Nothing could bring our waning love for the automobile more forcefully home than reports that the BBC may be axing its internationally bestselling motoring show, Top Gear. First broadcast in 1977, fronted by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, Top Gear began as a straight-faced motoring magazine show. It became the best-selling juggernaut production of its peak period after a 2002 reboot, fronted by the laddish trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond.

At its peak, Top Gear encapsulated an entire relationship between engineering and the pursuit of excellence: one inextricably bound up in material and cultural conditions that were already wavering when Clarkson was fired. And it’s this complex relationship, equal parts technical and emotional, which is in flux today: not just within the show itself, but out in the car-driving world itself.

The joy of Top Gear, in its Clarkson/Hammond/May salad days, was the way it captured the two dominant forms of motoring enthusiast: the tinkerer, and the petrolhead. Top Gear tinkerer features would depict these three middle-aged men making daft modifications to second-hand cars, for example turning a Porsche 944 into an “ambulance”, or a Ford Transit into a “hovervan”,  then try to complete ever sillier challenges. Petrolhead segments would feature the same three middle-aged men, driving beautiful, fast, staggeringly expensive miracles of engineering perfection through stunning landscapes.

Of course, petrolheads and tinkerers are often one and the same, though in my observation car-lovers tend to incline one way or the other. My late dad, for example, was a tinkerer: an engineer by training, he spent as much time as he could get away with in a workshop overflowing with hand and power tools, plus shelf after shelf of labelled tobacco tins brimming with nuts, bolts and other small objects that might come in handy one day.

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Tinkerers, of course, don’t confine their tinkering to cars. But cars have, historically, been a central object of tinkering attention. Whether mending, restoring, customising, or otherwise fiddling about with engines, the tinkerer is happiest absorbed in the material business of making the damn thing work. This both affords distinctive pleasures, and calls for a particular mindset: one eloquently defended by the mechanic and philosopher Matthew Crawford.

Working with your hands, Crawford argues, requires distinctive modes of knowing based in practice, imitation, and tradition as much as in abstract principles. Importantly, too, such work requires a pragmatic acceptance and understanding of what your chosen material will and won’t accommodate, such as flexibility, flammability, melting-point and so on. The resulting aggregate skill set is both physical and aesthetic: Crawford speaks of “pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation”, a sentiment my dad would indisputably have recognised.

For the petrolhead, meanwhile, the main attraction is how fun it is to make machines go ridiculously fast. Crawford analyses the emotional side of driving as a distinct aspect of his philosophy of engines, arguing that self-directed driving at speed expresses an attitude to risk-taking and personal agency that delivers immense social benefits.

For Crawford, giving up that sense of agency to an infrastructure of automated vehicles, speed cameras, and safety-minded restrictions may deliver some social utility, narrowly understood. But, driving is emotional as well as functional, expressing that aspect of our spirit that takes risks, and aspires to mastery of our tools. At its best, he characterises skilled driving as a “state of grace”.

In peak Top Gear, the avatar of tinkering was James May: an amiable nerd emanating pure essence of garden-shed. Clarkson, on the other hand, embodied the petrolhead delight at what these engines can do. (Hammond was the designated straight man and token biker.) Clarkson obviously knew about as much about engineering as I do, but his transparent delight at howling V8s, smoking brakes, and machines that let you corner at speeds that would kill you in a lesser vehicle, was genuinely infectious to watch even for a motoring agnostic like me.

But in different ways, both the tinkerer and the petrolhead have been losing cultural cachet for some time. Indeed, Top Gear itself captured this decline, mostly depicting tinkering in comic terms, and motoring excellence as the out-of-reach preserve of far-away experts. The supercar segments lionised these sleek, roaring vehicles as things of magic and wonder a long way from the reach of someone in a shed. And while my dad took his own tinkering seriously enough, car modifications for Top Gear challenges are usually comically shonky workmanship done not for the admiration and emulation of tinkering peers, but for banter. In amidst all the motoring was a pessimistic message radically at odds with Britain’s history as a nation of engineers: that fiddling under the bonnet is off-limits to amateurs, except as a joke.

As for the emotional side of driving, petrolhead joy in the high-velocity “state of grace” has also grown problematic. This is partly thanks to mounting anxieties over the financial and environmental price of fossil fuels — and, more broadly, a growing sense of scarcity. But it’s not just climate change. It speaks, too, to a growing discomfort with the pursuit of excellence as such — especially such resoundingly impractical forms of excellence as a car that will do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds but doesn’t have a boot.

