You have to hand it to Messrs. Clarkson, May, and Hammond. Together with producer Andy Wilman, they took a moribund BBC show about cars and turned it into a global phenomenon—we are of course talking about Top Gear. Under their revised format, Top Gear dropped the idea of being Consumer Reports for cars, instead opting for comedy banter, insanely impractical road trips, and breathtaking cinematography. When things ended badly with the BBC, Clarkson, May, and Hammond were snapped up by Amazon with a budget reported to be $7 million (£4.5 million) per episode. But they evidently want more. On Monday Variety revealed that the gang, together with a tech entrepreneur called Ernesto Schmitt, want to create a digital home on the Internet for car people.

The site will be called DriveTribe, and will cater to a range of different car enthusiasts—or tribes—with verticals full of written content as well as video. Each tribe will have a different host, including Clarkson, Hammond, and May. According to Hammond, "Gamers have got Twitch, travelers have got TripAdvisor and fashion fans have got, oh, something or other too. But people who are into cars have got nowhere. There’s no grand-scale online motoring community where people can meet and share video, comments, information, and opinion. DriveTribe will change that. And then some."

Clarkson was more succinct: "I didn’t understand DriveTribe until Richard Hammond said it was like YouPorn, only with cars."

It's a bold move, but one that is far from guaranteed success. Various attempts to create an all-singing, all-dancing online automotive publication have been tried and failed (Drivers Republic and /Drive both spring immediately to mind). Unlike a print magazine or weekly TV show, the Internet demands a steady stream of fresh content every day, an activity that cares not for interruptions for foreign filming trips.

But the more challenging part may well be the very idea of those tribes. Building (and managing) an online community is no easy task, for those different automotive tribes are nothing if not partisan—Internet fora are replete with thousands of pages of arguments about Ford vs. Chevy, F1 vs. NASCAR, Tesla vs. everyone else, and so on.

And despite what Hammond might think, these disparate tribes already have online homes like Pistonheads, FerrariChat, Rennlist, CamaroZ28.com, and many others. Drawing enough of these folks in to give the new community a critical mass will be no easy task.

Meanwhile, over at the BBC Top Gear lives on, recreating itself for at least the third time. Headed by UK radio and TV presenter Chris Evans, and joined by a massive cast that includes Matt LeBlanc, Sabine Schmitz, and Chris Harris, the show has been dogged by negative coverage in the UK's newspapers and a bit of a controversy involving someone drifting near the Cenotaph (a war memorial in London).

And it too wants a slice of online action. On Tuesday it emerged that in addition to the main show—which will air on the BBC in the UK and BBC America here in the US—there will be an online-only Extra Gear, hosted by Rory Reid, available via BBC3 (it is unclear whether those of us outside the US will have access).