Two stories in The Times on Tuesday, only three pages apart, told a similar tale. One with obvious comic implications, the other with tragic ones. Both were about dealing with modern teenagers, and both were about cars.

The first story began as follows: “Haynes manuals, the bible of home car mechanics, are branching out to take on a particularly tricky and temperamental model – the teenager.” It went on to describe the technological advances that have made home car-maintenance a thing of the past and led the famous DIY car people to move into domestic and familial how-to publishing.

It’s obvious, really, that the people whose advice about cars we no longer need should be the ones we turn to for help bringing up our children.

For example, if you have noticed your son is wearing his trousers round his knees and walking about with his left hand inside his underpants (as so many teenage boys do now), you can simply turn to the page where it says: “Stupid Teenage Walks – a longstanding fault with the model. Simply tighten the fanbelt, sorry, waistband. Failing that, apply WD40 to all moving parts.”

If the kid listens to his iPod at dinner, drumming the table with his fingers and making infuriating nodding motions instead of eating: “Try a jump-start. But remember to connect both positive and negative cable heads to your live 12v battery before applying to each ear of the teenager.” If the kid keeps saying “like” and “innit” and “blood” and repeatedly calls you “motherf*****”: “Tap head sharply with the back of a screwdriver.”

If the kid starts doing crack and then gets pregnant: “You’ve been sold a duffer, check warranty and apply to manufacturer for refund or replacement.”

Ha ha. Funny. The other story began like this: “A teenage motorist was facing prison yesterday after admitting killing a pensioner while sending a text on her mobile phone.” That’s the tragic reprise. In both stories, digital technology has brought about the death of something: in the first, car manuals; in the second, a person.

Had digital technology not enabled the invention of the mobile phone, the driver, Rachel Begg, might have been looking where she was going. And the pensioner, Maureen Waites, 64, might not have been killed.

Had digital technology not led to the computerisation of the automobile engine and the superannuating of the relatively simple traditional motor, people might still be mending their cars at home, using manuals.

Taken together, both stories have great nostalgic potential. One can’t help imagining that in her youth Maureen Waites was driven around 1950s and 60s Britain in cars made of steel and smelling of leather, maintained by their owners with the help of a broken-spined Haynes manual flopped open at the page with the gearbox diagram.

Owners who, when they had done the best they could to get the oil off their hands, called her up on a heavy bakelite phone, turning the dial ponderously and waiting for it to return between digits, to ask if she wanted to go out for a drive. Or even wrote a note, in ink or pencil, to put through her door.

The car that hit hers will have weighed less than half what those cars of her youth weighed. Its driver will never have looked under its bonnet. Rachel Begg will have had as little idea how her car works as her phone. But don’t blame her for the killing. She wasn’t even there. The iPod that cuts off the kid from the aural community, the gobbing in the street, the mobile phone used to connect to elsewhere because “here” is briefly tedious. They’re all part of the same blurring of boundaries between private and public space. The abnegation of society. The retreat from “here”.

Drivers who got to know their car through their Haynes manual were right there in the moment when they drove that car. Rachel Begg was completely elsewhere. In a world at the other end of a text message that contained neither her car, nor the road, nor Mrs Waites.

Both stories are about an atomised society. Fragmented ties. We are only as interested in our children as our parents were in their cars. Teenagers have gone a bit wrong, we know that. So we buy a manual ( Haynes Teenager Manual goes on sale on July 2) and promise to give them a tweak at the weekend. See if we can’t get to the bottom of the strange whining noise. The funny smell.

But you can’t fix teenagers with a textbook. It’s too late for that. The modern teenager is as hardwired for incomprehensibility, solipsism and brutish collision with its environment as your new 4x4.

For all the benefits you no doubt believe it has also brought, the technology that killed the Haynes car manual also created our teenagers. And killed Mrs Waites.

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