I’m glad to say I’ve never been in a serious road accident, but I’ve had lots of advice about what to do if it’s unavoidable. This varies from “hit another car in preference to a tree – you’re more likely to survive” to a simple “unhook your thumbs from the steering wheel before the impact”. (This latter advice, from a racing driver, is because the steering wheel jumps so hard it can break your thumbs.)

I’ve always secretly believed, however, that everything would happen far too quickly for any rational thinking. But maybe not…

I was taking a passenger ride round Silverstone last week in a fabulous Aston Martin DB4 racer, when we hit a huge glut of oil. While the driver was ensconced in a proper race seat, I was on the original upholstered armchair, with no headrest. The seat-back was below my shoulders. As we went into an elegant spin, I found myself thinking that, if we went backwards into the tyre wall, I was going to end up with the mother of all whiplash – if not a broken neck. I wiggled around (it was a four-point, not a five-point, harness) and by sticking my legs in the air, managed to slide low enough in the seat to rest the back of the helmet against the top of the seat, so I was staring at the roof. We came to a halt in the gravel, some way from the tyre wall, and the driver turned and looked at me in amazement. Maybe I looked silly, but I was amazed that I’d had time to think at all. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

The car in front is a Toyota

Can somebody please tell me why silver cars are invariably driven slowly? Why, without regard to other road users, obdurate Yaris, Civic, Rover 25 and Corolla drivers insist on maintaining a rolling roadblock that is more effective than Trafpol’s finest V70’s?

It is an offence to drive unreasonably slowly yet I wouldn’t mind betting that no one has ever been prosecuted for doing so.

I took my Lotus out for the weekend, along some of the quietest roads in southern England, many of which are subject to the national speed limit. Yet despite the openness of the roads, the general absence of traffic, and large signs adverting the legal right to drive at 60 mph, time and again I came up behind cars travelling at 40 mph or less, and all but one of them was silver.

And if you find yourself at the back of a slow-moving queue on a single carriageway road, at the head of the queue will be either a JCB or a silver Yaris. Regardless of the prevailing pace for that stretch of road, the Yaris will be off it. (Any other horrible, small, spotless, middle-class, holier-than-thou, CSMA-stickered, Britannia-rescued, dog-smelling, fifth-gear-locked, silver car may at this point be substituted). And worse still, all the cars behind it will be so bunched up that not even a clockwork-mouse overtaking strategy will work.

That evening, Silver Car Man will tell his neighbour what a lovely drive they had. “There wasn’t another car on the road,” he will say.

What's going on in there?

We’ve been having a tech-fest at home: I’m now Bluetooth-compliant, MP3-compatible, hands-free and wireless. I have even read the Korean-Babelfish handbook for my ‘Recoboy’ digital voice recorder, cover to cover. As for automotive technologies, I revel in every electronically-enhanced function, every automatically-activated acronym they can dream up. Lay it on with a trowel: I’m ready.

But… one small part of me mourns the passing of an age when we were more involved with our cars. I don’t just mean the driving experience; I mean the intimate knowledge of things whirring and turning and doing good. Getting us places. Those long hours spent tinkering with the valve timing or, more ambitiously, those ill-advised weeks spent dismantling the head and gas-flowing with hand-held tools to see if it would get me places faster. (Answer: no.) I miss all that. True, we can still have fun with classic cars… but it’s coming to an end, isn’t it? I, like everyone else, have been seduced by the lure of see-you-home headlights and dual-zone climate control. I used to look under the bonnet of every new car I tested… but seen one black, plastic box, seen ’em all.

Rather more exclusive than Peugeot hoped it would be...

Think exclusive and you tend to home in on ultra-costly cars wearing prestigious badges such as Rolls-Royce, Maybach or Lamborghini. They’re exclusive because hardly anyone can afford them; their sales are limited by the number of people with the necessary folding.

But driving something unusual doesn’t necessarily require the wealth of Bill Gates; for just a few grand you can snap up something you’re unlikely to see on your neighbour’s drive. On Saturday I saw a Passat W8 and a Renault Avantime; I took a lot more notice of those than I did of the Maybach and Phantom I saw on Sunday.

The VW and Renault were commercial failures, white elephants that should never have been signed off. But the fact they were is surely cause for celebration; if only rational cars got the thumbs up wouldn’t life be boring? The Honda Legend, Citroen C6 and Cadillac BLS are other cars you’re never going to see in quantity, partly because they’re against such established German competition. Yet they’re all going to represent cracking value for money in a year or two.

However, it’s not just in the executive arena that cars fail to sell. Peugeot is finding that out with its costly 1007, which it just can’t shift. Also, when was the last time you saw a VW Fox? I’ve yet to see one on the road, and VW can’t blame those pesky German rivals for dominating the market. Anything French and executive is never going to sell, but what do you reckon are the biggest-ever automotive white elephants?

Among the usual April Fool press releases was one from Kia about its new model, the Concept i, which costs less than £4,000 and comes in flat-pack form for home assembly. Then there was an insurance company survey with the headline “One in five admit to having used their car as a toilet: 22% of drivers have urinated in their own vehicle.” Finally, there was a real corker from Maybach. It was simply a picture – no accompanying story – of rap artist P Diddy sitting on a Maybach, apparently fiddling with his genitals.

The only one I was momentarily taken in by was the flat-pack Kia: I was on the verge of ringing up to ask for a test-drive. It also turned out to be the only one of the three that was an April Fool. The insurance company’s survey is enough to put you off ever buying a second-hand car but it’s the Maybach one which left me gaping. Maybach positions itself as the maker of “the ultimate luxury limousine” – an aspirational vehicle at the very peak of a tiny, highly-exclusive market segment. Not quite the image portrayed by P Diddy and his genitals, surely?

The first automated speed cameras were installed way back in 1992, so you’d think soon after their introduction some sort of study would be instigated, to look into their side effects. After all, we’ve had all the spin about how effective they’re meant to be – but what about the downsides?

Unbelievably, it took until 2005 for the Department for Transport to commit to setting up a study – a move that was well over a decade late. However, I was talking to Paul Smith of Safe Speed recently, and he’s been doing some digging. It seems that the DfT has decided to scrap its plans, while also changing the way that speed camera partnerships are run in the UK.

It’s all a bit involved to go into here, but Paul reckons this is the closest we’re going to get to the DfT admitting that its reliance on speed cameras was a bad move. Instead of admitting the policy has failed, the system is being allowed to fade away.

It probably makes little difference that the study was scrapped; it would have been yet another whitewash anyway. Remember the one a couple of years back that claimed cameras save 100 lives each year? That was the study which came out a few days before the annual road casualty figures – which had gone up slightly…

Perhaps Paul should have been able to do the study; he’s already come up with 40 downsides to speed cameras. Still, it looks like their use might be on the decline. Let’s hope so – then perhaps we can start doing something worthwhile towards making our roads safer.