Engineering miracles such as the Bugatti Veyron express a culture that will stop at nothing in pursuit of the “state of grace”, attainable in transcendent moments of harmony between driver and machine. And the cultural cachet accorded to this pursuit is, far more broadly, on the wane. It’s hard to point at a single cause, though it’s possible that at least some of those who once pursued mastery of tools and machines now devote the same attention to video gaming. In any case, the tinkering culture that once underpinned such joyfully pointless quests for excellence is also waning. Here, de-industrialisation no doubt plays a part, and it probably doesn’t help that modern gadgets are deliberately built to thwart tinkerers. So, too, are modern cars: there is much less point in buying a Haynes manual for a vehicle whose innards are largely powered by computer software.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the kind of inventive “shopcraft” that once characterised Britain’s tinkerers is today found more in culture where scarcity is part of life, and hence where tinkerers are still valued. Nor should it surprise us if the aspiration to build supercars has migrated with the tinkerers. Earlier this year, Entop unveiled the first Afghan supercar: the Simurgh, which looks like a Batmobile and runs on a modified 2000 Toyota Corolla engine.

The internal combustion engine was, once upon a time, accessible both mechanically and financially. Such machines afforded a democratic and emotionally potent playground for the symbiotic 20th-century emergence of the tinkerer and the petrolhead: the twin mastery of the engine’s innards, and of its capacity for excellence. But with its comical tinkerers and inaccessibly magical supercars, even peak Top Gear tacitly acknowledged that this age was on its way out.

Post-Clarkson the show has limped on for several fairly forgettable series, until presenter Freddie Flintoff’s horrific track accident last year took it off the air – possibly forever. And this may be wise: for even by 2015, the writing was on the wall.

Regulatory changes and rising fuel costs were already combining into the now acutely palpable pressure on Western consumers, to shift from internal combustion toward batteries. Some years on, there are no car manufacturers anywhere (except perhaps in Afghanistan) working on new internal-combustion models, while the cars we already have are at the heart of many energy-related culture wars. Whether it’s the cost of EVs, the politics of “Net Zero”, “15-minute cities”, or the geopolitics of petrol prices, much of our most contested political fractures concern personal transport. Against that backdrop, Top Gear’s fun, relatively apolitical magazine format feels at best out of step, if not outright disingenuous.

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And the energy transition has a bearing on the car as symbol of agency, too. This is partly practical: compared with internal combustion engines, the technical complexity of EVs poses tremendous barriers to entry for car-tinkerers. And there’s a class element, too: hybrids and EVs are prohibitively expensive compared with a battered-but-serviceable petrol runabout.

No wonder, then, that many young people are deciding not to bother, or to treat cars as mere appliances, with as little emotional weight as a dishwasher. To the extent that cars speak of agency or excellence today, they do so in ways that are ever more problematic – or simply inaccessible, whether through complexity or cost.

Cheap, abundant fossil fuels may have placed machine-enhanced grace temporarily in the hands of Everyman; but today, we are witnessing the end of that era. I have too much faith in the world’s nerds to imagine that tinkerers will ever die out completely; but the meaning of cars has already changed forever. And outside the dwindling community of tinkerers, a culture that has largely abandoned the search for mechanical mastery may not even feel this as much of a loss.

For the minority of a more severe, moralistic, and joyless disposition, this made him a national-psychological defect to be suppressed, or ideally exposed and exorcised. Before Piers Morgan, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump provided such stern competition, it was a small badge of honour on the Left to publicly hate Clarkson. But for many of us (probably a majority at his peak) he was a vulgar treat to indulge. For the length of a Sunday column or an episode of Top Gear, we could wallow harmlessly in the swamp of arrogant prejudice and self-gratification which sits at the bottom of the brain. At a time of minimal collective loyalty, the nation could reliably divide into those two tribes. Clarkson the monster, or Clarkson the geezer. Wokery vs blokery. A version of the same split is fuelling the current Clarkson row, but with the weight of opinion reversed.

Amazon, Clarkson’s primary current employer, now seems to have picked its side. His contract to make TV programmes about cars, farms and larks will reportedly not be renewed. There are rumours ITV may let him go too. We can suppose this is at least partly thanks to the nearly month-long storm over his astonishingly tasteless joke in The Sun about the Duchess of Sussex. For that, Clarkson has been granted no quarter by Harry, Meghan or their supporters. His first “rather put my foot in it” bumble was rejected. The Sun’s own “regret[ful]” memory-holing of the article was rejected. Even Clarkson’s last-gasp, hands-clasped grovel has been rejected, such is his history (they say) of “hate rhetoric”.

But his spiritual and popular appointment to the English is a far tougher thing to dismiss. He is, like it or not, quite a lot of us writ ludicrously, satirically large. Like a 21st-century John Bull: to paraphrase Auden, a self-confident, swaggering bully of meaty neck and clumsy jest. Whatever Clarkson’s professional fate, the question of whether our society can tolerate him has implications for the stomach and sensibility of the national character, of which he is a significant avatar and champion. And his rise and fall reads as a history of a changing English firmament, one in which public morality has come to supersede mere entertainment.

