The latest US car sales figures suggest that it’s not only the cap-in-hand Big Three who’re hurting.

They show that for November, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Honda all posted steeply downward-pointing sales curves. GM is down 41 per cent on last year, and Ford down by 31 per cent. But, get this, Toyota and Honda were down 34 per cent and 31 per cent respectively for the month also. It’s worth noting that more than 90 per cent of Toyotas and Hondas sold in the US are made there too.

Now with Toyota and Honda each introducing new small car offerings in the last few months in the form of their Scion and Fit brands while also having the best hybrids available, it could be reasonably expected that in the face of the Big Three’s much larger, less desirable cars and trucks, they would have held up their sales rather better.

A few months ago, I drove the new Ford Fiesta in Italy, through a part of Tuscany and on the same roads on which I’d previously enjoyed Porsche’s Cayman. Despite having such an act to follow, I loved the Ford with a passion. Okay, so there wasn’t much room in the rear, and its centre console looked like a squashed Transformer toy, but its poise, balance and urgency was emotive and addictive and at its probable starting price in the New Zealand in the low-20-grand bracket, it will charm a whole raft of downsizers when it comes here in the first half of next year.

Its handling and ride exemplify exactly what has been good about Ford of Europe’s driving dynamics since Richard Parry-Jones started to put his mark on them more than 15 years ago. Incisively accurate, shock-free over wicked road surfaces and possessed of an instinctive biddability that possibly only the MX5, Cayman and Boxster seem to share, the Fiesta drives with more gamin and flair than any car in its class and many classes above.

It seems that someone out there doesn’t like me. He or she is probably a GM fan, as the poison pen letter they left in my home mailbox threatened all manner of nasties and said that I didn’t know what I was talking about when I’d described the abject state of the Big Three US carmakers in general and GM in particular. He or she didn’t use words like that, but that was the gist of it - there were many single syllable words involved.

The democracy of the internet and our blogging system in particular means that everything can be traced to its source, and commenters are bright enough to know this, so though they have pseudonyms, their email signature is known and they have sufficient courage of their convictions to allow their comments to be moderated.

But our GM friend has no such courage. By slipping an unsigned, badly spelled and typed attack into my mailbox, the credibility of his or her opinions have no weight or credibility at all.

The writer’s credibility is even lower when I note that he or she says that the Chevrolet Volt has been “well receieved [sic] wherever it has been driven”.

With US car company CEOs parking their corporate jets in Washington as they went for Senate help last week, the Los Angeles Auto show became a benefit for Asian and European carmakers, with the loneliest stands being those representing General Motors and Chrysler Jeep. All that was missing was the wind machine and the tumbleweed.

Meanwhile, the big three makers turned up, caps in hand, for NZ$50 billion without a business plan between them to show the Senate how they would use the money, and were told to go back and think about it again and return on December 2 with some kind of plan, preferably involving the concept of selling cars that people and the environment would actually like and want.

An aside after that initial meeting was that turning up in executive jets (three of them) wasn’t a good look, and selling them may keep the wolf from the door for a while longer at least.

In all the 29 years I’ve lived in New Zealand, there’s never been a pub close enough to my home for me to be able to enjoy a quick half hour over a pint - or at a squeeze, two. That’s for the simple reason that it would take half an hour to walk to the nearest pub in the first place and I can’t afford a cab as often as I’d like. I won’t drive to the pub, because my career and the lives of other road users depend on my not conducting a car under the influence.

And don’t say I could just have one drink: even then, driving is affected, though that most inaccurate of devices, the breathalyser, will say it’s not. Incidentally, did you know that if you’re involved in a traffic incident and have been breathalysed and found to have a little alcohol in your bloodstream, even if it’s below the legal limits, then you’re not insured?

Anyway, recently, someone opened a pub just five minutes from my home and I tried it one night in order to watch the rugby while my wife stayed at home with Midsomer Murders - a scenario repeated all over the nation, I guess.

In just a week, under-aged drivers have been involved in three motoring incidents - one of them fatal - in the Christchurch area.

The fatal one involved a 14-year-old crashing his family’s Odyssey people-mover into a wall below the Hornby overbridge. The skidmarks in the picture suggest that he was going pretty quickly before realising he wasn’t going to be able to stop or turn in time.

Another incident involved an 11-year-old boy who was found driving an eight-tonne JCB loader on a public road in Southbridge. The owner of the loader was his father, who was driving a vehicle in front and who was charged with aiding and abetting an unlicensed driver.

I must say that I’m delighted that National has decided that transport as a ministry portfolio is rated as three-and-a-half times more important than Labour did.

Why do I say that? Well, because instead of having up to six or seven other full portfolios, Steven Joyce, recruited after a significantly impressive career in media management, has but two: transport and communications - very much connected.

OK, so he has associate responsibilities in finance and infrastructure, but both those areas are inextricably linked to transport.

I’ve always held that transport is too important to be regarded as merely part of a minister’s sheaf of half a dozen or so other responsibilities and, as in most European countries, I’d really like transport to be a single responsibility portfolio, where a minister can put his full focus on the subject.

In the UK, transport is seen as second only to chancellor of the exchequer in terms of importance, while successive governments in New Zealand have merely regarded it as something of a nuisance, to be doled out as one of many so-called “secondary” portfolios.

Jeremy Clarkson, who seems to take delight in taking the mickey out of his co-presenters the Hamster and captain slow - to my mind the real talent on Top Gear - has become a bit of a joke himself in recent weeks.

As part of a new series of The Fast Show, Harry Enfield and his supremely talented sidekick Paul Whitehouse have put together a sketch called Clarkson Island, a four-and-a-half-minute parody of Jeremy, situated off the south coast of Britain, where Clarksons are being cloned.

Fluffily mop-haired Clarksons are seen and heard repeating the Top Gear star’s habits and cliches and the whole clip is an absolute hoot.

Pundits in the UK surmise that Enfield’s sketch is a retaliation for his mocking treatment some years ago when featuring as Top Gear’s first “star in a reasonably priced car” with Jeremy in fits when our Harry mentioned he once owned a Vauxhall Cavalier convertible.

Cabbing to the airport this morning, I was met with quite a tirade from my driver, who was really cheesed off that fuel prices weren’t lower than they are, as the last time the price per barrel was this low, he was buying his gas for about 15c a litre less.

He’s an old mate, this cabby, and I could speak my mind without offending him. I asked if he was sure that he’d checked the relative value of the dollar compared to when a barrel was previously at this level. Of course, it’s a whole lot less valuable now than it was when crude was last placed so low, so we can buy less of the stuff for the dollar.

This doesn’t explain the fluctuating difference between diesel and petrol, however, though suppliers hedging home heating oil reserves for the northen hemisphere winter just might.

Anyway, I said to my cab-driving friend, if he was really serious about saving fuel, why was he driving an EB V8 Fairmont, and didn’t he feel a bit of a plonker having to charge the same as colleagues using more frugal diesel cars and hybrids? Just think of the profits he’s losing per kilometre.

Come to think of it, with his costs at the pump having dropped by so much in recent months, why is my trip to the airport costing the same as it did when his fuel cost over $2 a litre?

After a week or two of mucking about with a cathartic laptop while travelling around Europe and the Med, which has meant my blogs have had to come and go without me being able to place them, systems appear to be on the button again - just in time to write about a car that’s probably far more important than the Ferrari California.

And that’s the new Honda Jazz, which has been completely redesigned into its second generation. I’ve only just picked the car up and while it costs $1500 more than the old model, it addresses all the weak points: ride, flat-out handling, interior fabric quality and forward three-quarters visibility, and it might be worth the money on those counts alone.