Hacker Cinema
The Grand Tour
2016 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, Andy Wilman
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are back with a show about adventure, excitement and friendship... as long as you accept that the people you call friends are also the ones you find extremely annoying. Sometimes it's even a show about cars. Follow them on their global adventure.
11 positive2 negative15 neutralfrom 28 commenters
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31 comments on Hacker News
the Amazon's Grand Tour episode which compared the Jeep Wrangler, a Chevrolet Silverado, and Panda 4x4 as jungle cars was highly satisfying.
I probably would have moved to Jellyfin if they had an Xbox app available at the time (I see they re-launched it a month and a half ago now...) but alas, the main thing is that my media is mine to enjoy when and how I wish without needing to jump through any DRM hoops or ads or multiple services.
I still have Prime as a "bonus", though I wouldn't pay if it was removed because I only use it for The Grand Tour. Netflix was the first to go, as it was where I found the removal of content most annoying. It also decided to geoblock me on a 2019 trip to Japan: I had downloaded some shows, on my Canadian wifi, to my unrooted phone with a Canadian SIM card, with Canadian taxes paid on the subscription, and it still blocked access as soon as I was in Japan. That will never be an issue with self-hosting.
Disney+ is the one I'd like to cancel next - it's my partner's account and has just blocked her dad's access, but there's a lot of content I would need to self-host. I'm inspired to by a really annoying quirk of their app: if you put on a show, then fall asleep, reopen the app and the top choice will be "continue watching" which takes you straight back to playing where the app paused with the "are you still watching?" message. So to get back to the episode list, you need to fast forward through the entire episode and then choose "back to episode listing" in the 15 seconds before it goes to the next ep. Why the "continue watching" button doesn't just bring up the episode list is a mystery to me.
> "I think there is a very distinct “lightning in a bottle” component to great and/or successful companies."
Watching The Grand Tour[1] season 1 it feels stilted, awkward, like they are reciting their lines for some forced humor while Amazon showers cash and flashy cars all around trying too hard. If it was like this with three unknown people I wouldn't bother - I'm only watching on the hope that the lightning in a bottle sparks up again as they settle in, because the highs of Top Gear were good - friends messing about for a laugh, daring bold ideas, beautiful filming and settings.
e.g. scaling the Guallatiri volcano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOcJOn0nxnU
Crossing salt flats in Botswana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OETj9aTYO2Q
Driving to the North Pole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkvASxfEWQ
Driving the Bolivian Death Road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daQcxVqQJsI
Building their own amphibious cars and crossing the English Channel in them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTVPPTV-bQM
Trying to run out of fuel before arriving at the Chernobyl exclusion zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YtVV1VJ4f8
Getting lost trying to leave a traditional Italian city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI
Budget Italian Supercars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCff8nCxBU
[1] When they stopped Top Gear, Amazon snapped up Clarkson Hammond and May to make a Top Gear knockoff for Amazon Prime, that's The Grand Tour.
Is there anything wrong with that ?
Their 'Infinite resources and big property given to random nobodies'(LOTR) or 'big creators given infinite resources to create a no-name property'(Woody Allen - Miley Cyrus show) both failed. Their big hits have been episode-1-viral TV shows like The-Boys that they could fun risk free or established brain-dead guaranteed hits like The-Grand-Tour.
Netflix & Prime need to start learning from HBO. Running a sustainable subscription business is a tried-and-tested model. But, their obsession with establishing monopoly through loss-leaders means they will never reach monetary-sustainability as long as they're in their 'growth' phase.
This is peak "uber vs lyft" where everyone was getting hyper-subsidized rides while both were bleeding money by the million.
The Grand Tour touched on this with their "french cars" episode.
Thank you. That's precisely why I built this. Yesterday I wanted to catch up on Season 3 of Grand Tour and guess which site I went to see what to watch!
It absolutely was an accounting trick, done in the name of TV ratings. This is Jeremy Clarkson - he's a TV personality and things done on his TV shows are not to be taken seriously.
The farm had a grain business, sheep, a farm store for veg and stuff, and grants from government for re-naturing part of the property. I have no idea how Clarkson calculated the 144 profit, but I suspect there was a lot of shenanigans do arrive at that number for effect.
Edit - I'll add that I enjoyed the show. While obviously done for shock value (similar vein as as Top Gear and Grand Tour), it did a reasonable job showing how complicated and expensive running a farm can be.
If you're ok with Georgia, you should check out Batumi. It's a bustling coastal city that's seen impressive growth since independence. It's also pretty close to Turkey, so there are land routes to Trabzon (and flights from there to Istanbul).
