film,

its direct Japanese rival

is a perfect example of a petrol phoenix

rising from the ashes of war.

It's the fourth generation Mazda 323, launched in 1980.

Suddenly, the Mazda 323 was a modern front-drive hatchback.

Take that, Allegro.

You'll be amazed.

Mazda had been formed in 1920

as a cork-making company

and only turned to cars in the difficult post-war years.

That's amazing.

Do you remember what we were saying earlier on about Japanese engines

being small, revvy and efficient because they were forced to be?

It's still true in this car.

This is now 1980, but it's zippy,

it's quite refined,

it's got a bit of get-up-and-go

and it's got up and gone.

And the honest truth is,

the Mazda 323 is not really a particularly remarkable car.

It looks ordinary,

it's only 1.3 litres,

it's just a universal Japanese small hatchback,

but it's such a relief to be in,

compared with being in the dowdy, old Allegro:

even now, when it's 35 years old.

It may be humble, but therein lies its strength.

The Japanese started out with a proper plan

and gradually improved and finessed it,

rather than trying to go bigger or better, like the US,

or just panicking and covering the thing in wood, like the UK.

This is taut and...

Well, it feels positively contemporary.

This car is alive,

it's sprightly.

By 1982, two years into its life,

this generation of the Mazda 323

had sold one million units.

That actually made it the fastest car in history,

where fastest means first from 0 to one million.

1982 was also, coincidentally,

the last year that an Allegro

rolled off the production line.

It was also the beginnings of the global car

because the basis of this car

also formed the basis of two American Fords.

The Austin Allegro was just a local car for local people.

So, there you have it:

because of, not despite, their limited resources,

Japan's Mazda 323 was the sort of people's car

that we could only dream of exporting.

And I'm also guessing, but it is just a guess,

that the equivalent of Harris Mann at Mazda,

Harisum Manusan,

probably ended up with the car he drew in the first place.

By this point, it was all over.

Germany and Japan had cemented their lead

as the world's biggest car exporters

and the once-great British institutions

fell like dominoes.

Triumph and Rolls-Royce are now owned

by a different company altogether.

And that car company is...

..BMW.

Remember the giant Morris and Mini factory back in Oxford?

This is now owned by BMW.

And then there's Bentley,

now also owned by Germany: through VW.

Soon, everyone was feasting

on the carcass of what were the war victors.

MG and Austin, now owned by China.

Jaguar and Rover, owned by India.

Lotus, Malaysia.

The US might be just behind Japan and Germany in terms of production,

but its car factories have only survived

by adopting modern Japanese techniques.

They transformed the old Detroit methods.

We could blame the fuel crisis or poor management,

or even the class system for this,

but it's also worth considering that

while our brightest minds were occupied elsewhere

on things like defence,

Japan and Germany were barred: by treaty: from rearming.

So, what else could their brightest minds do

than move onto developing cars?

Indeed, we unwittingly sowed the seeds of our own downfall.

Remember when I said that Britain used to be

the world's biggest car exporter?

In Forbes' list of the largest auto manufacturers in the world for 2015,

Japan and Germany occupy every single one of the top five places.

From the devastation of war

had risen two automotive giants:

something even more incredible

when you consider where a car like the Mazda 323 had come from.

This is Mazda's home town, Hiroshima,

but it's more famous, of course,

for being the site of the world's first atomic attack.

Now, Mazda emerged from the rubble of the old city

and has now become a cornerstone of what is,

very obviously, a completely modern one.

Mazda, perhaps more than any other car-maker,

proves that to win at cars,

first you must lose...

..at war.

♪ Speeding along

♪ The rolling highway

♪ Singing a song

♪ To the rhythm of the road

♪ The sun's in the sky

♪ A heaven of blue

♪ The world flashes by

♪ You feel so happy

♪ When you're sweeping along

♪ A leafy byway

♪ Singing a song

♪ To the rhythm of the road

♪ You'll never be late

♪ If it's a V8

♪ When you're speeding along

♪ To the rhythm of the road

♪ The rhythm of the road! ♪

"If I'd asked people what they wanted," wrote Henry Ford,

"they would have said, 'Faster horses.'"

The coming of internal combustion relieved the horse and the donkey,

and the mule and the elephant, of their burdens.

And that was a good thing.

But these beasts still have something to teach us.

Because they're all equipped with a very intelligent 4x4 drive system.

A horse is rarely stuck.

An elephant doesn't generally spin off on a bend

and throw you into a ditch.

Valuable lessons, then, for the makers of the Cars Of The People.

'This week, the Cars Of The People engage all their wheels

'to go off-road and off the map.'

It's like having a brilliant butler.

'I meet Britain's fastest Uber driver...'

And lunatic!

'..become a teenage mutant ninja...'

This thing goes like an absolute bastard.

'..and I have a race with a bunch of Americans...'

I can see their dust, actually, I can taste their dust.

'..who get their just deserts.'

Flat tyre. Uh-oh.

But, first, something so horsey, it's practically Princess Anne.

This, with the best will in the world, is not a car of the people.

It is a fully-loaded, supercharged Range Rover.

It will cost you around £120,000.

It takes up more space than it really ought to.

And it will be chronically underused by the vast majority of its owners.

And that's a bit of a shame,

because this four-wheel drive marvel is no show pony.

It can do some truly remarkable stuff and, to be honest, it has to,

otherwise it isn't credible, it's just a designer handbag.

Holy mother of God! Look at that! Ha-ha!

It's sorting all that out for itself.

This thing really is bloody incredible.

I'm now going to drown it.

I know it's ridiculous, you're not going to do this.

It would be like going gardening in your best disco shoes.

But it's nice to know it can, isn't it?

This isn't a car of the people either.

It's a Lamborghini Aventador.

With a frankly unnecessary 700 horsepower

and a price for this particular one somewhere north of £300,000.

And, what many Lamborghini owners don't realise is

just how far you can bend the prescriptions of physics...

..if you take one of these things on a race track.

Tricky left!

Again, if you couldn't do this,

it would just be a piece of designer tinsel, not a proper supercar.

Not that you would do this with your own Lambo. Not at that price.

"Hang on," you must be saying, "these cars are for the rich."

Footballers, fund managers, Saudi playboys

and Radio 2 DJs.

They're about as of-the-people as Marie Antoinette's bread bin.

But they are relevant to the story of the people's car.

Allow me.

It's reckoned by some that, by 2030,

half of all the affordable cars built will be a 4x4 of some sort

or, at the very least, inspired by the breed.

And why not? A tough, go-anywhere 4x4, more than any other car,

appeals to our innate desire for liberty,

to our human pioneering spirit, wherever we may be.

For the car truly to serve the people,

it must be ready to sally forth into territory as yet unformatted for it.

Elgar.

Go west, young man.

North, to the ice caps, into the Australian interior.

across the desert on the sun's anvil, as TE Lawrence put it.

Or, maybe up a slightly slippery woodland track,

with your mountain bike strapped to the roof. Whatever.

To explain how the 4x4 gave us this freedom,

we must, inevitably, go back to a time when we almost lost it forever.

As the lights went out all over Europe...

..the Allies faced a deadly race to out-think and out-invent the enemy.

The Brits had their radar

and their bouncing bombs.

The Russians, the mighty T34.

And the Americans? Well, they came up with this.

This, as I'm sure you know, is a World War II Willys Jeep.

Now, General Eisenhower said the three most significant instruments

in securing Allied victory were

the Douglas Dakota,

the landing craft and the Jeep.

I've just realised it may be the most significant car ever made.

Yee-ha!

There had been four-wheel drive army vehicles before this one.

There were four-wheel drive trucks in World War I.

And, believe it or not, before that,

people experimented with four-wheel drive traction engines.

But this was a new vehicle for a new role.

It was a fast, light reconnaissance car.

America knew that victory would depend on

a massive land invasion of Europe. If they could find it.

So, something like this was going to be necessary

for beach landings, special ops,

and for transporting John Wayne across really rough terrain!

Army chiefs called for a vehicle

that could carry a quarter-tonne payload,

with a wheelbase of not more than 80 inches.

But, most importantly, it should be four-wheel drive

to ensure that the gum and nylons got through!

Compared with the other stuff the US was secretly building...

..designing a little car from scratch might seem like a doddle.

There was, however, a catch.

The American military asked America's carmakers for proposals,

giving them just 11 days to submit their bids.

And then just seven weeks to build a prototype.

And just two-and-a-half months

to come up with 70 working vehicles for testing.

To put that into context,

it took VW three years to develop the latest Golf.

Over 130 US manufacturers were invited to pitch for the job.

But carmakers American Bantam were the only ones to deliver.

Here it is, the so-called Blitz Buggy.

And it does look a bit like a Jeep.

The problem was, American Bantam couldn't produce them

in the numbers required.

So, the American Government gave their drawings to Willys and Ford,

who fiddled with them a bit.

Eventually, it was Willys who won the contract, largely because

they had their excellent Go Devil engine and three-speed gearbox.

But what really made the Willys Jeep stand out

was its astounding all-terrain performance.

A special gearbox allowed you to transfer into extra-low gear

to tackle the toughest conditions.

Even in 2015, you can sort of see why the Willys version was

so popular with the military authorities.

It has excellent low-down torque characteristics.

The sort of thing people talk about in their 3 series diesel BMWs.

Anyway, over 600,000 Jeeps were produced during the war

by Willys and under licence by Ford.

While we're at it, we may as well get to the bottom of the Jeep name.

A lot of people imagine that it's a reduction of GP,

for general purpose, but I'm afraid, actually, this isn't true.

GP only appears on the Ford versions,

and it's part of an internal coding system

where G means government contract,

and P is a code letter meaning a wheelbase of 80 inches.

A more likely origin is Eugene The Jeep,

a strange animal from the Popeye cartoons.

Popeye's Jeep was small, with wide-spaced eyes,

and who would always do his master's bidding.

A bit like Michael Gove!

So, sorry about that. But, if it's any consolation,

Princess Anne really did own a Reliant Scimitar.

Anyway...

..when the Allied invasion of Europe began,

the Jeep would instantly prove its worth.

Patton plunged towards Germany, 400 miles away,

with extraordinarily successful results.

From the Normandy beach heads across France and into the Low Countries,

forward patrols in Jeeps would often lead the way

in liberating the people from the evils of Fascism.

'Soon, it was the turn of the Italian city of Bologna,

'named after the famous sauce.'

What's rather disappointing about this exercise is that there aren't

thousands and thousands of young women throwing flowers at me.

