For all its countless contributions to modern car enthusiast culture, the famed BBC motoring show Top Gear was never especially thrilled with the idea of an electric future. But then there was Quentin Willson—one of the original hosts of the show in the 1990s alongside Jeremy Clarkson and others—who had old-school gearhead cred with the best of them, and became a passionate advocate of EVs and their drivers.
Willson died Saturday after a short battle with lung cancer, according to the BBC. He was 68.
Obituaries for Willson recall him as Top Gear’s used-car expert, as a longtime host of its quasi-successor series Fifth Gear, and a campaigner for EVs. Vicki Butler-Henderson, who worked with Willson on both shows, recalled him as “very much the champion of the consumer.” That was reflected in his co-founding of the group FairFuelUK, which advocates for lower fuel taxes in the United Kingdom and boasts that it’s saved British motorists £100 billion in duty increases.
It may seem incongruent, then, that Willson was also an early fan and booster for EVs. A statement from his family to the BBC even said this went way back: he was a champion of General Motors’ EV1, and “always ahead of the curve.” In recent years, he created a YouTube channel that served as a home for his electric road trips and EV reviews. He later left FairFuelUK after accusing it of promoting discredited myths about EVs.
“When did the noble vision of reducing tailpipe emissions become a threat to democracy?”, Willson wrote in a 2021 column for the group Transport + Energy, railing against what he called the “politicization” of EVs. “The technological leaps in battery efficiency, range and reliability should be something society should celebrate. But instead, this stellar progress is being demonized as a threat to individual freedoms.”
He added, with his signature wit: “A decade ago, when I was driving around in electric Mitsubishi iMievs, Citroen C-Zeros and Vauxhall Amperas, nobody complained. But now things feel totally different. Electric cars have become Satan with regenerative brakes.”
Even so, Willson was renowned for recognizing that the future would be electric, all while being every bit the classic enthusiast who knew cars of all kinds inside and out. “He really knew his stuff down to the tiniest details,” the journalist Andrew English wrote for The Telegraph. “The last time we met, we had a terrific scrap over an obscure fact about a little-known French pre-war classic about which I thought I knew everything. He knew more.”
Willson is survived by his wife, his three children and his three grandchildren.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com.
