Jeremy Clarkson is interested not only in cars but engineering in general, especially pioneering work, as his programmes on Brunel and the Colossus computer have shown. In April 2004, Clarkson appeared on the British talk show Parkinson and mentioned that he was writing a book about the 'soul' many machines have. He cited Concorde as his primary example: when people heard it had crashed, quite aside from the sadness they felt for the loss of human life, there was also almost a sadness for the machine. The book, titled I Know You Got Soul, was published in October 2004.

Jeremy Clarkson, being one of the passengers on the last BA Concorde flight on October 24, 2003, paraphrased Neil Armstrong to describe the retiring of Concorde: "This is one small step for a man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind".

His latest book, The World According to Clarkson was at number one in the charts for eight weeks.

Jeremy Clarkson was awarded an honorary degree from Brunel University in 2003, partly because of his work popularizing engineering topics and partly because of his advocacy of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 100 Greatest Britons programme. In 2005, the School of Technology at Oxford Brookes University awarded him with an honorary engineering doctorate on the same grounds. This led to protests from various hard line green organisations.