Celebrity Drive: Adam Ferrara, "Top Gear USA" Host, Comedian

Quick Stats:Adam Ferrara, comedian and host of "Top Gear USA"

Daily Driver:2008 Mercedes-Benz E350 (Adam's rating: 9 on a scale of 1 to 10)

Favorite road trip:Highway 1

Car he learned to drive in:1970 Cadillac Coupe DeVille

First car bought:1985 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe

"Top Gear USA" host Adam Ferrara didn't own a car in recent years, because he lived in New York City, where a daily driver can be more of a liability than a necessity.

"I don't have a car in Manhattan because you have to choose between a car and an apartment. It's that expensive," he says, always the comedian. "I've got a place in Santa Monica; I've got a place in New York City. I do more driving out in Santa Monica, although not this weekend with Carmageddon, because we don't have enough problems in L.A." Ferrara spoke with Motor Trend during a break on the "Top Gear USA" set, several hours before the media-hyped closing of the 405 freeway that turned out to be a nonevent.

When the U.S. version of "Top Gear" got the green light on the History Channel, Ferrara bought his daily driver, a 2008 Mercedes-Benz E350 he keeps in L.A. He bought the used E350 last year specifically because he liked the model's rounded headlights. "They squared them off in 2010. I just like the rounded look, a little more classic look on it," he says.

Ferrara gives the E350 a 9 rating. "It's got everything I want. It's got respectable power. It's a 3.5 six in it, which is plenty power for a daily driver. Gas mileage is pretty good. The handling could be a little bit better, but for a daily driver I'm not chucking it into a corner on the 405."

What he doesn't like about it is the navigation, so he uses his phone instead. "The nav's a little primitive and the screen is low on the center stack, so you have to look down," he says.

"The iPod connection is in the glove compartment. When you connect it to the iPod, you run it through your dashboard. You can play a playlist, but you can't navigate through your iPod, go back and forth to podcasts," he says. "What I've done is I use the 'auxiliary in' in the glove compartment. I ran the wire and I have a holder for my iPhone that sits in the power outlet so I could navigate with the phone. I could just use the iPhone as the touchscreen interface on the phone itself and I still hear it through the car that way."

He enjoys driving the E350 up one of his favorite roads, Highway 1, to San Francisco to visit family. "I prefer to drive than fly, so I take it up and down to San Francisco and when I want to make time, I take the I-5 at night and just run," he laughs. "If I want to take my time, just have some fun and just think, I'll go up Highway 1."

When he first got the car, Ferrara was on his cellphone, walking through the garage, and the Bluetooth startled him. "The person I was talking to started coming out of the car. It scared the sh-t out of me. I actually said, 'How the hell did you get in my house?'" he says.

This is Ferrara's second time moving to Los Angeles. He first moved to Hollywood in the early 1990s. Back then he was stand-up comedian with a TV development deal, but nothing much came of it. "The car I had here, because I was a big TV star, was a luxury Ford Escort!" he says, with emphasis. "That's what I could afford. I had a '93 Ford Escort."

When Ferrara got cast on the Denis Leary show "The Job," he moved back to New York and left his Escort in a friend's driveway, and eventually sold it. "When I came back out here and 'Top Gear' got picked up for the series, I thought, 'I could get me a car! That's when I bought the Benz,' he says.

Car he learned to drive in

Ferrara grew up on Long Island in the town of Huntington, where he learned to drive an "ugly olive green" 1970 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. "You learn two ways - you learn from the older kids in parking lots, when you're hanging around and they're just trashing a car. Then my father took me for a ride and taught me how to drive," he says.

The Coupe DeVille was the family's second car and was used to haul plumbing pipes, since his dad remodeled kitchens and bathrooms. "That was my mother's car and she flicked a cigarette out of the window. We didn't know that it went into the back seat and in the morning we came out and the back seat was all burnt out," he says. "My father figured out if you take the seat out, you can run the length of a pipe right through the car. The trunk would close with these pipes in there because there's no back seat. Load the tools around it and put everything else in the Caddy."

When it was time to practice driving on the highway, his dad took him to the Northern State Parkway. "He said, 'OK, take it on the parkway, merge into the lane. Now be careful, don't slam on the brake because the toolbox is going to come up and hit you in the back of the head!'"

Ferrara says highways on Long Island have short approach ramps. "They're really short. It's ridiculous. I think they were built for horses and carriages at the time." Once, he mistakenly thought his dad instructed him to merge. "A truck passed us by, I yanked the wheel to the right so I wouldn't get hit and all the tools came over to the passenger side. So he's sitting there, he's got solder on him, all kinds of tools in his lap. I could see he's burning inside, he just wants to scream at me. But my mother yelled at him to be patient. And he went, 'OK! Don't do that again!'" he says, in a voice that mimics his dad.

That was pretty scary, but not because he almost wrecked the other car. "It was scary because my father was more scary than anything. My father had to get up and drive into Queens to go to work. If I was going out, I had to be home at 9 o'clock. He used to say, 'Listen, I've got to go to work in the morning and I'm going to bed. I'm setting my alarm for 9 o'clock. You better turn it off before I do."

