I am not what you would call a “car person”.

Oh sure, I’ve owned a vehicle of some description since I was a young fella but it’s always been about being able to get from point A to point B rather than being able to brag that I owned the sleekest, fastest, classiest thing on four wheels.

I have nothing against people who are into cars (apart from you four-wheel-drive owners who think the road rules don’t apply to you), but it’s just not my scene.

My first car, at the tender age of 17, was a dark green Toyota Corolla built in the early ’70s.

Even my dad, who wouldn’t know an oil filter from a manifold thingamy, asked me if maybe I wouldn’t like something more, well, masculine.

But I was blinded by the salesman’s promise of years of reliability ... and the fact there was a girl I was trying to impress and if I didn’t have wheels by the weekend I was going to be out of luck.

So I got the wheels ... but not the girl.

She was last seen in the lambswool-covered front seat of a Ford Cobra – the biggest, meanest, most powerful car any of us could imagine at the time.

The blokes who owned Ford Cobras did laps of the main street every Saturday morning.

My Corolla and I didn’t.

I don’t remember why I sold it after a few years but I know the young bloke who bought it managed to wrap it around a light pole a few weeks later.

Pity. It would have been a classic by now.

By that stage I was cruising around in a bright orange Toyota 120Y chick magnet.

Throw in the fact it was a station wagon and it’s not exactly a pretty picture.

But it didn’t give me any trouble, which is more than I can say for some of those that followed.

The Commodore station wagon (bright red) went all right for a while but then its gear box blew up while trying to negotiate a mountain range between Grafton and Glen Innes, and it had to be quickly back-traded for a dark green Gemini which promptly dropped an engine-full of oil all over the driveway.

Then followed an XD Ford station wagon which needed the strength of three men to steer (but at least it was nice, neutral white), an XD sedan (bright red), a small Camira (white again), an XE Ford (maroon), a little KA (green again) and finally a Toyota Yaris (red).

Are you getting the picture?

Cars are just not a status symbol in my life and Harris the Yaris (yes, we name them – doesn’t everyone?) is the first one that’s been brand spanking new.

I changed my own oil once in about 1985 and took the air filter off the carbie (or something) of one of the Fords a few years later, but I’m still not sure where you put the oil in our present car.

Like my father, I believe that if everyone started doing their own work under the bonnet then the whole mechanical industry would go broke.

Imagine what would happen if I let you write your own column.

Sure, they might be a vast improvement on my offerings but what would be left to keep me off the streets?

I tried to do a little bit of my own mechanical work a couple of years ago when the tail light blew on one of the cars.

“How hard can it be to change a light bulb?” I said to my wife.

She tried to talk me out of it but I went ahead and did it myself and I have to admit I felt pretty darned good about it.

The next day we noticed that other drivers were flashing their lights at us and eventually someone told us it was because we were flashing ours first.

It turned out that our headlights were flashing every time we applied the brakes.

“Has someone been fiddling around with this tail light?” asked the auto electrician when we presented the vehicle to him.

“The bloody idiot has put the bulb in wrong.”

It took 10 seconds and $20 for him to fix it and my wife still reminds me of it every time I open the bonnet and stand there trying to look like I know what I’m doing.

Which isn’t often ... trust me.