Missionary zeal

Roadworks on the Auckland city side of Mission Bay on Monday reduced 200m of Tamaki Drive to a 30km/h crawl. Drivers exiting the disruption had just enough time to speed up to perhaps 40 km/h before they ran into another hazard - a tax collector in the form of a speed camera car. Why it parked within spitting distance of the roadworks will forever remain a mystery.

First among fools

A police patrol car should have been on the Southern Motorway on Sunday between Drury and Bombay. A woman in a Nissan Pulsar sat in the outside lane and a bloke in a Ford Mondeo was in the middle lane. Both were doing about 110 km/h and neither driver would move over and merge with light traffic on the inside. A frustrated Mercedes-Benz driver crossed three lanes to get past, nearly colliding with a BMW that had done the same thing a split-second earlier. Who would the wallopers have blamed had the Benz and BMW collided? The third lane in most developed countries is a passing lane. How come New Zealand drivers - truckies included - treat it as their own?

Slow to learn

On Australian roads 1759 people died last year compared with a comparatively large 509 in New Zealand. Australia has more than five times our population but only about three-and-a-half times our number of road deaths. Selfish driving like that on the Southern Motorway goes a long way towards helping to explain one of the main ways where New Zealand goes wrong.

Walking tall

It's called Walnut Walk. It's not a new dance or a variation of Caesar salad. Nor is it something Winnie the Pooh dreamed up. It's a little number by Jaguar - 10ha of British woodland planted in walnut trees. The carmaker is paying $500,000 over the next three years to establish Walnut Walk, which is part of a 20-year British Forestry Commission plan to plant 30 million trees over 320 sq km of British heartland. Jaguar won't mill the timber wood - the trees will be there to remind passersby of the days when Jaguar interiors and elegant walnut interior finishing went hand-in-hand.

Numbing names

Japanese carmakers have come up with some mind-numbing names in the past, handles immortalised in the translation from Japanese to English. The Nissan Gloria and Cedric come to mind. So does the Toyolet, Toyota's name for its first export. Now a customised Japanese motorcycle shop called V-PER is taking more liberties. V-PER stands for vibrated performance. The model range includes the Super Dung, Monky Goose, Skid-Scud and Killi-Fish.

Promised land

Ford will spend up large in a major effort to turn a considerable profit inside three years with Land-Rover. One plan is to boost sales in the United States, where Land-Rover has been selling about 30,000 vehicles a year, mostly Range Rover and Discovery. Another project would be a modernisation of the Solihill plant, which still uses 1950s assembly methods. The plant employs 8200 workers, who built 166,101 vehicles last year. That's only 20 vehicles for each employee, or less than half the 52-car average for each worker in European plants.

e are the world

A Sydney Morning Herald correspondent reports that the Sunshine Coast drug squad arrested a woman heroin dealer, seizing in the process a car bought with the proceeds of her crime. Nope, it wasn't a BMW, Benz, Jaguar, or even an HSV. Heroin profits must certainly have dived lately. Why on earth would she be driving around in a Daewoo?