Jeremy Clarkson's Ultimate Guide To Killing Cars

Make sure the car deserves it

You'd think a car designed by Alfa Romeo and Nissan would be brilliant. Italian flair twinned with Japanese reliability. What we got was the Alfa Arna, an early 80s Datsun Sunny with an Alfasud engine. Definitely not what you want, so very deserving of an explosive, fiery death.

Leave it somewhere dangerous

It sounds obvious, but it works every time. Leave a car on a level crossing and a train is bound to come along eventually and smash it smithereens. Jezza proved the theory when he left a god-awful Renault Espace on the tracks in a thinly disguised public safety announcement.

Make a game of it

Pub games are only fun after you have had a few jars. The rest of the time, it helps to make them a bit bigger, as JC did with this car-sized game of bar skittles. Best of all, he used the biblically bad Morris Marina as the ball.

Bring your mates

Everything is more fun if you do it with your mates (except the obvious). That includes wrecking cars. When Jezza banger raced a Hyundai Accent, he brought Tiff Needell along to take a few shots at it.

Persistence pays off

Jeremy tried everything to kill this Porsche 911: a shotgun, a piano, acid, crashing. But none of it worked. Some lateral thinking, however, gave him the answer. Drop it from a great height onto a caravan with a gas leak.

Cars can fly

Well, if you stick an air cannon up its jacksy it will! The giant wings Clarkson fitted to this heroically bad Sierra might have meant a longer flight, but did not prevent its inevitable, glorious, pancakey doom. And just to make it properly dead, he throws in a fiery pay-off.

A machine gun is good...

http://youtu.be/nwwfWPQYcX0

A sodding great army-spec General Purpose Machine Gun will settle pretty much any argument. When its between a hybrid-hating redneck and a Prius, the outcome is as predictable as it is magnificent. Clarkson is only too happy to facilitate the fight.

...But a rocket launcher is better

Jezza pulls out the air cannon again for a spot of car-based clay pigeon shooting. Only instead of a gun, he uses a missile that can take out a tank. And instead of a clay, he has a Ford Scorpio. Talk about an unfair advantage!

Size matters

Put a small thing up against a big thing and the encounter rarely ends well for the small thing. This miserable little grotbox of a Yugo 45 did not stand a hope in hell when Clarkson ran it over with 56 tons of Chieftain tank.

If in doubt, just get silly

Even a man as convinced of his own genius as Jezza must know that trying to power a knackered old diesel Merc with dynamite cannot possibly end well. But he did it anyway. And that is what makes him so good at what he does.

Any other spectacular JC car deaths deserving of this list?