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I was in high school when this clip came out, so perhaps I wasn’t as dialed in to the nuances of current events as much then. But to teenage me, things did seem to be pretty bleak. Australia was on fire, we were six years into the Iraq War, the Great Recession was in full swing (though that did cause gas prices to fall). My dad got laid off from his job. Cars—especially magnificent, soulful ones like V12 Aston Martins—were what brought me joy. To think that they’d soon be no more was a terrible thought.
In retrospect, Clarkson missed the mark. Not completely. Just a lot of it. (Who actually hits the mark with these kinds of forecasts, though?) It’s easy to fret about the death of supercars from the driver’s seat of a V12 Vantage in 2009 while staring down the barrel of All That Stuff—though I am sure the “relentless war on speed” was a bit of overinflated, self-indulgent doomerism—but it’s also because we literally had no idea what would happen next.
In Clarkson’s defense, he wasn’t specific when he said, “cars like this.” So did he mean naturally aspirated supercars? Supercars in general? Because if he meant the former, he had a point. The successors to cars like the V10 M5, Porsche Carrera GT, Ferrari Enzo, Ferrari 458 Italia, Ford GT, and Lexus LFA all either went forced induction, hybrid, or were eliminated altogether. Today, only the Lamborghini Huracán, Lamborghini Aventador, and Audi R8 maintain the free-breathing remnants of the late-aughts from which they came.
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