He’s so taken aback by the sheer crumminess of the Escalade in partcular, which literally disintegrated during the challenge, that he sets up a fishtank test between a Lincoln Town Car and a Jaguar XJ6, a car he describes as one made by a bunch of “Communists in the Midlands”, so badly made is it. The quest here is to see which shoddily made car can retain the most liquid if you drilled a hole on top and filled it full of water. The Lincoln refuses the contest point-blank – everything leaks out faster than they can put it in.

So, “America is losing everything”, and even the heart of Jeremy Clarkson is wrung. He decides to hand them a break: “Let’s look at straight line speed.” The candidate is a Chrysler 300C SRT8. “It’s a modern, road burning muscle car,” he notes. Alas, none of its muscle kept it from keening over in front of a… BMW M5? The video (below) is proof.

Hell, the Americans can’t even get the sound of the engine right. The Europeans don’t just make racing sounds – they have a bloody symphony going. Picture Jeremy ‘Petrolhead’ Clarkson in ecstasy, strumming an imaginary engine as a random European car races around a track.

Whatever. Now comes the most expensive sports car America has ever made – the Cadillac XLR-V. It’s stunning looking, fast and powerful. It’s also “fairly sophisticated” and a bit of a bargain compared to similar models put out by the likes of Mercedes Benz. “On paper it looks amazing… and it is. Amazingly awful.” He hates everything about it, even the European stuff they put on it. Now that is bad. “It is foul,” Clarkson corrects, because he must always have the last word.

He’s so depressed, he has to cheer himself up by tearing a 1994 Buick Park Avenue (“I would rather go on a bus than drive a car like this”) apart with a pair of giant secateurs wielded by a seemingly bovine American and his friends. They slowly and methodically chew their way through some indistinguishable food just as the machine chews up the Buick. And no, I didn’t mind that anvil dropping on my head. Not at all.

But all this is merely leading up to the ultimate horror – pickup trucks. “It’s a Dodge Ram and it looks good – if you’re nine.” It’s not even a car, as classified by the American government, he says, and has apparently achieved about the same level of engineering as an early 19th century covered wagon. But that’s all right, he tells us, because when the time comes for you to marry your sister you can just load a leaf blower, a cement mixer and a barbecue set in the back and you’ll be set. “What?” he drawls. “She’s awful purty and comes from good stock.” Oh, shut up.