The car I’ve been driving to work in every day this past week is a 1925 Ford Model T. It just got me thinking about how much we like our hybrids these days. But isn’t it more environmentally friendly to take an old car, something like a Model T or a Fiat Topolino or a Mini, clean it up a bit and drive it around? Is that not a smaller carbon footprint than building a Prius in Japan, putting it on a freighter and shipping it all the way across the ocean? It seems that this is the ultimate in recycling.

They built 16m Model Ts and there are still 1m of them out there. I’ve been commuting with one every day and it’s hilarious. First of all, the roads in LA are terrible but I just skip over potholes the way they did in 1925. I don’t go on the motorway with it but I take side streets and my top speed is about 45mph. People wave and are very friendly. They look at you as if you are doing something to help the environment. “Oh, he’s not buying some big shiny new car that weighs three tons.”

I think driving an old car for your entire life, or a long part of your life, is probably more environmentally friendly than getting a new hybrid every three or four years. Obviously this is not practical for everybody, but I have to say, driving a Model T around Los Angeles, with the exception of getting broadsided by a three-ton SUV, is actually quite enjoyable. The weather is pleasant, it gets at least 25 miles to the gallon, it’s literally bulletproof and you can go over any type of road surface.

When commuting in the morning, especially in Los Angeles, the traffic is bumper to bumper anyway. Nobody is going much over 30 or 40mph. I’m in my 83-year-old car that was built once. The paint that’s on it has been on it for almost 55 years, it looks presentable, it gets good mileage and I’m not constantly depleting the earth’s resources. It was built once and has a shelf life of . . . for ever.

I think you can offset any higher carbon emission from an old car. For example, my commute is about 15 miles each way, and those big container ships pulling into the port of Los Angeles put out about 360,000 automobiles’ worth of pollution hour for hour. So think of all these cars that are made in Korea and Japan and shipped across the ocean. Yes, the emissions are higher, but the Model T has a pretty small engine and it’s not belching out pollutants. Don’t forget, there’s no lead in the gas any more. So it’s not as bad as all that. I mean, this is not a ’59 Cadillac with a huge engine. It’s a little 177 cubic inch (3 litre) motor. This one’s got an exhaust pipe about half an inch wide and it just sort of putts down the road, if you keep it reasonably well tuned.

Obviously I know there are tremendous flaws in this argument, but I’m just saying it’s something to think about. How many cars do we dispose of merely because they are no longer fashionable and we don’t like them any more?

Sometimes we people in the car hobby get beat up over these things because we are probably the worst for the manufacturers because we’re not buying new cars. We’re constantly looking for old cars that we can recycle and use again.

Imagine if every time you moved they crushed the house you lived in and had to build a new one. People have no problem living in a house that someone else lived in. They just fix it up. We’ve certainly built enough cars. Why not just fix up the ones we have and continue to use them?

Let me know what you think.

You can write to Jay Leno at ingear@sunday-times.co.uk . See Jay’s garage online at www.jaylenosgarage.com

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