Writing last week in The Guardian, the mad old eco-fool George Monbiot went even further, saying that the Lake District is a chemical desert, devoid of wildlife and that the tradition of hill farming — the very thing the people with titles and CBEs want to preserve — is responsible. Because the sheep are eating the trees and the mountains and causing floods. Earthquakes, too, I should imagine.” But of course, Clarkson was won over by the “slayer-of-worlds” 635 horsepower (“What a rush”), the motorsport cornering sophistication even on bumpy, potholed roads, the familiar carbon-fibre-clad interior and the understated exterior. It's hard to know why this is so. We know that Japan's economy has been bumping along in the Mariana Trench for some time, but that's the great thing about the country's industry. It's always had its sights set on the export market, so why isn't it making exciting, flashy stuff now for all of the new money in China and Russia?

The best clips on Driving Video: Ford Supervan EV races up Pikes Peak Video: Ferrari SF90 XX walkaround Giorgetto Giugiaro, legendary car designer › More here... Jeremy Clarkson found driving in Cornwall so slow he had time to count the hand stitches in his Bentley Continental GT Mulliner Despite all that, Jeremy’s four-star review described the 296 GTB as a “tremendous car to look at and drive.” He also praised the engineers’ efforts to hide the “hybrid madness”.Clarkson claims that he doesn’t usually like “cars that produce more than 700 horsepower because they make no sense on the road,” but “this one delivers its power so smoothly and so righteously it makes you grin, not soil yourself.” But because the electrics started going wrong, including one incident when the driver’s seat kept moving forward on its own, crushing him against the steering wheel until he looked “like Stanley Tucci towards the end of that movie The Core,” Clarkson concluded he couldn’t trust the Merc and refused to drive it again. Then you have Rolls and Porsche, and Volvo and Saab and Toyota and Mahindra, and Kia and Hyundai and Peugeot and Fiat and Ford and GM and Honda all spending fortunes on the next generation of petrol hybrids and diesel hybrids and plug-in hybrids, all of which meet a fleeting need now, in the same way that cats met a fleeting need 30 years ago. But they aren't the answer. BMW 730d SE: “Then there’s the iDrive system. In essence, one button — think of it as a computer mouse — controls thousands of controls on the car, and I’m sure you can get used to it in the same way that you can get used to having a nasty headache.”

I had to stop and reach for my spectacles because the steering wheel was festooned with many buttons, most of which seemingly did nothing,” he complained. “I know it’s important for Ferrari to give drivers an F1 experience but they’re too complicated.” If you liked reading Jeremy Clarkson’s best and worst cars of 2021, you might also be interested to read Clarkson on The Grand Tour Series 3’s globetrotting high jinks

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It’s possible this will be the last M4 before electric drive takes over so I’m glad to see it going out in such style. Not with an especially large bang … but with a satisfied, arms folded, post Sunday lunch sense of a job really well done,” Clarkson concluded. You may think the reason people spit at 4x4s these days has something to do with Greenland’s blanket of ice. It isn’t. It’s because you’re well off. And that’s not allowed.” It’s size is ridiculous on Oxfordshire roads, and amazingly renders it too big to drive around his farm, but despite being “stupid”, Clarkson wants one. Or maybe because it’s stupid? The best thing about the Alpine A110, according to Clarkson, is that despite having the engine in the middle, it’s “not a plonker’s car”. This, he wrote, is because it’s so small, and therefore not threatening. “The young men of Abu Dhabi will not be going around Harrods till three in the morning in one of these, that’s for sure.”