Saturday, June 02, 2007

Petrol Heads, Clarkson's Dirty Dozen and a Refreshing Dearth of Political Correctness


Unapologetically I say Clarkson is my kind of guy, never more so than doing what he does best, reviewing motors ad writing in his uninhibited style. Who would think for instance this is part of a review for the Cadillac SRX4.
In fact I think an award is in order.

“I could have one of these,” I thought as I pulled into my yard. But of course I can’t, because I am a man and the Audi TT is so completely girlie that I’m surprised it isn’t supplied with a bra and high heels. It really is Jane Austen with windscreen wipers.

Or is it? If you believe hardline feminists, the sort of people who have Amazonian lady-gardens and wear dungarees made from hemp, then all men are intrinsically rapists and the only reason we don’t actually molest every single girl we see is because we’re all at home beating up our wives. Males, thanks to their physical size and their muscles and their need to spray seed into everyone and everything, are threatening, dangerous and deeply unpleasant.


Really? I only ask because if we look at nature, it’s normally the other way round.

Only recently we were shown pictures in the newspapers of a lioness that had attacked another mother’s cub and then dragged its bloody carcass under a tree and eaten it.

Then you have the praying mantis. As we all know, the female celebrates a successful impregnation by biting the head off its lover.

Other examples include the Mills-McCartney, a curious one-legged animal that infests the male’s nest for a short period of time and then leaves with most of its contents.

Or this from the review of the Mitsubishi Warrior.


But you need to remember that Ford has sold 800,000 F-series pick-up trucks every year for the past five years. They account for a quarter or all its sales and half its profits. They bring in $20 billion a year, which means that if the F-150 pick-up truck were a corporation, it would be in the Fortune 100 list.

Imagine my horror then when my wife casually announced the other day she’d like a pick-up. “What,” I exclaimed, “in the name of all that’s holy, do we want one of those for?” We’re European. We were sipping tea while the Americans were shooting Indians. We’ve had 2,000 years to get used to civilisation, not 20 minutes. We’re advanced, we’re slim, we’re at the cutting edge of evolution. We think that shooting bears is daft. Budweiser gives us a headache and we think George Bush is an arse. So why in God’s name do we want to drive around in a car made from a hen house and two bits of railway track?
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I will come to Cadillac's defence however, when I watched this yoke being reviewed on the box I did say to meself, that's one tasty bit of non apologetic kit. Not that you could buy one for that matter and even if you could the tag would be a zillion dollars.

The Cadillac Sixteen. (proto)

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