Plenty of time and work went into the germination of such a figure. Clarkson’s early life is a whistle-stop tour of the English class system. He was born rural, lower-middle class, Yorkshire. But, in a wonderful twist of fate, the Clarkson family came into money after his parents won the exclusive rights to sell Paddington Bear dolls, based on the ones they had made for him and his sister. With aspirational intent, Clarkson was sent to Repton, one of the North’s oldest private schools. There, he smoked, pranked and failed his way to expulsion, developing the likeable loutishness which is his career mainstay. And then he jumped social tracks again, entering the lowest rungs of the Fourth Estate at the Rotherham Advertiser.

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A public schoolboy who can still boast that he crashed out of education with a C and two Us at A Level. The ingredients were in place for a broad, classless appeal. But Clarkson really came of professional age in the new meritocracy of Thatcher and Murdoch, a place where common touch came to supersede common background (something also exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage). It was an England of quick, coarse wit, and quicker, coarser money; of the triumphant red-top, and the unrepentant “lad”. It suited Clarkson perfectly. Flush with entrepreneurial spirit, in Eighties London he had the wheeze of syndicating car news and reviews from his own company to the regional press. It was a money-maker which introduced him to motoring journalism and eventually to the producers of Top Gear.

The programme was a staid, genuinely factual affair in those days. And Clarkson’s irreverence and wayward metaphors (a Porsche Boxster “couldn’t pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom”) set him apart. So cars led only further into showbiz, with a chat show, documentaries, newspaper columns and pop culture ubiquity to follow. By the time he reformatted Top Gear 20 years ago (and made it the BBC’s biggest global brand), he already had the privilege of being recognisable by silhouette alone. The stance: arms-crossed, in male-barbecuing or under-the-bonnet-inspecting mode. And the hair: the curly remnants of the kind of Englishman’s ‘fro which peaked in the Seventies.

England at the turn of the millennium was Clarkson’s home. It wanted entertainment, and it got it from the Victorian circus of Big Brother and X Factor, and from the sneers and stereotypes of Little Britain. Clarkson’s Top Gear, launched in 2002, was almost edifying by comparison. Its open secret was that it was not really about cars. Instead, Top Gear seemed to scoop the ersatz appeal of reality TV and gave you the life you wished you and your mates could live. All the rudeness, ribaldry and exotic travel you could want. And while clearly a masculine offering, 40% of viewers were women. English people weren’t just seeing their grainy selves mirrored back — in Clarkson and his lieutenants they saw a dream life.

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Do they still? After multiple warnings — including for homophobia, xenophobia and the n-word — the BBC reached the end of its tether with the assault and abuse of a producer in 2015. Clarkson was initially undiminished. He was snapped up by a rich and ambitious streaming giant and instructed to make the same programme with more money. He took over Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and his collected journalism continued to be published (standing at eight volumes, the bestselling World According to Clarkson series must make its author the Proust of the pub bores). But the England that Clarkson once charmed was changing. Where once he was propelled by the forces of the contemporary, now he is encircled by them.

The principal feature of England in Clarkson’s imperial period was how apolitical it was. Electoral turnout fell; party memberships were tiny. Referendums proceeded according to plan. And the stability of New Labour’s long summer lent itself to a sense of consequence-free triviality. Under its aegis existed a crude cultural free-play. It was nasty, brutal and ephemeral, but in its own way quite funny, and even forgiving. So when, for example, he compared driving some svelte supercar to “smearing honey on Keira Knightley”, it was just good old Clarkson. Even when he said that striking workers should be “executed in front of their families” (a remark which yielded as many complaints as his Meghan column), it was, eventually and by enough people, forgotten.

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But there has come a point when such lines aren’t provocative catnip anymore, but an embarrassing commercial risk. Once Clarkson could stomp on to any old landmine — from speed limits to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes — and walk away with his popular constituency intact. Now he’d find himself blown into the no man’s land of an interminable culture war. And his nose and instinct for provocation means he can’t keep clear of it. Even his bucolic “Farmer Clarkson” period landed him in the soup. Before this latest fracas, his farm restaurant was making headlines for irritating the Nimbys and planning laws of Oxfordshire, a foretaste of the coming clash over the ownership and purpose of the British countryside.

The rowdy, TV-tabloid moment Clarkson enjoyed is gone. The lives and affairs of the lowest celebrity, from footballer to stand-up, are no longer sub-political fun. And the subterranean Englishness Clarkson personified is on trial, its burly, vinegary instincts held responsible for Brexit and the politics of reaction it supposedly represents. Much of Clarkson’s constituency will dislike both Meghan and the gleeful violence of the column he wrote. But, in his apology to Meghan, Clarkson wrote that it is “hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time”. It won’t wash with Harry or Meghan, but it will have spoken to his fans’ sense of alienation from the new set of rules that turned their hero into an ethical criminal.

