Films focused primarily on car review, motoring challenges, and road trip journeys, often based around those of Top Gear, such as a challenge in which the presenters have to purchase a class of vehicle and see which is the best through a series of tests given through text messages from the show's producer. Throughout the first three series of the programme, the format was focused on a similar arrangement to that of Top Gear, involving a mixture of pre-record television films - a mixture of single or multi-part films - and live-audience studio segments, though for legal reasons it was designed with significant differences to avoid clashing with the BBC's motoring series. In July 2019, executive producer Andy Wilman announced that he and the production crew had extended their contracts with Amazon for two additional years. A video game based on the programme, entitled The Grand Tour Game, was released 15 January 2019. The Grand Tour is released to viewers across more than 195 countries and territories, attracting favourable viewing figures since its premiere episode, and receiving positive reviews from critics. At the conclusion of the third series, the production team switched out of this format, and towards a focus on producing special motoring films for future series, with episodes released at select intervals. Episodes were released weekly to Amazon Prime Video accounts, and repeats of the first series were made available on traditional broadcasters in late 2017. When the programme was launched, it followed a similar format to that of Top Gear between 20, including car reviews and timed laps, motoring challenges and races, studio segments, and celebrity guests, with the team using a studio within a large tent during this time in its first series, the tent was located at different locations across the globe, before taking a fixed site within the Cotswolds.

The programme was conceived in the wake of the departure of Clarkson, Hammond, May and Wilman from the BBC series Top Gear and was originally contracted with 36 episodes over three years.

The Grand Tour is a British motoring television series, created by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, and Andy Wilman, made for Amazon exclusively for its online streaming service Amazon Prime Video, and premiered on 18 November 2016.

The grand tour jeremy clarkson