The predictable Americans want to pimp your ride. The droll Brits want to make you laugh while getting informed, infuriated, fascinated and otherwise riled up about the cult of cars. That makes Top Gear the best show ever for grease monkeys. Not to mention anyone who has ever felt the exhilaration of the open road.

So, gentlemen and ladies, start your engines because Top Gear 11: The Complete Season 11 and Top Gear 12: The Complete Season 12 are newly released in North America.

Top Gear 11 is a two-disc set with six episodes but, alas, no extras. Top Gear 12 is a four-disc set with eight episodes, a smattering of minor extras and a bonus disc of the hilarious director’s cut of the Botswana Special from series 10.

All episodes play in enhanced widescreen with the kind of high-def video footage of the outdoors you usually see in nature videos (with exceptions, such as in Botswana, when the co-hosts make fun of their own film crew’s wobbly efforts while racing through a game park). While the Botswana show is extended, there are minor scene cuts for the DVDs from the original broadcasts. But only hardcore fans will notice. What is here is just brilliant — and funny.

The BBC claims 500 million viewers in 20 countries — including on BBC Canada and BBC America — for its edgy entertainment. The series is co-hosted by the three most lovable goofs ever assembled for a high-tech series. Led by the wisecracking giant Jeremy Clarkson, the core team also includes James (Captain Slow) May and Richard Hammond, now recovered from a horrifying car accident that almost killed him. Meanwhile, for test drives at electrifying speeds, meet the mysterious, helmeted and white-suited stunt driver known as The Stig.

Both in-studio and on the road, the three competitive co-hosts banter, squabble and often intensely debate both the finer and funniest points of cars, as well as other modes of transportation.

The vehicles they tackle range from fantastically high-end, super-expensive machines to old beaters they salvage, repair and then race in ridiculous conditions.

In Botswana, the challenge was to cross the entire country, including through the forbidding Makgadikgadi salt pans and the Kalahari Desert, in three cheapo wrecks. Hammond did the trick in a 1960s Opel that looked like a sewing machine box on wheels.

Set against the slapstick are trenchant analysis, including a comparison of the fuel consumption of a Prius vs. a high-performance BMW. The Prius controversially loses, in shameful fashion!

As for the humour, the situations in Top Gear are often funnier than in most Hollywood comedies and much better than in American reality shows. But the best stuff is the endless spark of sarcasm, wit and sardonic observation.

When Clarkson test drives and then deconstructs the Ferrari Scuderia — which has “a silly name” — he pitches it to speed freaks as “the bastard love child of Stephen Hawking and Rambo!”

The humour gets caustic on a trip to the U.S. to test American muscle cars while driving from San Francisco to the Bonneville salt flats in Nevada. In Reno, May dismisses the town as “an appalling cac-hole”. Throughout, the three deliciously trash the U.S. State Department for the foolish restrictions on their work visas, which require them to “be factual but not entertaining.”

The cars also get a hard time — until the Brits get to drive them on the salt flats at heart-pounding speeds. The goal, Clarkson observes, was to see if Americans could ever “make a car that actually works in the civilized world.” The surprise, he said, is that they found three of them. And that’s factual. But how they found out those facts is incredibly entertaining.