Why was anyone surprised? Supercars, fists, bleeding and dead flesh – what’s the difference? Clarkson’s id is hungry. It must be fed.

But not on Top Gear, which has had four seasons without the man. The next begins on Sunday with what is called, by the production team, “emotional depth”. Whatever that is, it will distinguish the show from Clarkson’s current resting place – The Grand Tour on Amazon, where he continues to boast about his gift for changing gears.

There is a new team of presenters – Freddy Flintoff, Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness. McGuiness said, “there’s hugs and nice bits such as what we thought about Ethiopia”. Harris said, like a survivor of family therapy, “we hug each other. We didn’t hug each other before”. Flintoff promises, “honesty”.

But can they do it? Will viewers want it? More than 4.5 million of them left with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. Can cars – and specifically supercars (who watches Top Gear for a rebooted Honda Jazz?) – be uncoupled from heat and thwarted lust and intoxicated masculinity? Will Top Gear simply stop drooling over the Ferrari Lusso GTC4 (men like fast cars) and start drooling over the VW Up! (women like reliable cars)? Will they attempt mindfulness, with cars?

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I don’t think you can untangle cars from rage. That is why Jeremy Clarkson is the greatest motoring journalist there is. He is almost a car. He punched a colleague for food; the combustion engine broke the world. Its roar – the sex growl – is mere pollutant. It’s an exhaust: what a metaphor.

I learnt to drive at 40. I waited so long because I feared cars; I thought they were the spirit animals of angry men. I was always day-dreaming on buses, which are a more female form of transport: meditative and collaborative. When I got married my husband forced me to drive. It took five years to learn not to put the hand-brake on at each roundabout. I failed my practical test so many times I had a favourite test examiner. He was called Dave.

When I finally passed my test, I got a job reviewing cars, particularly supercars. (A supercar is, essentially, a car that is better than it needs to be. And cars are better than they have ever been. If you doubt this, drive a Morgan. Or rather don’t. If you crash it, you will likely die).

My job was revenge on Dave at Garage X, who sold me a written off Vauxhall Corsa at full price. When I learnt this, my response was not masculine – beat him, eat him, threaten him with Trading Standards  – but feminine. I said I was devasted and he gave me £700 back (from pity, not fear).

Why wasn’t I more like Clarkson? What would he have done to Dave of Garage X? Sometimes I think the rest of my life has been and will be revenge on Dave of Garage X. And what became revenge on Dave of Garage X became revenge on all men: I would take what they wanted for myself. I fantasised that I would drive into Garage X in a Rolls Royce Ghost and invent a spurious problem with the indicators. But in the end, I didn’t.

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But a succession of supercars has been delivered to my house by men called Dave: Aston Martins, Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon (which was designed as a military vehicle for the Shah of Iran but is now updated with Disco lights for Covent Garden wankers). They were a drug I took to as I have taken to every other drug: with fanatical devotion.

I think I am not a very good reviewer of cars. I pride myself on not learning what torque is. I battle to squeeze a factoid, or a number, into a review: length of wheelbase, the time it takes to get from 0-60 mph, turning circle, and all that. That is how men usually speak about cars, because they cannot articulate the emotions they summon. They would rather dress up as Vikings. Except Clarkson, who does it all non-verbally: with squints, farts and, eventually, his fists.

I can articulate the emotion. I can measure it, in the same way that you know an art work is great without knowing why exactly it is great, by how high I get when I am in the car. I am a recovering addict and I know when I am being drugged. (What, for example, do they put in Pringles, which are not nice?). The day of the Goodwood media day, I got very high driving an orange Bentley GT and then a blue McLaren Spyder and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. So, I review my own highness.

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The car that makes me most high is the Aston Martin Superleggera (super light). It has blah torque, and the ability to make the sexual currency of a fat middle-aged woman rise by 20,000% in six seconds, which is immensely disorientating, and very pleasing, although, as with all drugs, when I am on them I cannot do much else.

I read What Car? but I cannot see the words. I am too busy dreaming. In supercars, I am hot – or, at least, I feel I am, which amounts to the same thing. I am skittish. Of course, it is my midlife crisis. When I set out in a supercar, my husband makes me wear my wedding ring, or I would park outside Screw Fix (or any builders’ merchant) all day. If you have ever felt you have not had enough attention from men your life, park outside Screw Fix in a new Aston Martin. Myths, as John Tolkien said, are true.

Cars are the greatest and most destructive drug we have yet abused. That is their wonder and their terror; why else would someone spend £250,000 on a Ferrari Lusso GTC4, which has only two doors? The idea of gentle, emotionally available cars and attendant criticism is a nonsense. It ought to be suppressed.