Richard Hammond has made a passionate argument against the green credentials of electric vehicles in clips that are going viral online. The former Top Gear and The Grand Tour star warned that a wholesale switch to EVs risks the West ‘ceding global power to China’ and argued in favour of synthetic fuels as he advised young people to stick with internal combustion.

The 56-year-old discussed a range of topics on the High Performance podcast, including his time on the smash-hit TV shows and the breakdown of his marriage, but it was his breakdown of the rapid transition to electric vehicles that set off debate among car fans.

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“Right now, it’s a monumentally important subject. We have to decarbonise transport, yes but we can’t just listen to the push and pull of governments and commerce deciding it’s a binary definition,” Hammond said. 

“‘Right, you’ve all got to go electric. Vote for us because we’ll make everyone buy electric cars. Brilliant.’ You can’t. It’s not possible. But equally, ‘Vote for us because we only like V8s’ is just as stupid.”   

He added that people are currently making one of the biggest purchasing decisions of their lives with “no knowledge” about how EVs really compare to ICE alternatives, or what he sees as the true impact of switching to electricity.

“I regularly sit in pubs and say to people, ‘Oh yeah, synthetic fuel … we can make petrol.’ ‘What, with oil?’ No, you just capture carbon, which you can capture direct from source, manufacturing, the ethanol industry produces a lot of it,” Hammond said. 

“Capture it at the chimney, you’ve got your carbon. Hydrogen you crack using renewable energy from water. Combine them, you’ve got hydrocarbon, that’s petrol, and 1.4 billion cars can stay on the road and don’t have to be remade.”

Hammond went on to argue that while he believes there is a place for EVs, the world would be better off if motorists stuck with their ICE vehicles and filled them with synthetic fuel, rather than changing to BEVs.

The Grand Tour Jeremy Clarkson Richard Hammond James May
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“‘We’ve all got to go electric!’ Where are the resources going to come from? We’re going to cede global power entirely to China, they [EVs] don’t work in many applications,” he said.

“They work brilliantly in some [applications] – I’m a big fan of electric cars – but the technology is moving at such a rate, telling some 25-year-old who lives in a town and does 3000 miles [around 4800km] a year, you’ve got to go and find 45 grand to spend on a Kia now, electric, that you won’t be able to charge out of your house, and it will be worth 10 grand next year when the technology’s completely outdated, is idiotic.

“Actually saying to them, best thing you could do is go and buy a Mk2 Fiesta. You’ll be really cool and retro, get it fully restored, if you can run it on synthetic [fuel], that is the greenest thing you can do.”

The High Performance podcast episode has been viewed more than two million times, with separate clips on X focusing on Hammond’s musings on EVs have been watched almost four million times.

Those separate clips have also set off fierce debates in the comments section, with some viewers accusing Hammond of getting his facts wrong, especially about how to manufacture synthetic fuels.