Top Gear

Tonight, I hold up a jar.

James points at a hill.

And Richard eats a sandwich.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hello! Hello and welcome! Thank you so much, everybody! Thank you.

We start tonight with a big and important issue.

You see, back in 1975,

just 15% of people aged over 70 had a driving licence.

Today, it's more than 60%, and that means

the roads are full of people whose eyes are broken and whose feet hurt.

And car-makers are just not recognising this fact.

Most modern cars are made for techno-savvy teenagers.

Yeah, my mother, she just says all she wants from a car

is Classic FM and a heater

and everything else is a waste of money and annoying

and possibly even dangerous.

Which is why Jeremy and I decided it was time we went out and bought

a car to modify specially for today's enormous army of pensioner drivers.

This meant heading to the Top Gear Technology Centre -

the birthplace of all our great projects.

And, while Richard went off to buy a car which we could modify,

I examined the scale of the problem.

This Volvo has very few buttons, and that's a good thing, but each

one seems to do 28 different things depending on how you push it.

What does My Car mean? BLIS? DSTC?

Collision Warning? Why would you want to turn that off?!

And look at these - if you're 85,

these are just out-of-focus hieroglyphics!

Things were just as bad in this Ford Focus.

What does Block 5A mean?

There's literally nothing,

nothing on here which is old-people friendly.

"Press source for USB BT line in."

I'm sure all this makes perfect sense

to the foetus that designed it,

but to anyone over 65 it is just incomprehensible gibberish.

'Before I had a chance to get to grips with the Citroen...'

Oh, for BLEEP sake! '..Richard was back with the car he'd bought -

'a Fiat Multipla, famous for having three seats in the front

'and three in the back.

'To decide what to do with it, we set up a mood room.'

GENTLE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

All top designers use rooms like this to put them into

the actual mind of the customers they're trying to attract.

So, for example, we have an early vacuum cleaner, a one-bar heater,

a TV listings magazine, many of which are available,

with the programmes we want to watch highlighted.

It really is just like being in James May's front room.

Well, where do you think we got everything from?

What I'm seeing with every single thing in here

is simplicity and comfort.

Comfort on the chair, simplicity of the mop, the kettle, the TV.

Everything is simple.

It's simple...straightforward and yet,

in the case of this small sofa, also strangely itchy.

JEREMY LAUGHS

After several intense hours in the mood room, we at least knew

what colour our car should be, so we went off to get some paint.

Excuse me, you know this machine, can you match the colours of things?

Yeah, we can try.

Can you match the colour of this hearing aid, this bit,

specifically that bit. That is a symphony in beige.

That's the colour we want. Can it really do that?

So analyse the colour of the hearing aid. Can it do my left nipple?

With the paint sorted,

we went back to the Top Gear Technology Centre to begin work.

Look at this dash. Speedo - out of focus. Radio - too complicated.

It's all going to be changed, all of it.

I've been thinking about safety and not just for the car's occupants.

So, with that in mind, old people find it very difficult to look around

when they're reversing - it's just a fact -

so I'm planning a system for the rear, to help them

stop reversing into garage walls and lampposts, their wives.

I'm also planning much, much bigger door mirrors.

Then, at the front, a radical redesign of the front bumper

to avoid and minimise expensive bodywork damage.

I'm thinking.

After several hours,

Jeremy's dashboard was beginning to take shape.

Um, airbags. Yeah.

Dangerous, because you're not allowed to put children in the front seat

with them there because they're too delicate. Yeah.

Old people, they tend to sit quite far forwards even

when they're not driving. And they're just as delicate as children.

There you go - danger. So I think we get rid of them. Can I have them?

Yeah, I don't need them. I've got a plan.

I'll have your airbags out in literally...

Are you sure this is...? I'm not sure this is... Yes!

But the airbag had to be defused by cutting one of the two wires.

Which one do I cut? One presumably sets the bomb off.

Well, not bomb, but explosives. Yeah.

How much explosive is in an airbag? Quite a lot. Is there?

Is it really a lot? It is, genuinely it's a lot.

You can get burns from it. It's a lot.

So let's get inside the mind of the man who made it. He's Italian. Yeah.

So if I think it's blue, it's probably brown.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Wait! Yeah, no, you see, brown - that might be what they want you to think.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Wait! Wait. What colours are in the Italian flag?

None of those.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Ah, you see! It was easy! I wasn't worried.

