Top Gear's Midlife Crisis Cars

The third title in our bestselling 'Top Gear' humour series, Midlife Crisis Cars will strike a chord with every middle-aged man in Britain, and his partner.

Matt Master started his career at Auto Express, and moved on to Top Gear magazine, where he is features writer and road tester. This is his first book.

Following up on Crap Cars and My Dad Had One of Those, Top Gear celebrates the midlife crisis with the definitive collection of the flashest, fastest, most impractical cars ever to be found in the driveways of otherwise perfectly sensible men. 
 
Drawing on the high level of expertise in this area, Top Gear explores the phenomenon of motoring and the midlife crisis, identifying over 50 classics of the genre across four desperate decades. From Ford Capri to Ferrari Testarossa, it celebrates the flashest, fastest and most ridiculous attempts to cover a bald spot, meanwhile offering a profound insight into the complex psychology of a middle-aged man and his quest for eternal youth. 
 
Top Gear's Midlife Crisis Cars both rejoices and recoils at the time-honoured tradition of flushing the children's inheritance on something you're too arthritic to get into in the first place.

Matt Master

From flying cars to amphibious vehicles, solar-powered saloons to rockets on wheels, these are over 50 of the most wacky cars ever devised. Fancy a car that drives sideways? Try the Jeep Hurricane. Or maybe a car in which the windows change colour according to your mood for a more serene and health-giving driving experience? That'll be the Toyota RiN. And if you like a flutter, you'll need the Chrysler Town and Country Black Jack, which contains a mini onboard casino. 
 
Some concept cars are designed to demonstrate alternative materials and energy sources, or to showcase the gadgets of the future, or even cater for specific lifestyles or groups of people. Many don't even get beyond the prototype stage - for reasons of cost or practicality, or, in the case of the nuclear-powered Ford Nucleon of 1958, the danger of causing a small atomic explosion. Featuring everything from practical experiments such as the hatchback fire engine, and ideas that have managed to make it into production, to stunning yet impractical supercar concepts, this book both celebrates and cringes at some of motoring's most daft - and even idiotic - ideas.

Matt Master

Books by Matt Master

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