I'll admit it up front: when I heard Amazon was rebooting The Grand Tour, I groaned. Same as everybody else, I reckon. That show was Clarkson, Hammond and May. It was three middle-aged idiots arguing in tents and building awful amphibious vehicles that sank. You don't reboot something like that any more than you rebuild a small-block with parts from three different engines and expect it to hold compression.

Well, [The Autopian watched the new season](https://www.theautopian.com/amazons-rebooted-the-grand-tour-might-be-even-better-than-the-original-spoilers/), and by their account, it works. Might even be better than the original. I know. I didn't see it coming either.

What made the old show click was never the cars, not really. It was the chemistry, the arguments, the sense that three friends who genuinely knew cars were also genuinely sick of each other's nonsense by hour three. Any reboot lives or dies on whether the new crew has that same friction, and apparently this one does. The new hosts actually know their stuff and, more importantly, they aren't afraid to disagree on camera. Which is rarer than it ought to be.

The other thing I keep hearing is that the reboot leans harder into the road trip format. Fewer studio bits, more time on actual roads in actual places. That's the part of the old show that always aged best anyway. Anybody can stand in a tent and crack jokes, but a good challenge episode, the kind where they buy cheap trucks in some far-flung country and drive them until something falls off, that's car television worth watching. Tell you what, the Bolivia special and the Vietnam special are still better than 90 percent of what's been made since.

I won't spoil the specifics here because the source piece has spoilers and I'll respect that, but the consensus is the challenges feel genuinely hard again. Not staged-hard, where the breakdown is obviously scripted. Hard like a real trip, where the truck quits and you fix it with zip ties and cuss words and whatever's in the trunk. That's the stuff those of us who've limped a vehicle home on a gravel road actually connect with.

Do I still miss the originals? Sure. But the old trio's Amazon run had gotten a little comfortable toward the end anyway. Big budgets, familiar rhythms, fewer surprises. If a reboot shakes that loose and gets back to cheap cars in bad situations, I'd call that a tune-up more than a downgrade.

Anyway, it's on my watch list now, which is more than I expected when I sat down to read the review. Might queue it up for the Ozarks trip, download a few episodes for the nights when the campfire burns down and there's nothing left to do but lean back in the truck and watch something on the tablet. Good car TV and a cold night in the woods. Hard to beat that combination.