Which, I'm pretty sure, would have happened first time around.

Shame, because I'm convinced this vintage Willys

is capable of liberating the city all over again.

Unusually for a restored old car,

and very unusually by the standards of this programme,

this thing works absolutely perfectly.

Bologna was liberated on the 21st April 1945.

And we don't know this for certain, but it seems likely that

the very first Allied vehicle that the locals saw

entering the Piazza Maggiore where I'm standing now was a Willys jeep.

It had proved the worth of a light, compact, all-terrain car.

It really had played a major role in saving the world.

But now it would start another war.

Willys Jeeps were now scattered around the globe

like army surplus combat trousers in a student house.

And they would become an inspiration.

One of those left-over Jeeps made it to the Welsh holiday home

of a man named Maurice Wilks

who happened to be the chief designer of the Rover car company.

Post-war, Rover were in a bit of a tight spot.

And Wilks was looking to build a simple, rugged 4x4 vehicle

using readily available materials,

to keep the company ticking over while the economy recovered

and people started buying proper cars again.

Wilks' first effort was based around his old Jeep chassis

and had a strange central steering wheel.

But, pretty soon, it had turned into this.

The Series 1 Land Rover.

It is powered by a 50-horsepower, 1.6-litre engine

from the Rover P3.

And it has a transfer gearbox, just like the Jeep.

But it is permanent four-wheel drive, which people loved.

There is none of that upstart American Jeep left

but it is no surprise really that the wheel base is

exactly the same at 80 inches.

Or that the four-wheel drive system works in roughly the same way.

To spread the word about their great little 4x4,

Land Rover would lend vehicles and spares to spotty students

planning overland expeditions.

In some places,

it was easier to force a way through the virgin bush,

rather than try battling forward up the rain-eroded trail.

Something like that!

♪ Born free... ♪

♪ As free as the wind blows. ♪

Soon, Land Rover held an impressive clutch of records,

and orders flowed in from all manner of customer in all walks of life.

The Land Rover.

A tough, chunky, cheeky, versatile vehicle

with an unlimited capacity for hard work.

This Land Rover was actually originally supplied to the Army.

It was one of the earliest batches they bought.

I don't know if you watched Trumpton when you were younger, like I did,

but there was a song in it about the humpity-bumpity army truck,

and that's what this is.

♪ Driving along in an army truck In a humpity-bumpity army truck. ♪

It is largely bare metal on the inside.

There's not much padding in the seats.

There are a lot of sharp edges.

If there's one thing a British soldier really enjoys,

it's being uncomfortable!

Soon, Land Rover would bring discomfort

to multitudes the world over,

and Britain's sturdy workhorse would gain

an almost legendary reputation.

The Land Rover may be one of the worthiest things

that Britain has ever created.

It's as commendable as the Dimbleby brothers.

Whenever life is distressed,

a Land Rover is always on hand to save the day.

Mending telegraph poles, rescuing endangered species,

recovering cars, delivering medical supplies,

resupplying remote weather stations with Spam, keeping the peace.

The Queen has one and is greatly amused by it, apparently.

But let's not forget the people in all of this.

It is estimated that the first car ever seen

by one-third of the world's population is a Land Rover.

And that's a lot of potential customers.

Land Rover had the remains of empire as a ready market.

It had Britain's record in vehicle exporting,

and it had a car that represented salvation

and everything that was good about Britain.

Land Rover should have cleaned up.

And yet...

And, as an Englishman, this is quite difficult because,

well, it's a bit like saying Melton Mowbray are crap at pies,

but Land Rover got their butts kicked.

In the ancient Shinto tradition,

this is where Konohana, the daughter of the mountain god,

gave birth amidst volcanic fires.

And, 65 years ago, this mystic place would bear witness to the rebirth

of a slumbering Japanese giant.

This is the road leading up to Mount Fuji, a Japanese icon.

And this car I'm driving is another one.

Now, this is a model from 1980. But, for the moment I'm in 1951

and reliving the work of the Toyota test driver Ichiro Taira

who drove up the side of the famous mountain

in pursuit of a new altitude record.

He made it all the way to the sixth stage of the Mount Fuji ascent,

that's 2,500 metres.

That was further up the mountain than any car had ever been before.

Ichiro's pioneering drive, however, would deliver far more

than a mere altitude record.

It would turn a company on the brink of ruin

into the greatest car firm in history.

If the post-war world was bad for Rover,

it was disastrous for Toyota.

Toyota had been established in 1911 as a weaving company

and a maker of powered looms.

In the 1930s, they branched out, rather cautiously,

into car and truck making.

Now, World War II was excellent news.

That meant loads of orders for trucks.

But, come the defeat, Toyota was seriously short of work.

By 1950, what is now the world's most successful carmaker

was on the verge of collapse.

In that year, Toyota, still discouraged by the occupying forces

from making passenger cars,

produced just 300 trucks, like this one.

And they suffered the first and only strike in their history.

It lasted for two months.

What could save Toyota?

Well, perhaps ironically, it was the occupying Americans,

and, in a roundabout way, the Jeep.

Cue another timely armed conflict:

the Korean War of 1950.

The Americans rushed to the aid of the South and needed trucks fast,

and since the US ran Japan, they gave Toyota the job.

Bingo!

Or pachinko, which is what they actually play in Japan.

There now comes another twist,

because the occupying American forces were so depleted

by the events that had taken place in Korea,

unarmed Japan suddenly felt very vulnerable,

so a limited re-armament programme was permitted,

including, critically, the provision of 1,000 four-wheel drive vehicles

to the NPR: the National Police Reserve:

essentially, Japan's Territorials.

Toyota swiftly came up with this: the BJ Jeep prototype.

It was bigger than the original,

produced more power and used an all-new drive system,

but, despite all this, the police,

who'd been forced to walk everywhere since 1945,

seemed poised to commission copies of the Willys Jeep

from Toyota's rivals, Mitsubishi.

Until, that is,

the heroic Ichiro-san went up the mountain...

..after which the NPR placed an order for 289 Toyotas,

making it their preferred off-roader.

Toyota's new Jeep division was soon ready to

offer a BJ to the world.

There was, however, a problem:

and not just childish sniggering over the name.

The term "Jeep" was a US trademark.

Technical director Hanji Umehara thought long and hard about it,

and this is what he said.

"In England we had a competitor: Land Rover.

"I had to come up with a name for our car that would make it sound

"no less dignified than those of our competitors,

"and that's why I decided to call it Land Cruiser."

So, there you go,

and some people think the Japanese just copy everything.

So, Toyota should have been the underdog,

except that the Land Cruiser brought with it

Toyota's new approach to carmaking.

Almost certainly, one of the things that made the Toyota Land Cruiser

so triumphant was that the Land Rover stemmed from a time when

a bit of nipple-greasing or the occasional axle-rebuild

was all part and parcel of owning an expedition vehicle.

The Land Cruiser was an early fruit of a more modern philosophy:

one that said that the car should be spot-on by the time

it reached the end of the production line

and should remain as dependable as your penknife.

By 1957, four in every ten vehicles exported from Japan

were Land Cruisers, and soon they were ousting the Land Rover

from its markets in the former British Empire and beyond.

Now, this might come as bit of a shock, especially if you're British,

but I'm afraid, in the real world of vital off-roading,

most of the planet was conquered by Toyota.

Sorry.

Australia, which you would expect to be a sort of heavily-barricaded

last redoubt of Land Rover loyalty,

is in fact a Toyota Land Cruiser fiefdom,

and, as one Australian put it to me,

"If you want to go into the outback, take a Land Rover,

"but if you want to come out again, make sure it's a Land Cruiser."

And I hate having to say that.

So, that would appear to be a crushing victory for Toyota.

Well, not quite.

Remember the great multitudes of saddle-sore Land Rover users?

Their prayers, and those of the beleaguered Rover company,

were about to be answered.

Land Rover's response, in 1970, was this: the first Range Rover.

Still a very pukka off-roader,

but now with modern coil-springs, disc brakes,

a hefty V8 engine and a luxurious interior.

Rover's great new hope was born in an era that gave us

polyester loon pants, Carry On Camping and overblown guitar solos.

As a result, the distinctly classy Range Rover

came as a welcome surprise for early '70s Britain.

When I say "luxurious", that's all relative, of course.

Given what was to come, this Series 1 Rangey still feels

incredibly basic and hosed-down.

It is literally hosed-down: the seats are made of vinyl

and so is the upholstery on that central tunnel,

and you can actually come in here with a hose pipe.

I just made the classic off-road error and left my thumb

inside the steering wheel...

..but we'll overlook that.

♪ Let's make the best of the situation

♪ Before I finally go insane... ♪

And it was, and is, a genuinely very capable all-terrain vehicle.

The first one, in fact, to cross both bits of the Americas

in one go: including the Darien Gap.

So there.

The go-anywhere derring-do was still there:

but the new Range Rover was subtly aimed at

a whole new class of customer.

It wasn't necessarily someone who looked like

David Bellamy with a bad hangover.

It could be people who looked more like Purdey from The Avengers.

That wasn't going to do any damage, was it?

Perhaps more importantly, you could drive it into the town

without looking like some mad relation

who'd escaped from Mudfordshire.

The Range Rover looked cool...

..and the world agreed.

Almost instantly,

Britain had a stylish hero to thwart her foreign commercial foes,

and with each increasingly luxurious model,

more and more well-heeled customers would fall under its spell.

The Range Rover would soon allow the beleaguered Brummies,

still reeling from the success of their challenger from Japan,

to conquer quite possibly the most inhospitable place on Earth:

Hollywood.

With 1.8 million sales worldwide,

the Range Rover brand, like Bond, is a global icon,

but, unlike 007,

its handlers have often sent it on underwhelming missions.

And "go anywhere" means just that:

Go shopping, go visiting,

go to work and go to school.

A far cry, then,

from the war-winning remit of its distant American ancestor.

The Range Rover, across all its generations,

has always been a fabulously capable off-roader,

and yet, in reality, it has turned into a luxury car.

Some posh airlines ferry their first-class passengers

to the airport in Range Rovers.

How absurd is that?

But despite its "Chelsea tractor" reputation,

the Range Rover remains a deeply significant car:

the world's first 4x4 to make that difficult leap

from tough utilitarianism

to high-performance, high-quality desirability.

And do you remember what I was saying earlier,

about how, by 2030, half of the affordable cars in the world

would be inspired by the off-road breed?

Well, if any one car could be said to have triggered that trend,

it was surely the Range Rover.

