Ultimate remake

For sale: three-wheeler 1886 Benz Patent Motor Car, priced at about $125,000. No, it's not the world's first internal-combustion-engined car, just a replica. Mercedes-Benz has been bitten by the retro bug and is building copies of the car that is regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. Karl Benz donated the sole remaining original - the template for the replicas being built by the Mercedes-Benz Classic Centre in Stuttgart - to a museum in Munich in 1906. The carmaker has received 70 orders from collectors in Germany and beyond.

Dependable Lexus

Toyota's luxury brand Lexus has topped, for the seventh straight year, an American survey of the durability of four- and five-year-old cars and trucks. The J.D. Power study revealed that Lexus vehicles had less than half the problems of the average vehicle. A 1997 Lexus has 1.73 problems for each vehicle, compared with 3.82 problems for the average 1997 vehicle. Nissan's luxury Infiniti brand placed second. Other top-finishers included Jaguar, Ford Lincoln, Honda and Toyota.

Ban 'em all

The Good Oil stalled his car on a green light at an intersection the other day. Probably just as well, because the woman in the Honda Legend who ran the red light outrageously late might have ended up wearing her own airbag. Red-light runners should immediately be banned from driving for three months. No ifs or buts. But it won't happen because there are not enough traffic cops to crack down on idiot drivers and those cops that are on the road are mostly on speed-camera duty. That's how they get paid. The cost of running the police force is subsidised by traffic fines - ask a policeman.

Road safety

British columnist Anthony French-Constant says his countrymen are more likely to be injured by an innocuous household item than hit by a car or bus. Citing 1999 figures from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, he writes: "No fewer than 73 people were injured so seriously by talcum powder that they ended up in hospital. Accident and emergency departments were clogged by 10,773 hapless victims of the humble sock, 1171 gardeners were savaged by leaves and 787 unfortunates were mugged by a sponge. Moreover, bean bags beat the crap out of 1317 victims and 37 Darjeeling aficionados were viciously assaulted by a tea cosy.

"Perhaps the most disturbing statistic of all, however, is that an astonishing 13,132 Britons overtaxed our ailing Health Service with the aid of a vegetable. In all, 2.8 million people end up in hospital every year as a result of accidents in the home. About 4000 of them never re-emerge.

"Traffic accidents, by contrast, hospitalised a meagre 320,310 people over the same period, of which just 3423 actually died."

We are the world

* British police are urging motorists to fit a device that, when triggered, sprays an invisible chemical over anyone tampering with the car. The so-called SmartWater shows up under ultra-violet light and can stay on the skin for weeks and clothes indefinitely, says Auto Express.