Change out of £190.

Never mind the price of petrol, what about the price of oil?

I have just picked up the Range Rover we use when we are filming our road-test videos.  All I wanted was an oil change yet the Land Rover dealer (in Sussex, not central London) presented me with a bill for £250 – and that was for the labour alone. The oil itself was another £73. Add on the VAT, and the bottom line came to £380.

And since the Range Rover’s oil capacity is about two gallons, that makes the present price of oil around £190 a gallon.

When I started driving, you could buy an entire garage for less than that.

A spy shot of the new Speed Watch mobile camera.

The police in Surrey have asked me to help them recruit some more volunteers for the local Speed Watch system.

They are looking for anyone with a pulse, preferably regular, who is able to stand, sit, or lie by the roadside and point a speed camera towards the sound of an approaching car. Persons who twitch or oscillate are particularly welcome as speed readings are consequently exaggerated.

Eyesight is not essential as the camera-operator will be provided with an assistant to more or less read the number plates. A second assistant will write down the registration approximated by the first, and a third assistant will hold the camera still while a fourth reads the recorded speed. A fifth assistant will make conversation, whilst a sixth will wave at drivers in order to distract them. Age or sex is of no consequence unless it occurs on duty.

In certain areas, the police are experimenting with mobile Speed Watch cameras. These will be towed slowly along the pavement edge.

Applications should be made to Surrey Police on 01483 539999. When you call, please mention my name: Massimo Pini Graham Whyte.

I’ve just opened the post and found a speeding ticket, which worries me a bit. Not because of the £60 but because I can’t remember being there at the time.

The offence took place in Luton, so I must have been drunk – I certainly wouldn’t go there when I’m sober. I feel like one of those suspects in a TV cop show: “Where were you at 12 noon on December 17th, 2007?” How should I know? I’m not even sure where I am at the moment.

The car in question was the Vauxhall VXR8, so 63 mph in a 40 limit seems quite restrained. I must have been dozing off. Apparently I was caught in a mobile trap: some gap-year woodentop hiding behind a tree with a VASCAR gun.

Wait a minute. The Vauxhall wasn’t delivered to me until four o’clock: they know not to come too early. So I’m in the clear: someone else was driving it., and I know who it was.

That means I can finger the real culprit: nail him bang to rights. And if I turn grass perhaps they will provide me with a safe house: I could do with something bigger than my flat. But not a house in Luton, I hope: I’d rather pay the fine.

What's wrong with an orange car?

I gather from recently published statistics that blue is now the UK’s most popular car colour, having nudged silver into second place. But together, these two colours account for almost 50 per cent of the cars on Britain’s roads, and four times the number of red cars, which nonetheless occupy third place in the colour league-table.

What I find sad is the fact that bright, solid, ‘Smartie’ colours account for so few cars. Yellow and orange cars, for example, together make up less than one per cent of the total. Green fares a little better, which I find odd, as a lot of people think of green cars as being ‘unlucky’. (This seems to stem from pre-war days, long before Armco barriers - when green cars that ran off the road could remain in the undergrowth for days, without being spotted.)

Mauve and purple are, nowadays, almost non-existent. That is a good thing. As the light fades in the open country, the landscape turns purple – as all painters know – and any car of a similar colour disappears into the background, which is why I have always described such colours as ‘deadly night shade’.

I have never understood why people buy silver or dull-coloured cars – mine are anything but – so perhaps a reader could explain to me the attraction of these particular shades.

Ford gets a bargain

Those of you who were worried that Ford’s sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to Mr Tata was an act of desperation, necessary to keep the company afloat, need worry no more.

Instead, ‘Out with the old, in with the new’ seems to be Ford’s remedy for its cashflow crisis. Even though the Indian take away deal has yet to be delivered, Ford has already announced its intention to spend a fistful of rupees in Romania, where it plans to buy the old Daewoo factory.

But because the factory at Craiova is largely owned by the Romanian government, 1,600,700,000 rupees (give or take) will go straight into its coffers in order to satisfy complex EU rules on state aid. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that this corporate back-hander  will in due course enable Ford to build cars in Romania that it didn’t want to build in Britain.