The original Range Rover's upmarket appeal would leave

the redesigned Land Cruiser looking like something from CBeebies.

But if Toyota had been snubbed by the toffs,

they would be welcomed with open arms by an altogether rougher crowd.

This is the Hilux:

most people, though, know it simply as the Toyota pick-up truck.

This one is from 1992 and it's done 250,000 miles.

Ideal, really, for farmers, builders,

landscape gardeners...

or anybody looking for a scrap.

The launch of the Hilux in 1968 coincided with

a new form of conflict being waged across the Third World.

The age of the insurgent was upon us, and for lawless rebel armies,

the sturdy yet adaptable Hilux rapidly became indispensable.

Soon, wherever there was trouble,

you were bound to spot a lurking Toyota.

Did you know, the Toyota pick-up has been so successful as an ad-hoc

military vehicle, that there's been a whole war named after it?

True fact.

The Toyota War of 1987 saw 400 Hilux pick-ups from the Army of Chad

nimbly take on and rout Colonel Gaddafi's forces,

including 100 Russian battle tanks.

French officers working with the Chadians called it one of

the most spectacular defeats suffered by an army this century.

Bad news for the Colonel,

but great for Toyota's regional sales figures.

Toyota just make pick-up trucks.

They're not trying to decide

who should be in control of the Middle East.

That's up to the bloke in the back with the half-timbered machinegun.

That's as maybe, but today, Hilux and Land Cruisers are hanging out

with none other than James Bond's worst enemies.

Cue raised eyebrows everywhere.

♪ Fight the power... ♪

You'd think that everything that we've just seen

would do very Toyota's reputation a great deal of harm,

but not a bit of it.

In some ways, it's the best advert they've ever had,

because, let's be honest,

you don't mount the heavy weapons of insurgency on anything that

isn't absolutely dependable, do you?

So if this is good enough for that lot,

then it's probably good enough for you.

Despite all this controversy,

the Hilux is now in its eighth generation

and is Europe's bestselling pick-up.

In all its guises, worldwide, it's sold over 16 million.

You'd think that sales figures like that would make it untouchable.

Nah, hang on.

That ain't even a hill of beans.

This is a Ford F-series pick-up truck.

Specifically, it is the current F-150 King Ranch FX4.

Top of the heap.

Awesome.

The F-series family of trucks, across 13 generations,

has been America's bestselling vehicle:

and I mean vehicle: that's all types, not just trucks:

for a phenomenal 33 years.

33 years!

Total production of the F-150?

35 million vehicles.

It wouldn't be true to say that the pick-up is as old as the car

itself, but it's not far off,

because the very first one was made by Ford on the chassis of a Model T,

in 1917.

So the idea does actually belong to Ford,

but, more importantly, the idea, and everything it stands for,

belongs to America.

The pick-up truck is exactly what you'd expect this

pioneering and prospecting bunch to come up with.

You sit in the cab at the front, protected from the elements,

from rattlesnakes and accusations of redneckery,

but, then, in the back, you can chuck pretty much anything.

There are no restrictions because of the roof,

like there are on something like a Range Rover,

so it could be building materials, guns, dead bodies, slabs of beer,

General Stonewall Jackson,

and wandering, hitch-hiking blues singers.

I may have romanticised it a bit at the end,

but you know what I mean: anything goes in.

This blue-collar hero comes with true off-road credentials.

A 3.5-litre, 365-horsepower V6,

four-wheel drive, Hillbilly Descent Control,

and a built-in banjo soundtrack.

All that and a luxury interior too.

But what makes it a people's champion is the price.

Entry-level F-150s start at just $26,000.

That's about £17,000.

How do they do that?

I mean, it's partly because they build one every 58 seconds.

They have three shifts building them,

the factory never stops,

and these pick-up trucks are so popular that

if you work for Ford in management,

you can't have one as a company car,

because they can't spare one to give you.

Imagine that...

and it's a truck.

The F-150 is so cheap that the average American can buy one

and still afford to eat properly.

Thank you. Thanks. That looks divine.

Seriously, though, it does make a huge amount of sense.

More sense than a lot of things in America:

like the breakfast menu, for example,

or the four-way intersection.

And like its rivals from Europe and Japan,

it's turned into a sort of luxury statement of belief,

but, at its heart, it remains resolutely American.

It's American like a five-egg omelette

with cheese and extra cheese and a strawberry on top.

As perhaps the icon of all things American,

it is fitting that US culture

reaches its undisputed high water mark

at the wheel of a pick-up.

Ladies and gentlemen,

monster truck racing in E minor.

Let's be honest, though:

a hillbilly circus is not a true test of a 4x4's worth.

This place, however, is.

The Mojave Desert, Nevada:

50,000 square miles of desolation.

A wasteland hostile to man...

..and our machine.

So, to recap, here we are, 70-plus years on

from the global invasion by Willys Jeep,

and we have here three of the most recognisable, most representative

manifestations of our desire to be able to go anywhere in the car.

We have the redneck American,

the Japanese insurgent,

and the repressed but still rather dapper Englishman,

and what follows now is not a race.

It's a televisual celebration of three great interpretations

of the all-terrain vehicle.

It's an epic off-road run from here,

in the middle of the Mojave Desert...

and it will finish here, 25 miles away,

on this small side-street in front of the Sphinx

and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, in Egypt, Las Vegas.

Having said that, those two blokes with the Ford are from Ford...

..and the two blokes with the Toyota are from Toyota...

..and Melpomene, the Greek Muse of tragic drama,

has allowed me the honour of representing the British Midlands,

so, in a way, it is a race. All right?

Are we ready? Let's go.

The teams can take whichever route they want.

I've cunningly chosen an old trail that

Ford and Toyota have overlooked.

Go, go, go. Tally-ho, tally-ho.

Whoa, that's good.

Avoid that rock.

Nobody else can be going this fast, surely.

I'd like you to watch those jagged rocks. Yeah, I'll call them out.

Rock to the left.

Good job.

One of the casualties of the switch from the Range Rover from

a mud-plugging vehicle to a fashion accessory is that

the wheels are big: they're 21 inches on this:

and the tyres are very low-profile, so the most likely problem

we'll have, to be honest, is a puncture.

Over in the Land Cruiser,

Mike and Paul don't fancy my chances.

Did you see those buzzards circling?

Buzzards circling: that's some type of foreshadowing of death.

You notice it was circling James in the Range Rover.

You noticed that? I did notice that.

I wonder how the English taste? Hmm...

A bit gamey.

'Gamey? I'm not even sweaty.'

It's 121 degrees Fahrenheit outside,

but not in here,

cos this is luxury off-roading.

Bloody hell, it's quite quick.

Rocks!

More rocks!

But if I'm staying well chilled,

the mysterious desert appears to be doing strange things to Team Ford.

So, Joe, you know they have the Loch Ness Monster in...

in Sweden? And...

Is this that crazy jackalope story?

It is that. Yeah, you know what?

They say that it's true, you know,

and if you think about it:

a body of an antelope and the head of a rabbit.

Perfect environment for this, you know?

I've got to tell you, I'm going to be disappointed

if we don't see a jackalope on this trip.

'Well, there's no chance of that...

'..but while John and Joe might be

'falling down a giant rabbit hole of superstition,

'I've come up against an all-too-real obstacle

'that even a Range Rover can't conquer.'

Ah.

Well, I thought that was a bit too good to be true.

Will it go through there?

Hmm.

'It's a dead end.

'Good job the others don't think it's a race.'

Look at that torque!

God, I love that torque!

Nothing but torque: it puts you back in the seat!

There you go. Beautiful. Good line. Good line. Good line.

It really is amazing how these vehicles have progressed

from being very rugged and very primitive

to very rugged and very sophisticated. That's right.

An hour into the race,

with the sun glaring down like a vengeful Aztec god...

I've gone across country to try and hit a trail

that actually leads somewhere.

I know this doesn't look very dramatic on your screens,

but, trust me, it is. It's nerve-racking.

There is a bit of a bush in the way

but I think the bush is going to have to buy the farm.

I think I've done that slightly wrong.

I'm going to try that way instead.

'It's a lot steeper than I'd hoped,

'but I owe it to the ghosts of those early Land Rover pioneers

'to at least give it a try.'

Right, now, for the terrifying, dizzying, vertiginous descent.

There's nothing else I can do,

except say it's been a pleasure to make television for you,

and I hope my replacement is as good. Here we go.

BLEEP: a word I can't say on the television.

Whoof!

Thank you, car.

I need to try and steer it left a bit,

otherwise I'm going to fall off the edge.

God, it's steep.

I'm almost there.

Oof!

Traction control.

Clear.

And I'm off.

Thank you, Birmingham!

The Rangey has earned its spurs,

but now I'm miles behind the others.

♪ You win some Lose some

♪ It's all the same to me... ♪

Up ahead, however,

the curse of the were-rabbit is about to strike.

♪ The pleasure is to play

♪ Don't make no difference what you say... ♪

Slight left, left, left, left, left.

Big rock, right. There you go. Whoa. Yeah.

♪ The ace of spaces All right... ♪

Oh, I've got TPMS. The tyre: flat tyre in the back. Uh-oh, do we?

You know, Joe, I called out, "Rock on the right."

It must have been that jackalope

you've been telling me to look at on the left.

Well, no time to look for jackalopes. OK, let's get the tools.

Let's get the spare and get the heck out of here.

The wheel change has evened things up a bit,

but, way ahead,

Team Toyota have escaped the mountains to reach

the empty vastness of El Dorado Lake.

Once again, Japan can leave everyone for dust.

Here's where whatever skill you have comes in.

Feel free to start screaming at any moment.

Whoa-ho!

Meanwhile, I tear through the foothills like a man

late for the Fortnum & Masons sale.

Give it the berries.

Find the grip. Find the grip.

It's done that by itself. Isn't that nice?

It's like having a brilliant butler.

Permission to say "Yee-ha"!

Keep going left. Keep going left.

You got it. Beautiful, beautiful.

Right, right, right, right, right. Wonderful.

And here's the trail. Hey-hey, this is what I'm talking about.

Outstanding. You're the man!

This trail on the far side of the lakebed leads directly to Vegas...

and the finish line.

One team, one dream.

I wonder where the other guys are.

I don't know. I think they're stuck back on the dry lakebed.

Stuck?

This is the fastest stuck you'll ever see.

Engage supercharger.

I can see their dust.

Actually, I can taste their dust.

I'm hauling in your asses, truck boys!

Here I come.

510 horsepower versus 370-something. I've got them.

Yee-ha!

He may have 500 horses, but we've got massaging seats.

