The dropping of a new series of “The Grand Tour” held about as much interest for me as the announcement that the BBC is re-engineering “Top Gear” for another run, this time with a comedian/car-nut as its center.

It’s TV, remember. So British or not, you know all involved are thinking “youth movement.”

The rebooted “Grand Tour,” which is where the most celebrated “Top Gear” went when Jeremy Clarkson got fired and ended his and James May and Richard Hammond’s run of a series that began decades before them and continues after they left, throws three new strangers at the car review/car stunts/epic treks.

Old man Clarkson’s running “Clarkson’s Farm” and making bank for Amazon, thank you very much. Renaissance man James May is dabbling in travel shows and the like. And Richard Hammond, going grey and yet the youngest of those three — he’s 54 — is running a classic car restoration shop with a TV crew following him around.

The new guys are a personable, irritable Canadian youtube “car enthusiast,” Thomas Holland (38ish?), his “Throttle House” channel-mate James Engelsman (35), a Brit, and British engineer/nerd/trainspotting influencer Francis Bourgeois, the stage name of 26 year old Luke Nicholson.

If car culture and motoring enthusiasm is to have a future, the toothy, goofy, gawky Bourgeious is supposed to be its face, I guess? A little of him goes a long way, as he gives off this or that “Top Gear” replacement-who-didn’t-work-out vibes.

That’s one’s first take-away from this new series, which repeats “Top Gear” and “Grand Tour” gimmicks, takes us to a few new places — Malaysia and Malaysian drifting and car-decorating culture (think SoCal in the early 2000s), Pikes Peak for a race of tiny, underpowered but practical Japanese “Kei cars” — along the way.

Series reviewers have an unwritten code that says one must watch at least three episodes of a new show to review it, and even then you’re spitballing whether it’s going to work, who will rise to the top of the cast and if the chemistry will ever get there.

Series producers know that and make sure — no matter how pedestrian, derititave and blase the first two shows are — that the third episode is a winner.

That’s what happens here, as genre fans struggle to identify with this new trio, their forced bonhomie and their dental work. Even during Hammond’s “tooth whitening” days, we never saw this much toothy grinning from the old gits who used to get themselves in over their heads with this or that motorsports event or motoring predicament.

The third and fourth episodes send the guys off to convince America that “smaller is better,” and all most any pickup owner will ever need is a 40-60hp Honda Acty or the like, all any sports car enthusiast needs is a Suzuki Alto. But Kei cars are undersized and road-illegal in much of the U.S. So getting from Wyoming to Pike’s Peak, Colorado, will take some lumber roads and 4×4 trails, and one amusing bit of business involved covering the cars with a three-sectioned school bus shell to disguise them on Colorado tourist town streets.

The engineer is the enthusiastic pedant, the Canadian quick tempered and quicker with a U.S. policing/Teslas aren’t selling “I wonder why?” crack and the Brit is there because of well, birthright, I guess.

If this was an America-based series (they still refer to costs in pounds sterling, and horsepower in Brithis “brake horsepower”), you’d have to have a Latin car culture representative among the drivers. Because if car culture has a present and future in the U.S., it has a Spanish surname.

Some years back, for a magazine article on car collecting (the core audience of this sort of show), a successful dealer of restored classics told me men (mostly white) get into this in their late 50s and get out of it after ten years or so, on average.

That’s the “base” demographic these shows are pitched to. Most car repair/restoration shows skew “resto-mod” younger, and are just as dependent on “chararacters” at “The Grand Tour” and its “Top Gear” antecedent.

But as a guy keeping a 2003 Subaru Baha rustbucket going (fingers crossed) doing his own work on a ten year old Wolfsburg Edition Golf, I have to say that I look out the window at a drought stricken, over-heated part of America, that my tolerance for shows mocking the need to get away from hydrocarbons is spent.

It went away with the dinosaurs who retired from “The Grand Tour.”

If you’re younger than that and still burning fuel and burning tires oblivious to what that costs the planet, youtube is where you belong.

Maybe the chemistry will click more than we can tell from the first season. Maybe younger viewers hunger for a perpetually-grinning peer who gushes “It’s got me by the underwear, and it’s giving me a BRUTAL wedgie!” We’ll see.

But the odd remark about how “anti-social” America’s mania for two times the size we actually need a pickup truck to be is (I test drove a kei truck or two, and these three have no IDEA what the damned things cost) doesn’t justify the need for a show that covers too much of the same ground as its many predecessors.

It’s not your grandpa’s “Grand Tour.” Except it is. For now. Adding the three elder statesmen to the show as gurus they visit doesn’t work. At all, “torch passing” be damned.

The “car porn” that “Top Gear” heralded and that producer/creator Andy Wilman perfected is still very much an addiction for some. But the bloom has gone off that rose, and when it’s hot enough and the bees are dead, it won’t be blooming again any time soon.

We’ll see if these three mesh, if their geeky Power Rangersish “Kei Team” chemistry comes to feel less forced. Will they manage a little conflict beyond the odd moment of competitiveness?

And we’ll see if they find enough new wrinkles in old car quests/car tests/car gimmicks that decades of “Top Gear” and “Grand Tour” seasons trotted out to make the show a draw.

But it’s not just Clarkson and May and people their age who’re pretty sure the time for all that has passed.

Rating: TV-14, a bit of swearing, wot wot?

Cast: James Engelsman, Thomas Holland and Francis Bourgeois, with Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammon and James May.

Credits: Created by Andy Wilman, scripted by Sam Philip. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: episodes six @ :55 minutes each