Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Top Gear gives Honda Clarity FCX thumbs up

I have watched all of Top Gear seasons and little did they review green cars,well lets say Jeremy Clarkson way of saying an eco-friendly car is a Lamborghini Murcielago painted green, then yeah no they have not at all until this year's Season 12. What makes this episode different from all of their previous episodes are that apart from all there usually challenges and adventures across country in super fast cars are the things that make them more entertaining although this episode focuses on two cars which could become the future of automobiles.

Season 12 episode 7 focuses on the first electric sports car, the Telsa roadster created by Telsa Motors and the consumer-based electric family car the Honda Clarity FCX. As usually Jeremy Clarkson (JC) tests the Telsa roadster, drives it like mad however pushing the car a little to much to drain it out of charge. Anyways JC enjoys it even with the dissatisfaction of the car halting to a stop twice due to the lack of charge but in the end this car could become the future sports car.

On the other hand, Captain Slow a.k.a. James May flies to United States to drive the Honda Clarity FCX. He gives a detailed description of how the technology works and the cameraman being bored with the facts and a chat with Jay Leno, a man with an awesome garage, in the end he finishes off that climate change, global warming and that governments are taking strict rules about curbing emissions, the Clarity will become an household item in the near future.

I would have to say the first time Top Gear has done a good job on reviewing eco-friendly cars, and I get the fact that nothing can beat driving a Ferrari 430 or a Lamborghini Gallardo or an Aston Martin DBS and all the gas-guzzlers but we have to think about the future and companies like Tesla Motors, Honda, Toyota, GM, will provide us cars which are environment-friendly that will blow our minds and hope that the Top Gear team will be the first to go show us that.

1 comment:

Rachel said...

For the record: Thanks to The Stig’s impressive turn behind the wheel, the Tesla Roadster gets ranked in Top Gear’s performance board just above a Porsche 911 GT3. And if those results don’t speak for themselves: Jeremy Clarkson, a die-hard “petrol head” with a clear bias against green cars generally (not to mention his famed anti-American car bias), said that it must be “snowing in hell” because he had such a great time driving the Roadster.

In fact, he called himself a “volt head” thanks to the Roadster’s amazing performance. This is amazingly high praise indeed from Clarkson, whose tremendous entertainment value comes in part from his ability to savage even his most beloved petrol-guzzling race cars. It might not be immediately apparent to first-time Top Gear viewers just tuning into this one episode about Tesla, but Clarkson’s treatment of the Roadster arguably constitutes a positive review, and I’m sure most faithful viewers of the show would agree. We are quite pleased with the instrumented results.

However, simply to clarify just a few things: Never at any time did Clarkson or any of the Top Gear drivers run out of charge. In fact, they never got below 20 percent charge in either car; they never had to push a car off the track because of lack of charge or a fault. It’s unclear why they were filmed pushing one into a garage in the video, and I can’t speculate as to why they did this, as neither car needed a push and both were working the entire time.

Finally, a quick observation about the show's coverage of Honda's hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle: They were quite bullish about the car, though they seemed to have omitted critical details about pricing and availability. The FCX Clarity -- by the way, Honda says X stands for "experiment" -- cannot be purchased at all but rather leased for $600 per month to 200 pre-qualified customers in Southern California in the next three years.

Clarkson rips on the Roadster for being three times the price of a Lotus Elise -- yet I find it odd that no one mentions the cost of the FCX Clarity. Honda refuses to divulge the cost, but its previous FCX, first delivered in 2002, cost about $1 million each to produce, and executives have indicated that the new ones are about half the cost of the old ones. Auto industry analysts peg the cost at somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000 each. That’s half a dozen Roadsters – which incidentally are for sale right now to anyone who has the money.

Thanks, and I’m glad so many folks enjoyed the show and it has sparked such robust debate in the blogosphere.

Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors Inc.