I might have lassoed the rednecks,

but there's no sign of the Land Cruiser.

So, I think, just up over this hill.

Oh. There it is!

Do you see what I see? Civilisation.

Yeah, baby. Outstanding, brother. That's what I'm talking about.

And I see Vegas on the horizon.

♪ All my friends know the low rider... ♪

Aw...

Oh, honestly, that's like coming in from outside, in bare feet,

and walking on the carpet again.

Hey, hey, there it is: the Las Vegas sign.

There it is.

We went through some of the toughest parts of the desert

and we're cruising in Las Vegas in a vehicle that feels like a limousine.

I tell you what,

I'm pretty impressed with this beast, right here.

And I'm proud of the Midlands.

They've rescued me from the desert without a sweat...

..but have they beaten Japan and America?

I'm curious to see where I've come in this, cos I'm pretty sure

I'm ahead of the Ford, unless they've done something very sneaky,

but I don't know what happened to the Toyota.

I haven't seen it all day.

I'm not seeing anyone. I don't see anybody here.

Outstanding.

Victory, baby! First place, baby!

That's enough baby talk.

It's not as if they've won a race.

Bah...

Thank you for taking part. I'm sick of off-roading.

It's like an affront to tarmac. It's like going outside

and cooking on a barbecue when you've got a perfectly good oven

in the house. What's the point?

Anyway, look, here's a stroke of luck.

It's that Lamborghini I won earlier on, on the roulette.

Yes! See you.

I mean, I like the Range Rover, I like the Toyota as well,

and I like the big, brash Ford,

but I really like the Lamborghini.

And I'm sure you've worked out the connection already:

it's all-wheel drive.

Yeah.

♪ Somebody help me, yeah... ♪

'The Lamborghini Aventador is just an extreme example of the benefits

'that all-wheel drive brings to strictly on-road cars,

'and I love it.'

It's the jackpot.

But the all-wheel drive road car almost didn't happen at all,

were it not for a single extraordinary breakthrough

and a single extraordinary vehicle.

This is the car that kick-started

the on-road, all-wheel drive revolution.

This is the Audi Quattro:

the "Ur-Quattro" as it's known amongst aficionados.

A bit of brake.

And you will have guessed that I'm in the rally version,

and this is Dave Higgins, who is a pro rallyist...

and lunatic!

'Unfortunately for my coccyx...'

Ow! '..the story of this on-road revolution

'has a very off-road start.'

At the time, most car engineers thought that four-wheel drive

would be too heavy, too clunky and actually too fragile

to use in a performance car: especially a rally car,

but one man at Audi thought differently.

What had always held back the production of

a four-wheel drive road car was the heavy and clunky transfer gearbox,

which had changed little since the days of Willys Jeep,

but, when in 1978, rallying authorities opened up a new class

for four-wheel drive cars,

Audi engineer Jorgen Bensinger went back to the drawing board.

His design: a lightweight, hollow prop shaft,

driving a central differential:

did away with the heavy transfer box

and proved that four-wheel drive

was possible for all road cars.

Audi had come up with a fantastic four-wheel drive system

that definitely wasn't clunky,

definitely wasn't heavy and certainly wasn't in any way fragile.

It was as reliable as Angela Merkel's haircut.

And when this agile 420hp beast entered competitive racing,

the rallying world didn't know what had hit it.

For six years, the Quattro ruled supreme.

Rally legends Hanna Mikkola, Stig Blomqvist,

Oz Clarke, Michele Mouton and Walter Rohrl

won 23 world heats, bringing back four world titles between them.

Their dominance only ended

when the Group B rallying class was abolished altogether,

following a number of accidents.

This is the Quattro that went on sale as a road car in 1980.

The engine is a 2.1 litre turbo-charged five-cylinder.

Remember when they were all the rage?

And it delivers 200hp.

The Audi did work.

It gave you grip, it gave you security.

That is why, when an emergency happens in Ashes to Ashes,

DCI Gene Hunt doesn't say, "To the 911!" or, "To the Golf!"

He says, "To the Quattro!"

♪ Imagination...♪

If you were a debonair man-about-town

with a girlfriend from a Hot Gossip tribute act,

you'd buy into the dream too.

♪ Imagination... ♪

Hang the hefty price tag, this was top quality German engineering.

But there was more to it than that.

There was the provenance that came with driving

the conquering hero of the rally world.

There was the quality, there was the reliability.

And there was the kudos of being able to stand in the pub

and say to your mates,

"My high-performance road car has four-wheel drive."

Because nobody else's did,

and when it rained, which it would obviously, as we were in Britain,

it made a difference.

It did!

Despite its well-earned credentials,

the Quattro remained pricey, exclusive and rare:

only 11,000 were sold.

What we really wanted was an affordable people's champion.

Something a bit more... down on da street.

So, how about this?

It is an original first edition Subaru Impreza WRX STi.

Japanese market edition.

It has a 2.0 turbo-charged engine and four-wheel drive,

and gold wheels, and by reputation, it is for yobbos.

So, what I thought I'd do is drive it from here in Nagoya

to a very famous local road, the Suzuka Skyline, very, very popular

because of its winding curves, with local Japanese...

yobbos.

OK?

The chilling squawk of an Impreza turbo's wastegate

is the sort of sound that sends women and children running

for the sanctuary of doorways.

If you imagine the camera in our car is your rear view mirror,

then this is how you're probably used to seeing Subaru Impreza WRXs.

Come on.

Thank you!

In Britain, at least, it is the calling card of the hooligan.

But is that fair?

The Impreza gained its bad boy reputation

burning up multiplex car parks in Essex and the like.

Crowds would gather in their hundreds

in the hope of catching an STi.

STi stands for Subaru Technica International.

WRX, by the way, originally stood for World Rally Experimental.

And, like the Quattro, rallying turned the Impreza into a legend.

In 1995, British motorsport company Prodrive tweaked it

for the World Rally Championship and it won, three years on the trot!

And that activity spawned this,

the version you could buy in the showrooms, the WRX,

and suddenly everyone wanted to be Colin McRae.

And so do I!

This thing goes like an absolute bastard!

Yes, a dark blue Subaru Impreza with gold wheels

strikes fear and horror into the hearts of right-thinking people,

but hang on a minute, because I like gold wheels.

In fact, I have them on my car. And there's something else.

This car combines an intelligent and effective four-wheel drive system

with superb engineering provenance

and a first-class competition pedigree.

That sounds like a right load of old twaddle, and it possibly is,

but if I said those words and then attached them to a name like Porsche

you'd think, "Hmm, yeah!"

So, let's not have any of this "yob's car" nonsense.

This is a thing of excellence.

Right, let's start giving this car the credit it deserves.

At the heart of the Scooby-Doo

is a flat-four, two-litre turbo-charged engine, giving 280HP.

And this neat engine layout

leaves room for a perfectly balanced four-wheel drive system.

And the advantage of symmetrical four-wheel drive,

Subaru owners will tell you, is that it will pretty much anticipate

what the grip is for each wheel,

rather than having to wait for a wheel to start slipping,

and then sorting it out.

It's a largely mechanical system

and, by modern standards, I suppose it'd be considered quite dated,

but it does work.

It works an absolute treat.

It's a very, very lively car.

It changes direction like a local councillor.

♪ You better make way cos I'm coming through

♪ In my late '92 Betty blue

♪ Subaru... ♪

I'm not going to claim that the WRX STi was ever a cheap car,

but when this one was out in 1996,

it cost £17,500,

and that was £5,000 less than an Escort Cosworth.

And I think this is cooler.

This doesn't feel like an old car.

I mean, it's 20 years old, this thing.

It's absolutely as tight as a drum and it still feels good.

Grip, grip, grip, grip, power out of the bend.

No problem whatsoever.

Why haven't I got one of these? They're fantastic!

It's got gold wheels!

This, I think, is a deeply significant car.

In the '60s and '70s, style and exclusivity

were democratised by the Ford Mustang and the Capri.

In the '80s, sports-car performance was democratised by the hot-hatch.

In the '90s, genuine competition-bred,

all-wheel drive systems

were democratised by the likes of the Subaru Impreza.

It really is genuinely a great car,

spoiled only by slightly dubious head furniture.

Actually, I'd quite like to finish there,

but I think we can get even more of-the-people than this.

Almost an hour ago, I said that all this stuff,

Willys Jeep, Range Rovers,

deserts, mountains,

monster trucks,

that Lamborghini,

the jackalope, rally cars,

and hooning about in a Subaru,

was relevant to the cars of the people.

And it all is.

Awesome!

Without these safe and sure-footed cars,

we, the people, would not have conquered adversity,

developed new technology,

brought help to the needy and affordable joy to the masses.

Yee-ha!

But, if it's the truly affordable and dependable

people's champion you're looking for,

I could have saved you all that trouble and just taken you here.

It all comes together in this. It's a perfectly normal car.

It's also a bit of an off-roader,

the ghosts of the Jeep and the rally cars,

and the all-wheel drive supercars,

there's a little bit of them in this.

It is...

Ta-da!

The original Fiat Panda 4x4.

I hope you're not disappointed, because you shouldn't be.

It definitely qualifies as a people's car.

It will take a family, just, it's cheap to run and easy to maintain.

It's as much car as it needs to be, and no more.

But never mind all that worthy old rubbish.

My own research, gained from travelling around Europe

over the years, suggests

that least half the vineyards of France and Italy

wouldn't be able to function without the services of

a rather battered old Panda 4x4.

Which is ironic really, isn't it?

Because the two things we know don't mix are alcohol and cars.

So I've come up with an idea.

I don't know what sort of car you've got, but it almost certainly

owes a debt somewhere to one of the great cars of the people.

Which is a marvellous thing, isn't it?

So, here's the deal.

You drive, I'll have a drink.

Mmm.

Fruit.

Goodbye!

This is a model of KITT,

from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider with the Hoff.

And this is the 1966 jet-powered Batmobile.

The fantasy cars of TV and cinema

were formed by our dreams of the car of the future.

We liked the idea of a car that would talk to us,

that knew where it was going, that would fly

and we wondered if it could actually drive itself.

Did anything come of the wild imaginings

of the creators of these things?

Did any of it become reality to filter down

to the real cars of the people?

This week, innovation.

Making an impression where it counts.

It's doing terrible things to my testicles.

A funny man lends me his funny car.

So it would've made a futuristic noise and a great smell. Exactly.

'Engineering.

'Technology.'

This is the hardest thing I've ever done.

'And safety.'

All this, plus...a bird.

