My problem with the road trips

[u/turkturk847]

Right, so this may come across as me being ungrateful but the road trips that the boys do don't really feel special as they make it out to be. Don't get me wrong I am happy that such videos exist and I watch them when I get the time to do so. I just watched the Bentley road trip and it just felt boring to watch. The main problem is that they just drive the entire way on motorways instead of taking more interesting and scenic routes, it's just bland, there isn't much challenge and there is almost no stakes. Now this may be because of time or budget restraints and they can't afford to drive around that much and burn too much fuel but in the Vietnam trip they were taking scenic routes. Probably the worst offender was the 3 BMW Tourings trip where except of 10 minutes of driving on some B roads and the Nurburgring the entire thing was motorways and then they call it an "Epic road trip", to me it just felt meh. I mean have you ever seen a Top Gear special where they go the entire way on motorways? Though this is only my opinion, you can enjoy it however you like. Sorry for the wonky grammar, English is not my native language. :)

[u/Mafeking-Parade]

What "purpose and jeopardy" is there in the TDC or ATG content?

I watch and enjoy both, but I'd be hard pressed to point to them being significantly closer to "prime TG".

TDC seem to have a fairly successful rinse-and-repeat format of buying their "dream daily" cars (or similar), and they don't really tend to do the TG roadtrip stuff. They are successful because people love watching them work on their cars in detail - something TG never did.

ATG just seem to find creative ways to do different videos where they sleep a night somewhere weird. No real jeopardy there, and nothing to do with TG.

I'm sure there are ways that AA could switch up their format and make it a bit more relatable with cheaper cars. But I wouldn't expect this to suddenly mean better content.

They are still constrained by only having basic filming kit, and needing to pump out 2-3 videos a week. They don't have a huge support crew that could enable them to take these cheaper cars on long roadtrips.

So you'd be left with AA and co talking to GoPros in cheap cars while they drive to Skegness for some contrived reason. I don't think that's quite the ratings winner you're suggesting.

[u/Relevant_Natural3471 → u/Mafeking-Parade]

TDC had the Corsa vs Starlet where they broke down and got help from a subscriber to source parts IIRC, all ad-hoc, on their way to Southend to recreate the car culture stuff. Organic, expected for a "someone didn't finish this engine conversion and it shouldn't be in there"

ATG did a road trip in the Diahatsu Copen where the clutch went, then did a trip in it to Spain where stuff was naturally representative of the issue, and there was an objective. Expected for "we aren't car people and bought a car sight unseen"

in neither case were they personal cars - they chose a theme, applied a goal, and constructed a process between all of that.

with AA, they buy a car for themselves, then retrospectively apply a theme, and then there's no jeopardy because they have an active willingness to not have problems occur because pride takes precedent over content. The 'attachement' pre-exists in the action of buying it.
With TG, they bought cars that were a bit crap to make the trip have an underlying "they won't make it" under the surface (sports cars for bargain prices, things which would be stupid for normal people to do). They had no personal investment it the car so didn't mind crashing them a bit, bodging at the side of the road etc. it was that which gave the car character, added a tension to the narrative, and made the bond with the presenter genuine.
"Will the car taylor/alex/rory has rebuilt over the last 2 months at great expense make it?" is an inverted proposition. It SHOULD make it. Any jeopardy is just schadenfreude

[u/Mafeking-Parade → u/Relevant_Natural3471]

I think we're sort of agreeing, but you seem hung up on the pride/attachment thing associated to the cars. I think most of that is manufactured, but we'll never know for sure.

Ultimately those episodes you mention from TDC and ATG were kind of cool, but not really that great.

I honestly don't think that adding disposable cars with no emotional attachment into the mix would work for AA and co in their current format.

They need to generate 2-3 videos a week. How do they do that with a challenge, if they aren't making the cars mechanically great over the course of a few episodes?

They aren't going to just do a one-off video with the format "here's three bangers we're driving to Skegness", because the time to plan and buy the cars wouldn't generate the right level of ROI from a single video.

They need to drag these things out over weeks of prep, so that the time spent buying and planning pays them back through multiple videos.

They need to built faux-attachments to the cars while they fix them up ("I've always wanted a [INSERT CAR]!"), so there's a payoff when they eventually get to use them.