At the close of last week’s cliffhanger, regular readers will recall, the cliff from which our hero was hanging by his slipping keyboard fingers was waiting for something to appear beneath it. Irregular readers will need to be told that the something was a G-Wiz. And a scant moment after our hero finished writing and plummeted into the abyss, it arrived. He landed beside it.

The G-Wiz is a tiny electric car. It is tiny because it is an electric car: if it were any less tiny than 2 metres long x 1 metre wide, it wouldn’t be a car at all, it would be a hut; it would not be able to move anywhere, because its motor would not be powerful enough to move it. Indeed, tiny though it is, it doesn’t move much anyway, since, after you have unplugged it from your wall, its charged battery will take you a mere 40 miles before it goes flat – ie, just 20 miles from the wall, unless you want to trudge home on foot.

Readers who have not seen a G-Wiz – not only because there aren’t many about but also because those that are about are so tiny that you will not have spotted one if a dog happened to be overtaking it – should envisage it as a miniature Popemobile. It is what the designers would have lifted on to the table to give the late Pope John Paul II an idea of what he would be buying. Last Wednesday, it is what Mrs Coren actually bought.

So, then, how is it in this abyss – which, as you know, I saw as the end of motoring as we know it? Well, it is the end of motoring as we know it. But it is terrific. When I motored as I knew it, the world hated me, not just because the big fast carbon-farters I drove were frying it, but because the world was full of enemies. This is no news to you: you know that the moment you get in your car, it becomes a tank. You are not ferrying the kids to school, you are not popping down to Waitrose, you are engaged in the battle for Kiev.

But as I Wiz around now, the world loves me. Motorists do not fight me for every last millimetre of territory, every last nanosecond of time, they wave me in, they smile, cyclists do not bang on my roof, they lift their thumbs, they doff their helmets, I am made an honorary cyclist, marathon trainers do not sprint from kerbs to make me swerve, they jog upon the spot to let me pass, pedestrians tug down their smogmasks to gasp a pally cheer, and – best, perhaps, of all – the Bentley driver paused beside me at the lights no longer sneers, the way he used to do; instead, he looks uneasily askance, as his tickover slides another slab of Greenland in the sea and the stunna in the glove-kid passenger seat tells him she must have one like that right now, dead cool, dead chic, in pink, wiv whitewall wossnames.

Mind you, I can gloat and bask like this for only an hour or so, because that is the way it is with batteries, but as driving hours go, very few ever got this good. Green and pleasant is what this is: I had a lot of fun as Mr Toad, but, these days, I’d rather be Kermit the Frog.

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