Here's a bird.

'This week, before I deal with the people's dreams,

'I want to start by talking about me for a change.'

This is a BMW i3, an electric car.

It's my car.

If you haven't driven a modern electric car, it is worth a go,

because it's mainly like driving a car, there's no gearbox,

because you don't need one and some of the controls

are slightly different, but it does feel strangely enlightened.

'And as it's my car, it's even getting to know me a little.'

I can have a conversation with it, of sorts.

Phonebook.

Phonebook. Please say a name.

World's biggest.

Did you mean world's biggest...

Yes, I did, but I don't really want to talk to Jeremy, do I? No, cancel.

There you go.

Apart from sharing my opinions, this car, like many of its rivals,

is bristling with user-friendly hi-tech.

And like all other electric cars, it's powered by a simple battery,

without the need for valves, pistons or gears.

♪ Just the two of us... ♪

You plug it in, and you plug in everything these days:

your phone, your tablet, your toothbrush.

Your ladyshave, whatever.

I don't have a ladyshave, I just know that you recharge them.

'It's simple, yet sophisticated.

'It'll even park itself...

'while I'm doing my legs.'

I'm not touching the pedals. I'm not touching the steering wheel.

It's doing it by itself!

It's witchcraft!

Are you watching?

It's just going to go forwards a bit and then...

Ah.

It's good, isn't it?

'Electric vehicles like this are at the forefront

'of a 21st-century battle

'to decide how our cars will be powered in the future.

'And although rivals include the fuel cells, solar energy,

'biofuel and liquid gas, I quite fancy its chances.'

It's electric.

Smooth, quiet, clean.

Modern.

Or is it?

Let's go back 100 years or so.

Here is an early car from 1909. It's a Baker.

It looks a bit like a horse-drawn carriage

and, if you look inside the interior,

it's described by the current owner as a bit frou-frou,

or rather like a Victorian brothel.

But here's the interesting thing:

it's electric.

We modern people like to think that our electric dreams

are a product of our hi-tech world.

But in large parts of America in 1900,

the electric car was the bestselling car of the people.

It was as fashionable as top hats...

and TB.

'But, just like today, it wasn't clear which propulsion method

'would drive the car of the future.

'And the electric car faced some high-pressure competition.'

This is a Stanley Model 740D Roadster,

and as you can probably guess from the chuffing sound,

it's steam-powered.

Right, now this is like a car,

in that it has a steering wheel in front of me,

a rather vague one, I've got to be honest.

Everything else about it is quite baffling.

The pedals are all wrong, there's lots of lovely instruments,

but they're talking about mysterious things.

We've got fuel system pressure, boiler pressure,

cylinder lubrication, oil flow, all sorts of things.

Hang on a minute, open the regulator.

Climb this hill.

So all this stuff, this isn't steam punk, this is actually steam.

Duba-duba-duba-duba, duba-duba-duba-duba...

A steam car works in pretty much the same way as any other steam engine.

Water is boiled in, well, a boiler, by kerosene burners and then steam:

and I mean proper, superheated steam at 300 degrees plus,

not the poncey vapour that comes out of your kettle:

that is forced into cylinders, where it pushes pistons along.

That then turns a shaft, which drives the wheels.

That's all we've ever wanted out of all these sources of motive power,

a rotating shaft. That's it.

The brakes don't work, the steering is terrible,

and you do worry that it's going to blow up.

But, for the people of the early 20th century,

steam power was a trusted friend.

Steam had been around since the 18th century, it had industrialised us,

it powered mill engines and mine pumps and, of course,

it gave us the miracle of the railways.

Steam was understood.

A steam engine will really run on just about anything that will burn.

They can go very, very wrong and become very, very sloppy

and they still work.

Steam power, it seemed, was not only the past but also the future.

In America, sales began to outstrip electric cars.

But coming up fast in their rear-view mirrors was a rival system

destined to rule the world.

This is a Mercedes-Benz AMG DT.

It has a four litre V8, developing 510 horsepower.

Is that a lot? It is quite a lot, actually.

It does 193mph,

goes from 0 to 60 in under four seconds. It's amazing.

And it runs on petrol.

As indeed did the world's first true car.

Back in 1885, when Karl Benz ran the engine of his Motorwagen

for the first time, he described the sound it made

as "the music of the future."

He was right, wasn't he?

Because if the music of the 20th century has a dominant note,

it's that of the internal combustion engine.

'And that's odd,

'because the internal combustion engine is rather demanding.'

The petrol engine in this car has to have sophisticated electronics,

it has to have an oil pump, it has to have lubrication,

it has to have valves going up and down and springs

and it has to have a gearbox, blah, blah, blah.

So, why? Why have we ended up relying so much on this thing

when an electric motor in particular is so simple?

The answer is not to be found in the engine,

but at the other end of the car.

In here is a petrol tank holding around 80, 85 litres of fuel.

Not a very big volume, to be honest.

That much beer would only keep the production crew

of this programme going for about an hour and a half, two hours.

But as petrol, it will drive this high-performance car

all the way from my house in London

right up into the Highlands of Scotland.

That is very energy dense.

Fossil fuels were a great gift from nature.

If that were to be a battery,

it would have to be about three or four times the size of the car

to do the same job.

The energy that a few gallons of oil can yield

would send cars far across the world.

And filling stations were quick to spring up everywhere.

By contrast, national electricity grids simply didn't exist,

leaving the electric car confined to the city.

But what about the people's favourite, steam?

Railways had conquered the globe. Surely the steam car would prevail.

The steam car of the early 20th century

was doomed by several factors.

Ford's moving production line meant that his Model T,

his car for the great multitude, came down in price constantly,

so by the time this car came out, the Model T could be yours

for not much more than a 10th of the price.

And the Model T, of course,

as well as making the car an affordable proposition,

also cemented internal combustion as the accepted way.

Pish.

Infrastructure, economics

and Ford's mass production methods, then,

would decisively tip the balance.

By the 1920s, the battle was as good as settled.

The petrol age had dawned and its god was the piston engine.

The image of an engine is quite important

to the 20th century iconography, I'd say.

Blokes in particular will stand around looking at the engine

of a car as if it will inform them of something.

It's a bit like the way they are with weapons,

it's because they know it empowers them.

Empowers them enormously.

Look at this.

I feel empowered.

And there are a lot of people in the world who say that oil is a menace,

it will destroy us, it will ruin the atmosphere

and destroy wildlife and all the rest of it.

In which case, I say, let's put it cars like this

and get rid of it.

Cos then it won't be a problem any more, will it?

Clean or not, oil had got us hooked

and had given us the mobility we craved.

And, while engines slowly grew more powerful and reliable,

the car itself became a catalyst for rapid change.

Towns, cities, even nations were built around its requirements.

Roads are getting better.

Many highways have been designed that eliminate dangers and delays.

But, by the early '50s, there was a new kid on the block,

leaving the piston engine trailing wistfully in its slipstream.

Welcome...

to the jet age.

The jet engine would advance aviation in one giant leap.

But no-one would be daft enough to suggest a jet-powered car.

This must be one of the world's rarest cars. I think it is.

Certainly one of the world's rarest production cars. I think it is.

It's a great noise though, isn't it?

It must have seemed very futuristic then. It still does.

'This is the world's last working example

'of the Chrysler turbine car.

'And, if you haven't already guessed,

'it belongs to the superstar comedian Jay Leno.'

The car is 100% original.

Most jet cars of the period,

like, General Motors had two or three jet cars,

and they had the bubble top. And they looked like fighter planes.

I mean, the jet engine itself was still a relatively new

and remarkable thing. Most people still didn't fly anywhere,

so to have a car come down your street in your small town

that made the same noise as a fighter aircraft, that's...

Yeah. That's incredible.

'The car works by sucking in air to mix with a fine spray of fuel,

'which, when ignited, drives a turbine,

'sending power to the wheels.

'Only 55 were ever built.'

I mean, this does look outrageous to us now,

because this is a bit of very flamboyant 1960s American design.

Yeah. But this would have been

a mainstream-looking car, wouldn't it? Sure, yeah.

You could have built this car with a V8 engine

and it would have sold. Yeah.

They weren't trying to propose that the gas turbine car

was an exotic, rarefied supercar or anything like that.

It was going to be the way your normal family car was powered.

Right. That was the idea, wasn't it?

The turbine car is not a special car

designed for limited types of performance.

This is a car for people.

For doctors, housewives, schoolteachers.

Average people with average,

as well as extreme, driving requirements.

'Chrysler wasn't sure how a huge jet that could generate temperatures

'in excess of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit

'would perform in a family car.

'So they loaned them to brave members of the public

'to try out for three months.'

Imagine, in this litigious society,

having the general public do your R&D work.

Yeah. You just... You give it to some guy.

"Oh, tell us what happens." You know? Yeah.

"Oh, I've burned to a crisp." "Well, sorry, mate."

The point of trying something like this is to see what happens. Yeah.

It's not a demonstration. You're not saying, "This is the future."

You're saying, "Maybe this is the future,

"but we won't know unless we try it."

'I'm desperate to see under the bonnet

'and to soften Jay up, so that he lets me drive it.'

Here she is. This is all air filter right here.

This is what keeps it quiet. They're massive things. Yeah. They are huge.

Well, the programme ran for a long time. It started in the early '50s.

And in '54, they drove a turbine car, disguised as a regular car,

across the country. So the idea was to come up with something

that could get the job done

and still be reasonably, er...

..sensible in price.

'The turbine, however, could not compete

'with the cheap and reliable piston engine.'

This was hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars more.

And plus, the V8 had been...

pretty much perfected.

It is interesting actually, the V8 engine, well, the piston engine,

is actually a bit like the burger, cos you have other...

We started to eat Japanese food in Britain and America.

And we had Chinese food

and we experimented with Indian and wholemeal.

But the burger doesn't go away, doesn't it? No. There's still

millions of burgers every day. You'll always have the burger. Yeah.

The V8 is a burger.

With cheese.

'Now that I've managed to subtly shift Jay's attention

'onto the best baps in LA, it's time to hit him with the big one.'

This is a question one man shouldn't ask another,

I know, but...

can I have a go in your turbine car?

It's a bit unorthodox, but...

..I guess it'll be OK. Thanks.

Thanks, buddy. We won't tell anybody.

Right, quick situation report.

I'm doing 3,300rpm.

No, 33,000. Sorry, 33,000.

It's difficult to get your head round, isn't it?

Listen to that! Yeah.

The great advantage to this car was it could run on any fuel

that burned with oxygen.