Musclecars

Growing up on Long Island, Ferrara fell in love with the musclecars owned by the older kids in his neighborhood, like the 1965 Mustang a friend had. "I still love that era of automotive history. You know when you go back to your old high school and everything looks so much smaller? Those cars never got smaller to me," he says. "I get in those cars today and they're still as great as I remember when I was a kid. I got to drive a '66 Fastback in the new promo we shot. I had a lot of fun in that car."

First car bought

Once he started doing stand-up, Ferrara needed a car to drive to gigs. "You drive up and down the East Coast when you start getting booked on the road, so my road car was an '85 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe five-speed," he says.

Ferrara bought it from his brother, and his dad had to teach him how to drive a stick shift. He was 19 at the time and learned the basics in the Walt Whitman Mall parking lot.

Ferrara drove the Thunderbird from 1985 until his move to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. "The headliner ripped, the clutch went because I put 120,000 miles on it because I drove up and down the East Coast," he says. "I had to put a clutch in it, but other than that, no nickel-and-dime things. Nothing really went wrong with it. I always took care of the car."

But when he moved to L.A. everything went wrong at once. "It's like the car knew, 'Look, I'm not going to make it,'" he says. "The one I had before that car was an '81 Dodge Aries K. That came to me because I was on the dead relative inheritance program. My grandfather passed away and I was next in line. It was funny, because my father ended up getting into an accident on the Northern State Parkway in that car. It came home and it was all whacked out."

New York and California Drivers

Ferrara sees a clear difference between drivers on both coasts, and his assessment of Los Angeles drivers isn't pretty. "In California the lines on the road are just a suggestion," he says. "They're in the left lane with the left indicator on, so naturally it's time to turn right! Are you kidding me? In your Prius? I know, you're saving the Earth by trying to kill the people!"

Ferrara gives a warning for anyone driving in L.A. in the rain. "They can't drive in the rain!" he quips. "If you're in California and it's raining, stay home, because nobody can drive in the rain. It's like it's raining frogs. They're terrified."

"Carmageddon"

We spoke just before the hyped-up Carmageddon event, but Ferrara wasn't going to be affected since they were filming in a studio in Orange County all weekend. But he thought warning drivers wasn't a bad idea.

"It's appropriately named. It's like living on Long Island and we had Shoreham, the nuclear power plant -- what's our escape plan? Everyone get on the L.I.E.!" he yells, as if doing a standup gig. "Yeah, that'll work. This, they're giving you warning, 'You've got time to get out of town, or to stay home, but don't do anything this weekend where you have to drive. '"

Favorite road trip

The first time Ferrara drove up the California coast on Highway 1 was in his Ford Escort. "I don't know if it was the way the Escort handles, or the hangover I had, but with all those turns, I got physically sick. I had to pull over," he says. "The next time I did it, I did in a Carrera S. I was like, 'Oh, now I get it!'" The car belonged to his girlfriend.

With his current hosting gig, he feels lucky to be able to drive all over the country. That included driving a Lotus Evora over the Seven Mile Bridge from Miami to Key West at 130 mph.

"Top Gear" on the History Channel

Season Two of "Top Gear" debuted July 24. On the first episode last season, viewers were introduced to this U.S. version with Ferrara winning a Lambo challenge, topping out at 180 in a Gallardo Superleggera. Having never gone that fast, he reflexively threw a few f-bombs while in the cockpit.

"I put that car in thrust mode, where you take off the traction control, put your foot on the brake, you rev it up and take your foot off the brake. It's like launch mode in a Ferrari," he says. "I've never done that before and I really thought I dropped the transmission because that thing just goes, 'Bang!' You set it into a setting called Corsa. It's just -- boom!

"At 140, the car starts getting light and it feels like it's floating. It's scary as hell. You've got to hold on because the slightest move at that speed, you're dead. It tops out at 202 and I wanted to do 200, but I was running out of runway to stop. I had to bail. You're terrified and giggling at the same time. It's like, 'Oh my God, I almost died. Then you start laughing, 'Oh my God I almost died!' Then it's, 'I want to do it again!'"

Ferrara was in a pilot for History Channel that didn't get greenlit before he was offered a chance to try out as the third host of "Top Gear." He was already a huge fan of the original version. "They said, 'We're doing the American version.' My first words were, 'Don't screw it up. '" He met the other two hosts, Tanner Foust and Rutledge Wood.

"It was the weirdest audition I ever had because I didn't go to a producer's office or a studio. I was in California, they said, 'Meet us in the parking lot, look for an Evo. '" Like it's a ransom drop and a kidnapping," he says, wryly.

The producers set up cameras, furniture, and cones near the Evo, and wanted to see how the three would get along. "We were in this Evo 9," he recalled. "We just got in and said hello to each other and started tearing up the Evo." Foust showed them how to drift.

"We found this old sofa and tried to put Rutledge on the sofa, 'Let's see how close we can come before he chickens out and gets up!'" Ferrara says. They tried to skid close to Wood without hitting him. "That's when the executive producers went, 'Cut! OK, we've got enough. Thank you.' They stopped us when we did it because we almost killed each other."

To prepare to become the host of the most famous car show franchise in the world, Ferrara went to stunt driving school at Drivers East in New Jersey.

"Danny Aiello III was our stunt coordinator on 'Rescue Me.' When I got this gig, he said, 'There's a good guy in Jersey, go see Mike Burke and he'll hook you up," he says. "It was great. You learn J turns, reverse 180s, stuff in those cars you don't normally get to do -- the right way."