Chryslers Rule… Jayne Mansfield Drools…

You’ve seen Top Gear, right? It’s a British show featuring a few limey characters that test drive super cars under all kinds of crazy scenarios and then report back with witty commentary. It’s actually quite watchable. There’s also an American version, but… well, it doesn’t deserve mentioning here.

Anyway, one of the more common formats of the show is pitting three or four brands of cars against each other using different performance criteria as a measuring stick. Often, these battles turn one sided in a comical way. One older episode pitted a 911 against something Italian. They couldn’t keep the Italian car running long enough to compete against the German, so they ended the show by attempting to destroy the 911 in anyway imaginable. They dropped it from a 20′ crane, they drove it through a lake, they dipped it in battery acid – all kinds of crazy shit, but the car kept on running.

Like I said, it’s all very watchable automotive TV and that’s not something we get much here in the states. And Top Gear is one of a handful of British shows that does get it right (Wheeler Dealers comes to mind right off the top). It all made me wonder this morning – How did those damned Brits come up with all of this brilliant content when we… the US… is the foundation of the world’s car culture? Damnit man… What is going on here?

And then I found this video. Apparently, the Brits are thieves in the night!