But when they took it to Mexico, they ran it on tequila.

When they took it to France,

they filled the tank with Chanel No.5.

Quite pleasant driving around. So that's actually true?

I always thought that was a bit of a myth. That is true. No, no, no.

It's like a car full of hookers going down the road

with Chanel No.5. "What's going on?" You know?

So it would have made a futuristic noise and a great smell?

Right, exactly.

I can't imagine why didn't catch on.

'There was one fuel, however, that the turbine car couldn't handle.

'It was, ironically,

'the very fuel that had kick-started the petrol age in the first place.'

The disadvantage was the turbine could not run on lead,

so you couldn't fill it up at the normal gas station,

cos the only gas available in America at the time was leaded gas.

Right, so the only thing it couldn't tolerate was the lead? Right.

Cos that would damage the blade. That's a shame.

It's one of those things that,

given a few slight tweaks to history,

it might have worked.

We might all have been driving something like turbine cars. Yeah.

So, like the early electric car,

thwarted by an electricity grid that wasn't there,

the turbine car came just too soon for the advent of unleaded petrol.

In the end, Chrysler recalled and crushed

almost all of these experimental cars.

♪ Tequila! ♪

But surely innovation would be the way to go?

Especially for carmakers facing slow-off-the-mark competitors.

There now follows a tale of two sports car makers:

British and German.

One of them would plug away bloody-mindedly at outmoded ideas

about car design from the middle of the 20th century

and keep redesigning the same basic car over and over again

for decade after decade.

But the other, the other one was an innovator,

experimenting with new materials, lightweight design,

flexible, small volume manufacturing.

It would develop compact, powerful engines of its own

and push at the boundaries of contemporary styling

and even contemporary colour schemes.

'One would go on to greatness.

'The other would disappear.

'And you can probably guess how this goes.'

Or can you?

Because the radical freethinkers

were TVR of Blackpool.

And the stuck-ists were Porsche.

It's in 1963 that things become interesting,

because that's when Porsche revealed this:

the first of the 911s.

Now, Porsche would go on to make many different cars, of course,

but this is the one that would cement their reputation

over five decades and counting.

'For a new sports car, the 911 was already pretty old-fashioned.

'Not least the air-cooled rear-mounted engine:

'a layout that dated back to the 1930s.'

This was thought to be the right way to do it.

Engine at the back, so the drivetrain is simple.

Nice, a lot of space inside

and a more aerodynamic nose.

This layout is also...

What would be the right word?

Er, wrong.

Because the engine is right at the back, behind the rear wheels,

it acts as a sort of pendulum when you're going around bends.

This is at the root of the 911's reputation for handling trickiness.

'But what about the boy racers from Blackpool?'

This is a 1965 TVR Griffith.

I know what you're thinking:

you're thinking, "Here he goes again!

"He's going to kick the wheels off

"another great British motoring institution."

But no.

I liked TVR.

TVR are a bit left-field.

TVR were a laugh.

But, look, we're in the same year.

Porsche has given us a rather archaic and very expensive car

that does 131mph

and takes over eight seconds to get to 60.

The TVR does 160mph.

It gets to 60 in less than half the time

and it costs less.

'TVR were all about new thinking, new design

'and affordable power and performance.

'Their aim was to appeal directly

'to the young male driver of the time.

'And to do away with the old fuddy-duddy notions.

'Like clothes for its sales team, evidently.'

Blackpool uber alles!

'The cars were certainly thrilling,

'but TVR would be in a permanent state of revolution.

'There was the Tasmin, the 400, the Griffith, the Cerbera,

'the Tuscan and the outrageous Sagaris.

'Models came thick and fast,

'costing the company a fortune in start-up costs.'

Meanwhile, boring old Porsche

just continue to make the 911.

I mean, the wheel arches swelled a bit,

the engine got a bit bigger, but nothing really changed.

It took them until 1987

to fit a decent gearbox, for Pete's sake.

This one, in the 1964 car...

is rubbish. And I mean rubbish.

I can't even find it half the time.

'Finally, in 1993, it was completely restyled.

'But it came out looking exactly like a 911,

'with the engine at the back.'

I mean, this has been going on for decades.

Other people have realised the folly of the rear-engined car

and thought, "No, actually, we were wrong about that.

"It needs to be in the middle or at the front."

But Porsche would just go,

"Nein, nein.

"Nein, should be at the back.

"We will stick with it and make it work."

And they have done, all credit to them,

but why not just...

..put it up there!

'TVR may have had the engine right,

'but that was the only part of the business plan that worked.

'The constant chopping and changing lead to confusion,

'profit warnings and a string of failed attempts to revive the name.

'The result was chaos.'

TVR folklore is a bit too good to check, to be honest.

It includes stories about windows falling out,

about the owner's dogs taking a bite out of a polystyrene styling model

and then the results being incorporated in the final car.

And then there's the one about the workforce scrawling rude messages

about each other on the bare glass fibre body works on the inside.

So that, one day, when the car came to be repaired or restored,

you'd take a piece of trim off and then, yes,

you'd discovered that Yozza was indeed a right...

'Porsche, on the other hand, would spend over half a century

'cautiously evolving the 911.

'And earning billions in profit.

'Today, a 911 is one of the world's most coveted artefacts.

'Who'd have thought it?'

Just have a look at the astonishing variety that TVR produced

over the years. Model after model.

Modification after modification, ever bigger engines.

Incredible, dinosaur-inspired paint schemes.

And, if you went back to the 1960s,

the other end of history's telescope, you would say,

"Yes, TVR is going to win this one.

"Not Porsche, with the dreary old 911.

"TVR with all its innovation, all its soul, all its spirit."

And yet, nothing has been made by TVR

since 2006.

'So, extreme innovation,

'as Chrysler and TVR discovered,

'could be a risky venture.

'But it's nowhere near as dicey as copying that rear engine idea

'and doing it really badly.

'This is the Chevrolet Corvair,

'a car that paved the way for some of the most important

'safety innovations in history of the car.

'Although, that wasn't Chevrolet's intention.'

This is actually the second generation of the Corvair

and it is quite a pleasant, nicely sorted car,

but it wasn't always that way.

'The first generation Corvair

'was deftly launched in 1960 by Michael Landon...'

Hi, I'm Mike Landon.

'..from Bonanza and The Little House on the Prairie.

'The trouble was, the real cowboys weren't the ones behind the wheels.'

Yippee-yow! Corvair!

That earlier car had a couple of horrific design flaws.

One was that it had the obvious rear weight bias

that you get with a rear-engined car.

But it also didn't have a much-needed antiroll bar

on the front suspension.

And that was because that would have added a bit of cost,

so the management at Chevrolet thought...

"Well, we'll just leave it off."

'As a result, the handling was a nightmare, especially on bends.

'But, rather than fix the problem, Chevrolet simply improvised.'

They addressed this, to some extent, by fiddling with the tyre pressures.

They actually recommended tyre pressures outside of the limits

advised by the tyre manufacturer.

'And this cavalier approach meant that Chevrolet

'would start losing their customers...permanently.'

Under certain conditions going round corners, one of the rear wheels

on the rather crude swingarm suspension could tuck under

and you would suffer sudden and catastrophic oversteer.

And if you're not familiar with these technical terms,

oversteer is when you go through the hedge backwards.

'Things got so bad that even the ads for this deathtrap

'seemed to be offering you a one-way trip to the afterlife.'

There's a car down there

that can make you feel you're way up here.

'By 1965, Chevrolet faced over 100 separate lawsuits

'from the Corvair's victims.

'But still they did nothing.

'Until one man decided to take them,

'and the entire motor industry, to task.'

Now I must bring up the most famous, or perhaps notorious,

bit of consumer campaigning in the whole of history.

Not just the history of the car.

It was the publication in 1965

of Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed.

Now, Ralph Nader believed that the American carmakers

knew about many of the dangerous failings of their cars,

but couldn't be bothered to deal with them.

He talked about all sorts of things,

from sharp edges on interiors,

to gearboxes that could be pushed into reverse

while you were going along and so on and so on.

But, most famously, he addressed the issue of the Corvair.

'And, with road deaths from all vehicles

'topping 47,000 in the US alone,

'Nader had the people's overwhelming support.

When the New York motor show opened this Easter,

the city's doctors paraded with placards of protest

about the lack of safety features on the new models from Detroit.

What he effectively investigated was legislation covering the design,

especially the safety features, of cars.

For the first time, he forced the authorities to take an interest

in what car manufacturers were getting up to.

'As a result, the Corvair, and many other lethal cars, were modified.

'So it's thanks to Ralph that I can happily drive this one

'around this bend without the need

'for my emergency pair of brown trousers.'

What was becoming clear was that the honeymoon of our love affair

with the car was coming to an end.

It would no longer be allowed

to blunder through the world unchallenged.

'But the biggest safety innovation of them all was made by a man

'from a far-off country

'abusing eggs from his company's fridge.

'And what he'd achieve would save more lives

'than any single innovation in the history of motoring.'

The year 1959 saw a great leap forward

in the safety of a car's occupants.

Something that is reckoned to reduce the risk of death in a collision

by at least 50%.

And you ought to be able to guess what it is,

because you can see it in this picture.

Yes, man on the sofa in his underpants,

eating the takeaway pizza.

Yes, correct.

It is the safety belt.

Most specifically, the three-point safety belt.

And this car, the Volvo Amazon,

was the first car to have such a thing fitted as standard.

'Volvo's seatbelt pioneer, Nils Bohlin, thought long and hard

'about where the straps should go.

'And he'd worked out that the three-point system was the best way

'of comfortably restraining the human body during an impact.'

The inventor took a very philanthropic view of his idea

and decided not to patent it,

but to make it freely available to all carmakers.

Very nice.

'But, like the stubborn carmakers

'who refused to iron out a dangerous fault,

'many normal people were against an invention

'that could save their lives.'

Weirdly, there was a lot of resistance to these seat belts.

I can remember it, actually, as a small boy.

People saying that they believed they would be thrown clear

in an accident and that's what would save them.

But, actually, it is a very, very simple idea

that is reckoned to have saved over a million lives already.

'Volvo's gift to the world was a generous one, but it also created

'a new marketing strategy that the people's car hadn't known before.'

The standard seatbelt was the beginning of a peculiar initiative

by Volvo, which is...

the idea of selling safety.

Volvo would go on to produce rubber bumpers, crumple zones,

all sorts of stuff that people liked.

'Good for the people and great for Volvo's sales figures.'

