For giggles, here's my reaction to some of the stuff that has been posted:
Chris Evans has had a breakdown? Yeah, sure, but it seems to me that he has "learned the hard way" and learned quite a bit, over the years.
New Top Gear will only last a year / Chris Evans won't leave his day job? Well, there you have it. Perhaps if it succeeds, he'll finally give up the radio show.
The general sense that the new show needs to be a clean break from the past? You bet. I think Chris Evans appears to understand that quite well. Also, he certainly appears to have a great reverence for what Top Gear used to be, so I think he has a good sense of where he wants to go. Will any of us like what he comes up with? We just won't know until we can see it.
MWF's "Typical extreme lefty missing the whole point as per bloody usual"? That's what I'm getting at with Chris Evans in the paragraph above -- I think he "gets it." Whatever he comes up with, I think he has an idea of what Top Gear fans will want to see. Like him or not, at least I think he is one guy who has a grip on what worked with the CH&M Top Gear. At the least, that's the best hope I've got.
Elijah B's "My suspicion is that TG is going to again become a car show like Fifth Gear; all cars and no entertainment or personalities"? Again, that's what I'm saying above -- I think Chris Evans "gets it." How obvious can it be that Top Gear was all about the personalities of the three guys, orbiting around the subject matter of cars? Very obvious. How can Evans, or anyone else, miss that point completely? Possible, yes, but again, I sure hope that he'll move forward in that direction. I suppose we'll start beginning to know when we hear who he hires as co-presenters. I could see it wind up being a bit more like Fifth Gear, but certainly Evans has to comprehend that personalities is what Top Gear was mostly about. So, I sure think he realizes that he needs to have personalities as the biggest part of the new Top Gear -- but only time will tell whether he can pull it off very well.
And so on, yadda yadda yadda. From my limited exposure to Chris Evans, I'll agree that he was the main guy I wanted to see in a new Top Gear. So now I'll have it, and I'll see what he comes up with. That's about all I can say at this point.