We could just edit all that stuff out. Yeah.

While Hammond continued with his safety features, I started

making a new dashboard and soon had something to show my colleague.

You know elderly people like to drive quite slowly?

Yeah, like James. Exactly.

So this is what I've done to get round the problem.

Brilliant - so it only reads 20 even if they're doing 80 miles an hour.

115! "I'm only doing 17 miles an hour," so they're happy.

The people stuck behind, whose wives are in labour

and they have meetings to get to, they're happy. Everybody wins.

'I was also rather proud of my old-people-friendly rear fog light.'

This'll be mounted in the car - this is the switch.

So as soon as it starts a little bit of light drizzle,

the elderly person turns on the rear fog light

and then what happens round the back is...

absolutely nothing at all.

With the new dash sorted, I started to think about the rear seats and I

went online to search for an advert I remembered from the early '80s.

And that's it, that's it! Hammond! Hammond! Come and look at this!

Watch this commercial. Ready?

It's grand to find a comfortable chair

when you're getting on a bit or you've got arthritis.

My niece got this from Shackletons, you know.

You know! You know! You know!

Shackletons' original high seat.

Never thought it would be so easy to get in and out of.

Shackletons' high seat chair. It's lovely.

Hang on, so you're saying replace that with one of those?

But they're so easy to get in and out of, YOU KNOW!

And it is lovely to find a nice, high seat.

"A-Team" theme

Things were better in the old days. They were. Fact.

Oh! Oh-ho, oh-ho!

Ohhhh...

Come on, that is brilliant!

'Our car was coming along nicely.

'We removed the Fiat badges, which were a bit foreign,

'and replaced them with something more appropriate.

'Hammond softened the suspension and I installed a pet cage.'

A cat bolted to the roof?

I'm not bolting the cat, I'm bolting the cat cage to the roof

and then it'll be up here and I won't get asthma.

'As I was busy with my cat carrying system,

'Hammond decided to make some covers for the front seats.'

Weirdly, I've used this as my inspiration. It's a BAC Mono.

Because it's a track car, it's got no roof or doors or windows,

so they line the interior with this special material.

I've got some here.

In beige, obviously.

Now, it's quite plush, it feels like suede or even velvet,

but when it gets wet, here's the strange thing -

the water just runs off.

Look at that! You'd think it would be ruined, but it just flies away.

I'm going to use it to make what I shall call inconti seat covers.

By the evening, our car was almost finished, but we felt a bit strange.

What's extraordinary about today is that, without James here, there

have been no arguments, nobody's caught fire, nobody's fallen over.

We've been like a well-oiled machine

and I think we've created something really rather brilliant.

And with that, back to the studio.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The thing is, I've just got a question, actually.

What do you do...?

While we're on the subject of old people, what do you do when you know

that your mother or father is really too old to be driving any more.

Good question. You can't really say, "Hand over your licence."

I think that's why our car makes so much sense.

Yeah, and we shall see how it does in a road test later on.

What happened to your eye? Nothing, nothing at all.

No, because you weren't there with your slap-happy attitude,

no part of the needle of the sewing machine went in it.

Not even a tiny... No, not even a tiny bit. No. No. So, the news.

You know there's a new Volkswagen Golf? Yes. Very nice, actually.

But in four months there'll be a GTI version of it.

Now, that will have 217 horsepower...

Or no, actually, it's German - cowpower.

217 cowpower engine and it's going to be about £25,000.

Thing is, though, there's going to be a rival for this.

You know the car we looked at last week, the Kia Cee'd, well,

look at this. This is the... They're calling it the Pro Cee'd GT.

I think that looks rather good. It does.

And it's two grand less than the Volkswagen.

Nearly three grand less.

And the thing I like about that is they haven't gone absolutely

mad with it. It's a 1.6 litre turbo, 200 horsepower, which is...

Well, no, it's not horsepower. It's Korean. It's dogpower, yeah.

Exactly, yeah.

I tell you what, though, if you don't want to spend that much,

the reason we bring these hot hatchbacks up

is, Volkswagen has announced, you know the Up, which we love?

It's a great little car. Really brilliant little car.

They've announced they're doing a GT version of it here, OK?

Now, this is going to have 110 horsepower,

so exactly the same as the original Golf GTI.

It's smaller than an original Golf GTI, it weighs less than a tonne.

I reckon that will be epic and it's £13,000!

No, I think that could be brilliant.