All credit to Volvo:

they have stuck to their guns, because, fairly recently

they announced that, by 2020,

no-one would be killed in a Volvo.

That's a hell of a claim, isn't it?

Volvos invention came just at the right time.

'As the '60s progressed, car ownership was mushrooming

'and that meant rocketing accident rates.

'Across the world, the car needed more space.'

Even when the car was still quite a new idea,

there were people who realised there would, one day, be too many of them.

Henry Ford and Glenn Curtis,

who wasn't really so much to do with cars, he was an aviation pioneer.

And these people said,

"One day, the car and the aeroplane will be combined.

"You can be sure of it," said Henry Ford.

Inside seven minutes flat,

you've got yourself an all-metal motorcar.

In America, cars are airborne.

Over here, it's only the price that's up in the clouds.

And it sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

The idea that your car would also fly.

Here is some footage of me flying a flying car

in an earlier life.

I am actually flying the aerocar.

How about that?

Hold your hands up in the air, so they know I'm doing it.

There you go.

'And, by the way, if you're expecting me to'

pull back on the stick and take off,

you're going to be disappointed.

This isn't a flying car.

'Nope.

'It's a swimming one.'

That's very rough.

Is it afloat? It's not quite afloat.

'At least the production team SAID this was a swimming car,

'but maybe it's an elaborate joke for YouTube.'

Engage propeller.

I am a boat.

'I do believe that, in the future, we will all take to the skies,

'but back in 1961, they set their sights a little lower.'

This looks a perfectly normal motorcar, but what its name?

The Amphicar.

This is the land animal that has taken to life afloat.

Two-way traffic on a wavy highway,

where there's no such thing as a speed cop

or a hold-up at the lights.

'You might be taking your life in your hands getting it afloat,

'but the Amphicar is actually as forward-thinking as the car plane.

'Waterways predate tarmac roads, so why not use them?

'To explain further, here's a flashback.'

Here I am earlier

and here is, basically, how it works.

The top half is a car.

The bottom half is sort of a boat, but it's more carbon boat, really.

It has all the things you'd expect of a car:

headlights, indicators, a steering wheel,

a perfectly conventional four-speed transmission and so on.

You drive it like a car. You're unaware of it being a boat as well.

But if we go to the back...

things are a bit more interesting.

You can disengage the gearbox and engage a separate gearbox,

which then drives...

Wait for it.

Can you guess what it's going to be?

Two propellers down here.

And then it becomes a boat and it steers with the front wheels,

because a rudder would make it a bit too boat-like

for people who aren't familiar with boats.

By making it steer with the front wheels,

it still retains some car-like qualities on the water.

You have two bilge pumps and, of course,

the exhaust pipe has to be up there, otherwise it would be underwater.

And, finally, when you're on the water...

..you do, of course, have to display your colours.

Which are here and that inserts in...

..there.

We're ready to sail.

'To demonstrate the Amphicar's

'ahead-of-its-time practical capabilities,

'I've asked someone to meet me

'at Birmingham's most important tourist destination:

'the pub.

'While I navigate the canal system,

'my friend and personal stylist, Rory,

'will tackle the rush hour traffic.

'Rory's never been to Birmingham before.

'He has no map or sat-nav.

'He has only his favourite mix tape for company.'

Ooh! There's third gear.

'The Amphicar takes its engine from the Triumph Herald,

'which is what we've given Rory to drive,

'to give him a fair chance at pipping me to the pint'.

♪ Look, all the ducks are swimming in the water... ♪

'And, as the scorching British summer rolls in,

'a dip sounds like just the thing.'

Just about every town or city in the world has a river,

because that's why towns and cities are where they are.

That goes back, you know, to the Dark Ages.

And, since there's no requirement to move coal

and wood and jute up and down the canals any more,

we might as well use them for commuting.

'And, anyway, it's no wetter than anywhere else in Birmingham.'

I thought there was a big junction in Birmingham

that avoided all the traffic.

"Oh, yeah, you go to Birmingham, there's a big Spaghetti Junction,

"there's no traffic."

It's all I've been doing, just sitting still the whole time.

'Not a problem for the Amphicar.'

Just the job for a Sunday cruise

down the river and the thing is, once you're waterborne,

you really begin to believe that 9mph is quite a speed,

because, look, that Amphicar is travelling at 9mph precisely.

They do say that the average speed of traffic during rush hour

in a big British city is, typically, about 8mph.

And I'm doing four knots, which is sort of 4.5mph,

but I'm going a fairly direct route.

Come on. Go! Go!

Let's go, guys!

And you feel you're really moving.

'And it's not just congestion solving

'where the Amphicar has its advantages.'

All right. Here we go. Hamstead, straight on.

Handsworth Road,

Birchfield, Lozells.

All I have is a paper map of the canals, but it's quite simple.

To be honest, having turned right under that bridge,

now I just keep going until I get to a canal T-junction.

Then I go left.

'Sir Isaac Newton said that every action

'has an equal and opposite reaction.'

Come on. Let's go, let's go!

'The Amphicar car provides the equal and opposite reaction to road rage.'

Here's a bird.

Hello, mate.

Look at that.

You wouldn't normally get that close, would you?

Did you see him?

That is absolutely superb.

Morning, afternoon, whatever it is.

Time is of no consequence.

Right, and there is my endpoint, which is the pub,

so now just mooring up.

Can you give me a small hand to moor my car, sir?

I'm docked.

Allow me to buy you a pint. Thank you.

'So there you have it: the Amphicar.

'A great idea that offered an answer to congestion

'and made the people happy.

'As for Rory,

'he did finally reach the pub,

'although he appeared to be legless by the time he got there.'

Are you all right? Yeah, I'm good, thanks.

'Despite its quirky brilliance,

'the Amphicar was not a worldwide success.

'Maybe that was because, in America's wide open spaces,

'congestion was not an issue.

'Over there, the people still wanted speed, style and muscle.'

This car is the Series 2 Dodge Charger RT.

And it kicks butt...

big time.

♪ When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town... ♪

'This 7.2 litre, 440 horsepower monster

'was a shameless celebration of the petrol age,

'the US auto industry and America itself.'

It was a bit of a golden era for massive cars with massive engines.

And it was all...

Well, it was rather fantastic.

'The Dodge Charger was a perfect car for late '60s America:

'a time when cheap oil flowed like running water.'

In 1968, gas: that's petrol:

in the US was typically 34 cents a gallon.

Now, that sounds cheap, of course, because it was a long time ago.

Actually, it was quite cheap even at the time.

And there was probably a good reason for that.

Detroit depended on the oil companies to support them.

The oil companies depended on Detroit to make a car like this

that would use a lot of their stuff up.

So everybody was happy.

Official fuel consumption figures for the Charger RT:

ten miles to the gallon, which means, roughly,

as I go past these nodding donkeys,

each one is, effectively, refuelling this car.

If more than three of them pack up, we're doomed.

I'm going to give it the berries. Hold on.

Thank you. And I'll have some more, please.

'Well over half a century since the dawn of the petrol age,

'oil was still king and the piston engines was still providing

'the soundtrack for the world.'

This car comes from a high point in the Detroit motor industry's story.

A time when all that mattered was the pursuit of power and majesty

and it didn't matter what was consumed in achieving it:

how much fuel it burned, how much raw material was used,

how much it weighed, how much space it took up, how much noise it made,

how many instruments you've got on the dashboard.

And here is a measure of just how profligate

the American motor car had become.

The average size of the four-leaf clover highway interchange

being built on American roads at the same time as this car

occupied the same area as the mediaeval port of Dubrovnik.

And you can take one down the pub and have it on me.

'The muscle car, like Detroit itself,

'had become an American icon.

'And, like all true American heroes,

'it was eulogised in song and on-screen.'

♪ I'm a charger

♪ That charges through the night

♪ I'm thunder on the highway

♪ Looking bad, bad, bad. ♪

If you were a regular watcher of The Dukes of Hazzard,

you will know that the Charger RT:

RT is for road/track, by the way:

it could fly.

Well, it could take off, at any rate: it wasn't so good at landing,

which is why you never really saw that bit in the programme.

Now, the production budget for The Dukes of Hazzard was,

presumably, quite small, because they couldn't even stretch

to full-length trousers for Daisy,

but they did manage to find enough money

to get through quite a few Dodge Chargers.

In fact, estimate for the number of Dodge Chargers

consumed by The Dukes of Hazzard

ranges from two to seven...

..hundred.

'Of course, America's gleeful waste

'and conspicuous consumption couldn't last.

'The carefree days of "howdy, pardner"

'would soon be ended by their Saudi partner.'

'In 1973, after yet another squabble in the Middle East,

'the Saudis and others banned oil sales to America.

'Even when the embargo was lifted,

'petrol prices stayed high

'and cars like the Charger were left gasping.

'And, so, people began exploring cheaper and cleaner alternatives

'to their beloved gasoline.

'And that reopened the door to some old thinking.

'Remember the Baker Electric we saw earlier?

'Let's see how that idea was coming along.'

It's bad news, I'm afraid.

By the 1980s, battery technology had not really moved on

from the state it was in back when the Baker was built.

The big revolution that was brought about by mobile phones

and laptops and that sort of thing, that hadn't happened yet.

And, anyway, electric power was still for milk floats

and meals on wheels delivery vans and nutty professors.

So an electric car of the people would have to be very light

to make the most of the feeble battery technology of the time.

It would also have to be simple, it would have to be very cheap

and it would have to be cool, because being cool

was very important in making a new idea catch on.

Imagine a vehicle that needs no petrol. Just a battery.

'Yes, in 1985, that height of cool was hoped to be achieved by this.'

The Sinclair C5.

It's a new power in personal transport.

Well, here it is.

Six foot of plastic with foot pedals and an electric motor,

not unlike the one that drives your washing machine.

This is brilliant.

I like it.

'The Sinclair C5 wasn't actually fitted with a washing machine motor,

'although it was made in a factory that built them.

'The 12-volt motor it did have could completely burn out

'on even a mild hill, though,

'so it was fitted with these user-unfriendly pedals, too.

'It might make you look like a kamikaze reject from a Tron movie,

'but it was actually the product of some incredibly forward thinking

'by its genius inventor: Sir Clive Sinclair.'

It's ideal for shopping, for, you know, going to the office,

going to the station, going to school.

Any relatively short range trip.

'He was so proud of his baby that he even named after himself.

'That C stands for Clive.

'Yes, it's the Clive 5.

'I told you it was cool.'

Sir Clive Sinclair gave many of us our first pocket calculator.

