Quentin Willson, who has died aged 68 after suffering from lung cancer, was a secondhand car dealer in business with his twin brother Ashley when he was chosen in 1991 to join the presenting team on BBC television’s motoring magazine show Top Gear as the used-car expert.
He was informative and intelligent, with a wry delivery, sardonic smile and scathing comments. While praising the perennially popular MGB sports car for both its road-holding and price-holding abilities, he described Jaguars as “the domain of spivs, crooks and bookmakers” in earlier times.
Willson quickly established himself as one of Top Gear’s most familiar faces alongside Jeremy Clarkson, who already had a reputation for shooting from the hip.
One TV critic, commenting in 1994 on the new “sexy” format of the programme, previously presented by Angela Rippon, Noel Edmonds and others following its launch in 1977, described Willson as sounding like “a cross between Loyd Grossman and a Steve Coogan send-up”. Another wrote that he “plays Sundance Kid to Jeremy Carkson’s Butch Cassidy”.
Willson was the consumers’ champion on and off screen, highlighting the artificially higher prices of vehicles in Britain and campaigning for parity with other European countries.
He was also an early advocate of electric cars after becoming one of the first journalists to test-drive General Motors’ EV1 in 1996, and a firm enemy of diesel, proclaiming: “All that noise, the reek, the plumes of smoke and that miserable plodding performance. It’s a dreary, industrial form of propulsion.”
Following Clarkson’s initial departure in 1998, Top Gear’s audience figures began to decline. Willson left in 2000, later complaining it was because of the BBC’s “political correctness”. He said he was told that he could not refer to “the great English breakfast” because it would offend Scottish, Welsh and Irish viewers, and his contention that the US motor industry had lost its way would be deleted because the programme had an executive producer based in Los Angeles. The show was axed in 2001.
With other former Top Gear presenters, Tiff Needell, Vicki Butler-Henderson and Adrian Simpson, and some of the production team, he switched to Channel 5 to launch a new motoring programme, Fifth Gear, in which he appeared from 2002 to 2004. One addition to the tried-and-tested formula had them staging “shoot-outs” between similarly priced powerful cars. The BBC fought back with a Top Gear revamp devised by Clarkson, who returned to the fold.
Willson was born in Leicester, one of three boys and a girl, to Agnes (nee Gullon), an English lecturer known as Nan, and H Bernard Willson, a linguist who was the first person at Bletchley Park during the second world war to decrypt the Italian navy’s Hagelin C-38 code machine.
“Dad was a much more significant human being than I ever dreamed,” said Quentin in his 2011 Channel 5 documentary Hero in My Family. “I’m really proud to be his son.”
After the war, his father became dean of Leicester University’s faculty of arts. Despite his parents’ academic brilliance, Willson recognised their lack of financial awareness. He claimed to have persuaded them to leave their two-bedroom terraced house for a bigger one at a bargain price and, when he was nine, to buy his favourite make of car.
“I was crazy about Jags, especially E-types,” he said. “I strong-armed my dad into going to the showroom near us to buy a Jag and did the deal for him. I went round the car – it was a Jaguar 420 – and told him it needed two new tyres, an exhaust, and there was a scrape on it. I got [the dealer] to knock £300 off the price and agree to fix what was wrong.” A few years later, he was stripping down a Ford Anglia engine on the family’s kitchen table after his father bought it for him from a scrapyard.
On leaving Wyggeston boys’ school, Leicester, he studied English literature at the city’s university, arriving on campus in a classy sports car bought for a song.
Willson then went into business with his brother Ashley as Fastfleet, selling former fleet and lease cars. This led him to become deputy editor of Car Choice magazine, aimed at secondhand bargain-hunters, after being invited to write an insider’s guide for it.
Once fame came on television, he had motoring columns in the Daily and Sunday Mirror, billed as “the writer the car industry fears”, as well as Classic Cars magazine.
His campaigning for cheaper cars included parking one outside a Birmingham car plant, having bought it in Amsterdam for £7,000 less than the British price. He was also a co-founder of the FairFuelUK campaign for lower fuel duties, which claims to have saved motorists thousands of pounds in governments’ planned increases since 2010. He resigned from it in 2021, unhappy with its approach to electric cars, whose benefits he extolled to politicians through his FairCharge communications agency, formed that year.
On BBC television, he also presented The Car’s the Star (1994-99), featuring classic automobiles, and the one-off documentary Quentin Willson’s Bangers and Cash (1998), joining the US coastguard in Miami to witness the seizure from drug smugglers of yachts and speedboats subsequently sold at auction.
He showed a different expertise in presenting the BBC property programme All the Right Moves (1998-2000), advising on buying and selling homes. “Call me old-fashioned and a misty-eyed romantic, but I believe you can get as emotionally attached to a house as you can to a car,” he told Radio Times in 1999, following his move from a Georgian rectory in Leicestershire to a 1934 art deco house in rural Warwickshire.
After switching to Channel 5 for Fifth Gear, he hosted Britain’s Worst Driver (2002-05), a format he created and sold to more than a dozen countries, and The Classic Car Show (2015).
Meanwhile, he humorously regarded getting the lowest score in Strictly Come Dancing’s history, in 2004, as a badge of honour. He was the British Press Awards’ motoring writer of the year in 2004.
Willson is survived by his wife, Michaela (nee Mac), whom he married in 2000, and their son, Max, and daughters, Mercedes and Mini.
• Quentin McDonald Willson, journalist and television presenter, born 23 July 1957; died 8 November 2025