Given the wheels within deals nature of the globalised automotive industry, I can see the headlines a year from now: “Tata outsources X-Type production to old Daewoo plant. Extra shed needed’.

The hidden extra on every Volkswagen

The former Volkswagen labour boss, Klaus Volkert, is about to be banged up for nearly three years for using his influence to obtain sex and bribes. And the company’s former personnel chief, Klaus-Joachim Gebauer, has received a suspended sentence for handing over customers’ hard-earned money for that purpose.

Every Volkswagen sold in the past few years has cost a few cents more thanks to the antics of these two men, who between them pissed away some three million dollars on booze, sex and riotous living.

If Volkswagen had any decency, it would issue a public apology and consider some form of reparation. Maybe it could donate an equivalent sum to aid famine victims in Africa; at least those few extra cents you paid for your car would eventually serve a good cause.

If Kevin Rudd can apologise to the Aborigines, the least Volkswagen can do is say sorry to you and me.

Meanwhile from the comfort and sanctity of old age, Ferdinand Piech, the former Volkswagen CEO, and the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, denies all knowledge of the slush fund. “He’s lying,” claims Volkert. There were “only a few things” Piech did not know, said 65-year-old Volkert, who is appealing his jail term.

Johnny. Remember me?

I hear through the grapevine that Top Gear is to have its wings clipped. Trips to the North Pole are on hold, trashing caravans is now verbotten, and there’s to be no more splashing out on power boat trips up the Thames.

Worse still. I hear that Stig is to be replaced. There’s no longer enough money to pay a professional racing driver, so the rumour goes, and therefore the Top Gear producers are casting around for a member of the public who will fit into a small Nomex suit and look lively round Dunsfold. I would like to suggest my Uncle Charlie. As a market trader, he’s used to cutting corners, and the bends are no problem - he hasn’t been on the straight and narrow for years.

Perhaps when the present Stig leaves, we shall find out who he is (or she?). I have my own theory based on Stig’s size and the apparent fact that he is available all the year round and so is unlikely to be involved in F1 testing. Having met him a few times, my instinct tells me it’s Johnny Herbert. If you have a better idea, why not air it here?

Surrey's latest traffic car.

I got a tug last weekend. A police incident car followed me for several miles then eventually pulled me over with a quite unnecessary surfeit of blues and twos.

At the time I was driving ‘Old Bill’, my 1947 MG TC police car, which was once a proud upholder of the Road Traffic Act in distant Yorkshire and still decked out in its original livery. That is to say, it has a sort of number plate on t’back reading ‘Police’.

The young constable was eager to demonstrate that I was committing the offence, as he put it, of “…impersonating a police car.” Quite right: you could easily be fooled by the fabric roof and wire wheels.

Then he noticed that, according to the car’s road-fund licence, the fee paid was zero. This struck him as mysterious and possibly the source of another offence. And when his PNC check revealed the elderly MG to be an ‘Historic Vehicle’ he seemed unaware of such a taxation class.

Suspecting a ruse, he used his mobile ‘phone to engage the services of a traffic inspector, by way of a consultant. The conversation was fairly short, and as far as I could gather, quite pointed. A number of “Sirs” were appended at our end.

We left shortly after that, and on the way home I booked a couple of Beema drivers for speeding.

I recently had occasion to drive to Kentish Town. The journey was quite uneventful until I reached Kentish Town Road, northbound from Camden.

Then suddenly what had been a quietish journey turned into a nightmare of diesel fumes, belligerent bus drivers, hooting horns, and little or no progress.. In fact, it took me almost 30 minutes to travel some 400 yards along the aptly named A400, and I was even overtaken by some old boy with a Zimmer frame.

And the reason? Road works, of course. Except they weren’t so much road works as a tiny depression in the gutter, which, presumably, some council loony had decided should be fenced off in the name of Health and Safety. The patch in question could not have covered an open magazine, yet the fence around it could have contained several cows. In consequence, the road width was reduced to that of a single bus.

Mind you, the fenced-off area appeared to have trapped all the rubbish that normally tumbles down Kentish Town Road, blown by the winds from the Highgate foot hills. For a change, the place looked quite respectable, and the wag who doctored the local Northern Line sign may soon regret maligning such a clean and tidy neighbourhood.