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Jeremy Clarkson: Executive cars are all the same

6.9.2016 Print

If there is one person in the world of cars who has a major impact on what consumers buy, it's the English journalist Jeremy Clarkson, a former moderator on the world's most successful motoring show, Top Gear produced by BBC where he started in the late 1980s. Although he has been often criticized for his politically incorrect opinions, he became a respected expert on motoring, popular not only on television, but also from many newspaper articles and books. What does he think about executive cars?

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The Clarkson effect remains strong

Jeremy Clarkson's influence on the success of individual car manufacturers and models has a specialized term in English - the "Clarkson effect". Marketing professionals talk about this effect in connection with, for example, the decline in sales of Opel Vectra. Clarkson criticized the Vectra for the first time in 1997. Then in 2002 he described this car as as so bad and boring that he refused to test it again. Instead, he wrote a column about the reed warbler.

If, on the other hand, a car won all five stars in Clarkson's columns in the Sunday Times (which was not often), the car's sales rose by about 7,000 units in the UK alone. Visits to the websites of cars that were positively reviewed grew by hundreds of percent after publication.

At the beginning of 2015, Jeremy Clarkson was dismissed from the Top Gear show after a strong disagreement with its producer, and subsequently fired from the BBC. Fans of his tests and reviews, however, are eagerly awaiting the new show Clarkson will present with his former colleagues from Top Gear, Richard Hammond and James May. The new show will be called The Grand Tour, and broadcast by the Amazon Prime video service. The first parts have already been filmed and should be released this autumn. BBC's Top Gear, with new presenters, has not gained much popularity yet. It seems that the successful brand suffered after the presenters left, and it will suffer in the future as well.

See the arrival of The Grand Tour filming team to Vicenza, Italy, on July 7, 2016.

What executive car should you choose?

"I can’t imagine for the life of me why anyone would want an executive saloon car," says Jeremy Clarkson on executive cars. However, if you want one, you can choose from among only four brands - the Audi A6, Jaguar XF, BMW 5 Series and Mercedes E-Class. All these cars are, unfortunately, economical, convenient, reliable and equipped in the same way. So which one should you choose? Jeremy Clarkson advises:

It's like choosing a place for your honeymoon. When you exclude the Seychelles where you would most likely be eaten by sharks, there is only the Caribbean, Mauritius, the Maldives and Tahiti. Brochures presenting these destinations are exactly the same. The sea looks beautiful, but hides many inconveniences and danger. Generally, you'll get the same experience everywhere. I would chose the Caribbean. Why? Because I love it. Likewise, I would choose a BMW. If I, however, don't decide to go on honeymoon on Capri because no one else would either.

-kk-

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