Quentin Willson, Prime Gear Presenter And Electrical-Car Advocate, Dies At 68

For all its numerous contributions to trendy automobile fanatic tradition, the famed BBC motoring present Prime Gear was by no means particularly thrilled with the thought of an electrical future. However then there was Quentin Willson—one of many authentic hosts of the present within the Nineteen Nineties alongside Jeremy Clarkson and others—who had old-school gearhead cred with one of the best of them, and have become a passionate advocate of EVs and their drivers.

Willson died Saturday after a brief battle with lung most cancers, in accordance with the BBC. He was 68.

Obituaries for Willson recall him as Prime Gear’s used-car knowledgeable, as a longtime host of its quasi-successor sequence Fifth Gearand a campaigner for EVs. Vicki Butler-Henderson, who labored with Willson on each reveals, recalled him as “very a lot the champion of the buyer.” That was mirrored in his co-founding of the group FairFuelUKwhich advocates for decrease gas taxes in the UK and boasts that it is saved British motorists £100 billion in obligation will increase.

It could appear incongruent, then, that Willson was additionally an early fan and booster for EVs. A press release from his household to the BBC even stated this went method again: he was a champion of Common Motors’ EV1, and “all the time forward of the curve.” Lately, he created a YouTube channel that served as a house for his electrical highway journeys and EV evaluations. He later left FairFuelUK after accusing it of selling discredited myths about EVs.

“When did the noble imaginative and prescient of decreasing tailpipe emissions turn into a menace to democracy?”, Willson wrote in a 2021 column for the group Transport + Vitalityrailing towards what he referred to as the “politicization” of EVs. “The technological leaps in battery effectivity, vary and reliability needs to be one thing society ought to have fun. However as an alternative, this stellar progress is being demonized as a menace to particular person freedoms.”

He added, together with his signature wit: “A decade in the past, after I was driving round in electrical Mitsubishi iMievs, Citroen C-Zeros and Vauxhall Amperas, no one complained. However now issues really feel completely completely different. Electrical vehicles have turn into Devil with regenerative brakes.”

Even so, Willson was famend for recognizing that the long run can be electrical, all whereas being each bit the basic fanatic who knew vehicles of all types inside and outside. “He actually knew his stuff right down to the tiniest particulars,” the journalist Andrew English wrote for The Telegraph. “The final time we met, we had a terrific scrap over an obscure reality a couple of little-known French pre-war basic about which I assumed I knew the whole lot. He knew extra.”

Willson is survived by his spouse, his three kids and his three grandchildren.

Contact the writer: patrick.george@insideevs.com.