He also introduced my generation to the marvels of computing,

with the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, and they were brilliant.

He was a clever man.

Sorry, I mean he IS a clever man.

Cos, despite this, he's still alive.

'In fact, he wasn't just smart,

'the man was damn near clairvoyant.'

I believe firmly that all cars

ought to be electric by the next century.

Back in 1985, when this was launched,

the environment hadn't yet become a mainstream force in politics

and fashion, so this was very modern thinking.

'There were plenty of advantages.

'It was under 400 quid and five miles on this thing

'would only relieve you of one penny in running costs.

'You didn't have to tax or insure it

'and you didn't need an MOT or number plates.

'Plus, if you were a feckless youth, it got even better.'

Strictly speaking, the C5 is not a car.

In the eyes of a law, it's an electric tricycle,

which means anybody aged 14 or over can drive it.

Ride it. No, drive it. Whatever you do.

'For some reason, though,

'not everyone was thrilled about the idea of unlicensed kids

'hammering around the highways on a plastic tricycle.

Argh!

I'm very unhappy

that it's being sold

without essential safety equipment.

I wouldn't like to let my children out in it.

Are you happy at the thought of 14-year-olds

taking this onto the road? No.

There are one or two other issues.

Because you are so low, a lot of people don't see you.

They only feel you as they run over you.

Your head is at about the same height as a lorry's exhaust

and, er...

there's no reverse gear. Did I mention that?

It is catastrophically slow as well.

But it's quite good fun.

Because it's so small, the sense of terror at 50mph

is like nothing I've ever experienced before.

Oh, for God's sake!

Engaging pedals as well.

I can see why it's got the little drain holes in the seat.

I thought that was to let the rain out.

Th...

Agh!

Yes, all right!

Oh, come on!

Agh, I can go in this lane, cos I'm technically a bicycle!

Stick that in your tipper!

'So forward thinking alone, alas, just wasn't enough.'

The critics say it's not safe.

The C5 has been a flop.

Whoever brought out that...

well, wants putting up a wall and shooting.

'And the reveal of the roofless C5's wet weather solution

'was the final nail in the coffin.'

Accessories to make the C5 an all-weather vehicle

have been designed.

Waterproof side screens fit on front and rear wheel arches.

The protective cape with a hood...

'Even the actor can't keep a straight face.'

Eight months later, retailers have slashed prices

of the C5 trike to try and shift their stocks.

Keep going.

'To try and keep his much-abused electric dream alive,

'Sir Clive even sold his computer business

'to that bloke off The Apprentice.'

It was confirmed today that the assembly line

has reverted to producing washing machines.

'The Clive 5 was not alive.'

So, in the end, everybody suffered,

because Sir Clive lost a load of his money,

we didn't get the low-cost, electric urban transport solution we wanted,

and we also ended up with Alan Sugar barking at us from television.

What a bum deal!

One of the criticisms regularly levelled at Sir Clive Sinclair

and his Clive 5 is that he never did any market research.

Well, good for him, I say, because market research

wouldn't have given us the home computer,

or television, for that matter.

Progress, as George Bernard Shaw once said,

"depends on the unreasonable man".

If he'd done any market research, he'd never have built this

and then we wouldn't know what a daft idea it is.

THAT is progress.

The C5 was just a stepping stone.

It's a learning exercise.

But what it leads to is very much more important.

'And, fast forward 30 years, and we appear to have solved

'the feeble battery issue that bedevilled Clive's invention.

'Today, there are electric vehicles out there

'that have side-stepped the battery issue altogether.'

Now, this is something I approve of immensely.

It's a hydrogen fuel cell car.

It's the Hyundai ix35.

It's actually the first truly commercially available

fuel cell car in the world.

It will cost you £53,000, but new stuff is expensive.

Remember the first video players, the first digital cameras.

A few rich people have to buy them,

then the idea will catch on and we can all have them.

Then it becomes a car of the people.

Anyway, look, the interesting thing about a fuel cell car

is that it's really an electric car.

The wheels are driven by an electric motor.

But, instead of having a battery that has to be recharged,

it has a hydrogen fuel cell, which is...

well, you can think of it as a sort of on-board, miniature

electricity generating station.

And a very good one, because the one in this car makes 100 kilowatts,

which means you could run your house off it.

And the great thing about the fuel cell car

is that you simply fill it up with liquid hydrogen,

which takes about the same amount of time as it does to fill a petrol

or a diesel car up with conventional fuel.

And the range of this car on one fill-up,

if you drive carefully, is 350 miles or so.

And then you can fill it up again, which will take you three minutes

and then you can do another 350 miles.

What's not to like?

'How does it work?

'Brace yourselves.'

Look, this does all get a bit "double chemistry with Mr Stink",

so I'll try and keep it reasonably simple.

Hydrogen in the tank at the back of the car

combines with oxygen in the air to make electricity.

So, in that sense, it's a bit like a fossil fuel,

it relies on the atmosphere to work. Good.

The other interesting thing is that the hydrogen in the tank

combines with the oxygen in the air to give us, as an exhaust,

er...water, which is H2O, remember.

Hydrogen and oxygen.

You can drink it.

This all sounds very Friends Of The Earth,

but there is a catch.

Currently, there are only four hydrogen filling stations

open to the public in Britain. And one of them's in Hendon.

And that's awful, because the know-how has been around

for longer than you think.

There are two bits of technology on this car that predate

the flatulent internal combustion engine in Benz's Motorwagen.

To be honest, they predate the original Rover safety bicycle,

which was the inspiration for every bike you see over there.

Now, one of them is the electric motor.

That's not such a surprise, maybe.

But the other one is the fuel cell itself.

The basic principles of which were worked out

back in the middle of the 19th century.

The technology is perfectly understood,

it's perfectly reliable, it's perfectly usable.

The only thing we are waiting for to make this

fabulous dream of hydrogen happen...

is a hydrogen infrastructure. That's all we need.

Everything else, like this Hyundai...

..is ready.

It's extraordinary, really,

to think that we may be on the brink of a people's car revolution.

But, despite this exciting progress,

there's still one deeply unreliable component in this.

And all cars.

That component, of course,

is me. Or you.

Whoever. The driver.

Most leading carmakers are already experimenting

with elements of driverless technology.

And tech giants Google have gone the whole hog

and are trying to eliminate the steering wheel altogether.

All you have to do is sit in it and look stupid.

Now, Audi think rather differently about all this.

They say the car will be autonomous.

It will be a robot car for all the boring bits.

So driving along the motorway, heavy stop-start traffic,

all that sort of thing. But then...

when it comes to fun time, you can take over.

I'm in my Audi RS7 with 552 horsepower

and I'm on a track day in Spain,

in Catalunya, in fact.

Ooh!

How did I do?

2 minutes, 20. 2:20? Yep.

Yeah, I think it'll go faster than that.

'This, if you haven't guessed,

'is the experimental autonomous version of the RS7.'

So, Thomas Muller, very briefly, please. How does it work?

James, the car works like a professional race driver.

You know, it knows the track already.

Through differential GPS and through cameras, it's a complex technology.

Depending on the stability of the car,

depending on the driving dynamics,

it's going to choose the best path to go through all this course.

But, in the end, it's like a professional race driver.

What, so it makes excuses all the time?

'So, can a car capable of analysing track conditions

'to follow the best racing line

'beat a car journo with years of experience?

'To find out if it can better my time of 2:20,

'it's going to take me captive for a high-speed lap.'

All I actually need to do is keep my thumb on that button

and the car will drive me round. That's it.

And I was about to say I'll just get the seat in the right position

for the pedals and everything, but I don't need to.

Technically, I could sit in the back and do this.

But they won't let me.

So...

goodbye, cruel world.

Right. If I hold this button,

the car will go.

And I mustn't touch anything.

That feels weird.

Don't brake. Don't brake. Don't brake.

It's braking for me. Excellent. That's a result.

Actually, this is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Don't touch the steering wheel. I'm not touching the pedals.

Into the right-hander.

It's drifting across. It's done that properly.

Brakes! Brakes! Argh, that's the hairpin.

That's slowed right down now.

It's going to give it the beans as it comes out of there.

70, 80.

Agh, I don't like this one!

Don't touch the brakes!

Oh, God. This is the long straight.

Here we go. 88, 88, 90, 91.

Now it's 100.

That's about 120.

Brake, you bastard!

Come on, otherwise I'm going to let go of the button!

Yes. Thank you.

Ooh.

Ooh, might have to edit some of that out.

Come on, I've just done the vorsprung.

And now on the home finish straight. It's going straight.

I'm going to take my finger off the button.

And there it is. It's a car.

I wasn't scared in the slightest.

'Maybe not,

'but the car's own lap was eight seconds faster than mine.

'In racing terms, that's the difference between

'a night out with James Hunt and a night in with James May.

'And that's a slightly depressing thought.'

A lot of people say, the autonomous car will be the end of driving.

I think, actually, it could be the end of the car, as we know it,

as a means of just getting around, because, if we can develop a system

that clever, that keeps us all apart,

why not use it to get around up there?

Because that's where all the space is.

And then the car can become a hobby.

Excellent.

'All right. So maybe I'm getting carried away with the flying thing.

'But autonomous technology is already with us.

'My i3 can park itself, remember.

'However, just as in 1900, we still don't know for sure

'what the people's car of the future will be.

'Even the old ideas refuse to go away.

'Remember steam cars?'

Chuffa-chuffa-chuffa-chuffa...

'People are still experimenting with those.

'This one does 160mph.

'Chuffing hell!'

I am a boat.

'Amphicars now look like this.

'And could be operated by even the clinically delusional.'

I'm Mr Darcy.

Come on!

'And turbines?

'The fastest car on earth is powered by a jet engine.

'With some help from a rocket.'

'Good old TVR has risen from the ashes...'

Blackpool uber alles!

'..and has plans for an all-new car, again.

'And Clive Sinclair: he still dreams

'of an elegant, electric transport solution.

'Until that happens, he's funding this:

'the electric A-bike.

'So, where does this leave the man in the street?'

I actually think we're in a golden age of the car,

because, for about 120 years or so,

it developed very slowly.

It just crept along incrementally.

But, all of a sudden, we're looking at things

like new methods of propulsion, new materials,

possible autonomy, connectivity.

It's all really fantastic stuff, but it is very much work in progress,

because: here is a slightly depressing statistic:

the real-world range of my electric BMW i3

is about 75 miles.

The real-world range of the electric Baker

we saw right at the beginning of the programme...

it's about 75 miles.

Hm.

Right, to the Batmobile.