Romesh Ranganathan on cars: “I will have to accept our robot overlords”

Romesh Ranganathan does not consider himself a petrolhead. “No, I don’t think I’m a petrolhead,” he tells TopGear.com. “Did I prioritise cars? No, not until a bit later on when I slowly started to get into them.

“I went from seeing cars as something functional to something you could enjoy,” he adds. And hoo boy has he got something he can enjoy. But more on that in a bit.

Because how he got there is just as important. The multi award-winning comedian, presenter, radio host, writer, actor, Top Gear track star and all-round gent gets serious for a moment when we pose the Big Question: did he pass his driving test the first time around?

“No. I had a really harrowing experience.”

A beat.

“It’s not that harrowing actually. I’ve really bigged that up too much. What happened was, I took my driving lessons at 17 and then failed my test in such an embarrassing way. I basically failed leaving the car park at the beginning of the test. And then for the rest of it they were kind of doing it out of politeness.

“It freaked me out so much I didn’t go back and try again for about five or six years.”

Mercifully, he passed the second time around, and with his new-found freedom spent £3,500 of his hard-earned cash on a 1997 Honda Civic. Solid buy, that. Though he couldn’t afford to mod it, and what he could afford, he’s now embarrassed to admit.

“In my dreams I’d have LED lights along the outside. I actually ended up buying a little blue torch that you could connect to the lighter, and it sort of gave the car an ‘aura’. It looked really good… until you saw the source of the light,” he laughs.

And while nothing went wrong on the trusty Civic – why would it, it’s a Nineties Honda – there was something more fundamentally wrong with it, as Romesh soon discovered. “I’m really into hip hop, and UK hip hop fans growing up in the era that I grew up in will know the pain of playing music that is designed for a much better car with a much better system and to be driving around a different city.

“You know, playing Dre and Snoop in a Honda Civic in Crawley,” he laughs, “… it’s not the one. But I spent a lot of my youth doing that.”

TopGear.com confirms this observation, relating our own experiences of blasting early Wu-Tang Clan from a 1.1-litre Peugeot 106. Romesh laughs. “Imagine pulling up to a petrol station and Bring da Ruckus is playing as you gas it up!”

From there, he went through a load of second-hand cars because he was “broke for a long time”, then moved into a Ford Focus which he loved but absolutely destroyed driving halfway around the country doing gigs, then a “really, really old Volvo”, and then — shudder — a Vauxhall Meriva. No laughing matter.

Playing Dre and Snoop in a Honda Civic in Crawley... it’s not the one

“I’d fallen into the trap,” he admits. “I’d made the assumption that once you’re a dad and you’ve got a family, enjoying driving doesn’t happen anymore.” Hence the Meriva. “It did a job. But I didn’t particularly like the look of it and I didn’t particularly like the drive,” he says. TopGear.com strongly suspects Romesh is not alone in this opinion.

So he got his first Volvo XC90… and then “knackered it out” by deploying it for full on family duty, where it performed admirably, flirted with a Land Rover Discovery but didn’t ultimately ‘click’ with it – “it just felt slightly different” – then went back to another XC90 which he and the family absolutely adore. "That's the Ranganathan car. I drive it and Leesa drives it. It's like a member of the family." 

Alongside the big Volvo, he also got something for himself. “I also bought a Mini John Cooper Works because somebody said to me – and this is embarrassing to say to a Top Gear journalist – it’s the closest thing to being in Mario Kart.”

Then he really came into his stride. “Actually this is as a result of coming on Top Gear. I was doing A League Of Their Own with Freddie [Flintoff] at the time, and he said to me, ‘I know you think you’ll look like a flash b******, but it is really nice to get a nice car’.

“So I ended up trying out a few – a McLaren, a Porsche 911, a Bentley – and ended up getting an Aston Martin Vantage. It’s obviously really exciting to drive, but it also doesn’t look too much like a penis extension,” he says.

Not one for hiding it under a cover and keeping it away from the weather and other road users or even frail human breath, is Romesh. “I use it all the time,” he says, much to TopGear.com’s relief.

Nor is he one for driving it in anger, either. “I’m pretty chilled [behind the wheel],” he says. “I basically can’t think of the last time I lost my temper about anything.”

A beat.

“I do get slightly annoyed with Leesa [his wife] when she's driving because sometimes she’ll flip the bird at somebody, or she'll make a ****** sign at somebody. And then I'll say, ‘what you don't understand is if that person gets out of the car and comes over, I'm going to have to get out of the car and sort of step up on your behalf.

“And I don't want to, to be clear. I have no desire to protect your honour’.”

Other times you go ‘what, do I have to breathe on this screen three times to active it?’

What about if a computer was driving? Autonomous cars are coming, after all. “I was filming in Nashville a few months ago and we got into a self-driving taxi and it was great, it worked fine. But it makes you a bit nervous. And the problem is I've watched films on AI, like I Robot.

"I use AI to ask questions, and it's kind of like having this real suck-up on your phone. It will do whatever you want and you don't have to be polite. And in my head, I just think at some point it's going to get p***** off with that.

“I think about the times when I’ve been driving back from gigs at 2am and you're knackered. Driver fatigue is underestimated. And so there are obvious advantages, but I do think there will be an eventual thing where we're in our cars and you and I will have to accept our robot overlords and just allow them to take us wherever they've decided to.

“Like the next mine.”

How about too much tech inside the car? “The people I feel sorry for are those who’ve driven a car for a long time and then they go, ‘let’s move into a new car’, and then it looks like Knight Rider or some s***, and they don’t know how to access any of it.

“Sometimes you can get into a car and the stuff feels fairly intuitive, other times you go ‘what, do I have to breathe on this screen three times to active it?’”

There are a couple of cars Romesh has his eye on that don’t require a degree in engineering or knowledge of witchcraft to operate, mind. “Growing up I remember being really invested in cars that my dad had, and he had an electric blue Ford Capri – like in Minder.

“I remember feeling really cool with my dad driving around in that car. My dad’s no longer with us sadly, but I do want to get that car again.”

I’m going to overpay for a massive obstacle on my driveway

And the second? “You’re going to judge me for this,” he laughs. “I really want a DeLorean.”

A beat. TopGear.com does not respond.

“I know. Look, I can tell by your reaction. You tried to do a poker face. You tried to hide the fact that it’s one of the worst things that somebody has ever said to you in one of these interviews.

“But it’s Back to the Future.”

We share a laugh. “I’ve read it’s a s*** heap. I’m going to overpay for a massive obstacle on my driveway. But it’s the fantasy. Every now and then I scour the internet for a reliable one, and when that happens, I’ll get one.

“I saw the doubt in your face. When I get one that really works, I’m going to take you out in it, and we’ll do a follow-up interview. And I want you to say ‘I eat my words, Romesh had a dream, I doubted it, but it’s all come together’.”