Jeremy Clarkson says foreign London taxi drivers' cabs smell of 'sick'
The suspended presenter made the claims in an article in Top Gear magazine
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Your support makes all the difference.Jeremy Clarkson has risked incurring the wrath of London cabbies by saying that they're either foreign and their cars smell of vomit, or they're wildly overpriced.
Writing for Top Gear magazine, the suspended BBC presenter opined that: "in London, there are two types of [taxi] driver."
Clarkson said: "You have a chap who has just arrived from a country you’ve never heard of, whose car smells faintly of lavender oil and sick, who doesn’t know where he’s going and can’t get there anyway because he never puts more than £2 worth of fuel in the tank of his car."
He added that you could get decent drivers in the capital, but their services are disproportionately expensive. "Then you have someone in a suit in a smart black Mercedes S-Class who does know where he’s going and is very polite but he charges around £7,500 a mile."
Clarkson is no stranger to making generalisations. He has previously described Mexicans as "lazy", and went to India to drive a Jaguar with a toilet seat fitted on the boot because "everyone who comes here gets the trots".
The presenter and columnist also referred to a Thai man as a "slope" on the programme, which Ofcom found to have breached broadcasting rules.
An internal investigation has recently been concluded over Top Gear's use of the work "pikey", and found that it was not racially offensive.
BBC's director of television Danny Cohen has said that he doesn't believe Clarkson is racist. In August 2014, Cohen said in a letter to The Guardian: “Whilst, Jeremy and I disagree on the language some have recently found very offensive I do not think he or anyone on the Top Gear team are racist.”
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