Batumi is also known as Colchis, the destination for the Argonauts in Greek Mythology, so plenty of history & culture and great food.
The Grand Tour did a special driving through Georgia to Azerbaijan if you want to get a feel for what the region looks like:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6068920/
> Most are terrible off-roaders
I always love revisiting the Canada episode of The Grand Tour where they tested 3 midsize SUVs and concluded that they’re neither sporty nor provide much utility.
> I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Ultimately that's one show though. Amazon have spent BIG on some of their series. The Grand Tour had an enormous, enormous budget compared to Top Gear. They are spending Game of Thrones money on Wheel of Time.
They did Lampshade[1] the supposed scripting in an episode of Grand Tour[2]. They've got a huge crew and lots of stuff, so going over borders is a huge hassle without extensive preparation. Basically it needs to be scripted to some point to work at all.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging [2] S2E4, Unscripted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6068870/
Nio makes a supercar, the EP9 which while impractical because it requires a team of technicians to operate and has a rather large price tag (2.5M GBP), it seems to be quite an impressive vehicle (see The Grand Tour's episode on it [0]).
I wonder how much of that engineering has translated into the ET7.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilEG53Cl3LE
Check out the Grand Tour episode they filmed there. One of my favorites.
You're right about cars, but I'm unsure whether that's from ads or not. I rarely if ever see advertisements for cars, unless you consider TV shows like Top Gear/Grand Tour to be advertisements for cars.
I think the difference is that I live in a different country. I don't consume much local media and even if I did there are few enough local products that you would've heard of all of them by word of mouth. Take the soda as an example. I've certainly seen Coke and Pepsi ads, but I've not seen (or at least can't remember) ads for about half the sodas in my local supermarket. Even when Coke released Coke Zero the first time I found out about it was seeing it on a shelf in a store.
But let's say that all of what you're saying is true. The effect from it seems quite small. I'd estimate that I spend at least 5 minutes a day seeing ads.
I wonder if there are any family with kids on content subscription service decide not to get Disney+ and instead get Apple TV+ if they were to choose between one of the two. I just dont see this happening now, in three years time, or even in 5 years.
And if they were to get another Content Subscription Service, would they choose Apple TV+ at half the cost of Netflix, or Netflix with hundred if not thousand times more content from Originals, Movies to Anime?
Then there is the Amazon Prime, which means it is Free for the 100 million subscribers in US.
Even The Grand Tour wasn't good enough for me to stick with Amazon Prime Video, and I have been watching Jeremy Clarkson shouting POWER for nearly two decades. At this rate I see majority of people subscribing to two streaming services at best and just go back to pirate other shows they like. And even if that was the case, there doesn't seems to be any show worth pirating from Apple TV + now, or in the near future.
I just learned about this last week watching "Seamen" on prime video[0]. It is pretty terrifying.
But one thing I don't get is: once the dam is built and filled up, shouldn't the water be back to flow regularly? It seems the dam should only act as a buffer, but not cause a dramatic decrease in water flow. Is it because evaporation at the water basin is much higher than on the river?
[0] an episode of the show called "The Grand Tour" where they usually drive cars, but here they drove boats on the Mekong.
A good insight on how daming and sand dredging is destroying the Mekong is in the latest Grand Tour episode. The extent of the damage that humans have caused to other humans surviving on the river is unfathomable.
>We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies.
Ok, but China is adding millions of brand new drivers to the roads every year, they've had to institute a lottery system just to determine who can apply for a license. They're building roads, bridges, gas stations etc as fast as they can to accommodate all of the new drivers and you can see this documented in the China episode of Grand Tour last season. This is going to happen with or without subsidies (Besides, I highly doubt China is subsidizing their citizens petrochemical purchases in any meaningful amount).
China is going to have more drivers than the United States has people in the country in the near future and that will only continue to grow. Are you going to tell more than a billion people to never get a car and to only walk places?
What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?
>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
One of the things that brought home to me how far China has to go was an episode of The Grand Tour in which Jeremy Clarkson was driving along one of its countless new highways, only for a rain shower to render the road virtually undriveable because said road had apparently not been designed to shed water quickly enough.
But each time I've gone back to the US between 1993 and 2017 things have seemed just that bit worse, and the people just a little less positive about the future. It is sad.
Other examples of Amazon self-censoring despite the govt saying they are not considering censoring online content.
* Pixelated nudity in shows like Californication and The Man In The High Castle and films like Watchmen and The Godfather
* The Grand Tour had an episode which involved animal carcasses. All of it was removed.
My $0.02 on this difference between Amazon and Netflix. This is Netflix's primary business, while Video is an afterthought for Amazon compared to the retail business. A boycott of their retail business would be catastrophic, whereas a few people canceling their subscription over self-censorship is a non-issue.
