"What I don't like about all these Korean and Malaysian cars is that you get a sense that they were designed not by one man who wanted to make a great car, but by a corporation that simply wanted to make money."
- Jeremy Clarkson on the Kelisa, shortly after hitting it with a sledgehammer
The Perodua Kelisa was a Malaysian city car built by Perodua from 2001 through to 2007.
Appearances[]
- Top Gear GTi (Unknown episode)
- Series 2, Episode 3
- Series 5, Episode 9
- Clarkson: Heaven and Hell
Top Gear GTi[]
The Kelisa would first be driven by ex-Top Gear presenter Steve Berry for a late 2001 episode of UKTV spin-off show Top Gear GTi. The metallic green example driven by Berry on the show, VU51 EFJ, was registered on the 13th of December that year. He talks about the various methods in which a person could spend £6,000, such as on a very nice watch, a holiday, a bathtub, or the then-new £5,300 Perodua Kelisa, which was then Britain's cheapest new car. 4 years prior, Berry had driven the Kelisa's predecessor, the Nippa.
Series 2, Episode 3[]
Not too different from a bacon sandwich.
The Kelisa made its return to the rebooted version of Top Gear for the third episode of the show's second series, and was driven by the likewise freshly-returned host James May. Starting off at a seafront café, he asks patrons, including the stall owner himself to try and pronounce the company's name as he orders a fried bacon butty.
During the 18 months between the car's first two appearances on Top Gear, the Kelisa had remained Britain's cheapest new car at £5,000. He gives the car a glowing review and implies that it was a better successor for the original Mini than the BMW version.
Series 5, Episode 9[]
Round and around...
For a showdown between a whole host of Korean and Malaysian cars, a facelifted Kelisa was driven in a wide radius where host Jeremy Clarkson sat in the driver's seat without a seatbelt on. The combined G-Forces and the lack of any support forced Clarkson over the centre console and into the passenger seat with his hands still firmly on the wheel.
Clarkson: Heaven and Hell[]
Clarkson's Kelisa purchase.
The Kelisa returned a third and final time for host Jeremy Clarkson's 2005 home video release, Heaven and Hell. Purchasing an 05-reg model in "Spakling Silver", to which Clarkson presumes they meant "Sparkling Silver" for £4,842 at a car dealership near Oxfordshire, he drives the car off the forecourt for a very short amount of time before parking it immediately in front of the aforementioned dealership. He then gets out of the car and returns with a sledgehammer, before proceeding to damage most of the body panels. With various staff looking on, he then gets back in the car, pushing the dented roof back up, before taking the Kelisa for a drive and continuing to critique it.
Towards the end of the video, Jeremy Clarkson attempts to destroy the Kelisa by dangling it from a crane with a heavy weight that eventually succeeds in ripping off the entire front fascia, before blowing it up in a spectacular dynamite-fuelled explosion which sends the car flying through the air before landing on its roof engulfed in flames.