Amazon can also potentially be shaken down for protection money. It would work like this. "Hi, we're from this political party and we're considering making these videos a major issue. Meanwhile, would you consider making a donation to our election campaign?"
To me, it's worth it just for the Grand Tour and the occasional movie.
The Grand Tour did it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/2018/02/16/grand-tour-season-two-episode-11-recap-gang-get-stuck-mud-inmozambique/
A better comparison is Top Gear, the BBC show that was essentially the same as The Grand Tour. At it's absolute peak Top Gear drew live audiences of ~8 million people. When the BBC cancelled it (after Clarkson hit a producer) it was getting audiences of ~5 million. I'm sure you could double that number including on-demand and foreign audiences. It was a popular show.
To me these numbers show that Amazon have managed to compete reasonably favourably with the BBC, which is famous for being really good at making TV shows, within 5 years of starting to make their own content, they've built a platform that people are willing to use to watch that content, and they've developed a model that audiences are willing to pay for. That's huge.
I saw rumors a few days ago that The Grand Tour has already been canceled after the already ordered season 3. Really hope it isn't true because it is one of the biggest draws of Prime Video for me.
If price was the only factor that matters, we could be using nickel-metal-hydride batteries. They also last longer.
A more important aspect where Sodium would be better than Lithium for batteries is that it doesn't catch fire that easily. Lithium batteries are prone to thermal runaway, where if you increase their temperature that makes them release more energy and increase their temperature even more until they combust violently.
A graphic example to this is where Grand Tour's Richard Hammond recently crashed an electric car, which then continued to spontaneously catch fire five days after the crash (https://www.total-croatia-news.com/made-in-croatia/23852-the-grand-tour-season-two-episode-one-is-out-and-rimac-concept-one-is-on-flames)
These days I enjoy all of the Amazon TV shows a lot more than anything Netflix does (except for House of Cards and maybe Fuller house and that other TV show I forgot the name of). I guess I am just not the target audience of many of the shows Netflix makes these days. For example, I am tired of superhero stuff that has tons of unnecessary violence (like very detailed violence).
So that plus the fact that most of the other shows on Netflix are useless in a sense made me cancel it.
So these days I enjoy shows like Goliath and Bosch and even Grand Tour, all which are Amazon Prime Shows.
My opinion is not that you are wrong that you prefer Netflix, but rather I am disagreeing with:
>Especially compared to any other streaming service, such as Amazon or Hulu, they continue to provide much higher-end content for my dollar, as well as a (far) superior UI experience.
Personally, over the years the UI of Netflix has gotten worse as well.
Finally, after almost five years of membership I cancelled my subscription with them since I found that I barley use them. I guess I will just sign up eventually for a month or two to catch up with the shows I mentioned, but that's about it.
Reminds me of the recent The Grand Tour episode, when they mention how if you're famous for something positive you're called British, otherwise you're Scottish/Welsh.
The very first episode of The Grand Tour (The Holy Trinity) was about how awesome hybrids are (the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 and Ferrari LaFerrari). Granted, those cars are worth over a million dollars.
One thing I wonder is why Top Gear (the old one) / Grand Tour never has the tesla in it's episodes or drag races?
Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it. And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that. Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?
In the last episode of "The Grand Tour" they did a race between a Veyron and the new Porsche 918 Spyder which utilizes electric power alongside a petrol engine. The Porsche won only by a very small difference. Porsche is using a complicated system where the electric engine fills the gaps when the combustion engine is in low torque. Seems like the best of both worlds for now.
In the same episode they also did a drag race between a Golf GTI and an BMW i3. While the latter was faster off the line, due to the instant torque thing, once they got past 80 the Golf got away by a lot. That's the beauty of the combustion engine, once it revs up it goes ballistic.
It includes "production" cars, which are vehicles offered for sale to the public, legally able to drive on public roads, and typically mass-produced identical items rather than one-offs for each customer (though this may be only a few dozen vehicles).
It does not include dragsters or other custom vehicles, which may be equipped with nitrous injectors, non-street-legal equipment, or other major concessions to daily driving.
This was apparent in Friday's episode of <strike>Top Gear</strike> Grand Tour where Hammond raced a Porsche 918 hybrid supercar against the Bugatti Veyron, and then against "some old Nissan van." Which (as you may have guessed, sorry for the spoilers ahead) happened to be souped up with a 1900 HP engine, and easily beat the supercar.
It's also apparent when looking at this electric project car: https://phys.org/news/2016-06-electric-car-world.html which, at 1.5 seconds, seems likely to approach the limit of wheeled vehicles.