Cutting the cost of new motoring at a sweep.

Apparently the motor industry is being hardest hit (along with estate agents - Good!) and sales of new cars are plummeting. Therefore I'd like to offer up the "Old Naq's Almanack" on producing a car which will meet the apparent driving style of many motorists (Including the old Bill!) and hence save a fortune in production costs.

Firstly do away with the meaningless orange lights normally mounted somewhere around the four corners of the vehicle. They seem to be increasingly unused by the average motorist anyway and would also mean you can remove the waggly-up-and-down, stick thing that makes them flash should you be of a mind.

Remove the headlights, or at least one of them since a large majority of vehicles only seem to have a single working one. Adjust this so it shines either into the face of oncoming drivers or, if retaining the nearside one, so it lights up the kerb for the drunken crawl home after a skinful at the pub. Also change the remaining bulb to man beam only since most people don't use dip beam anyway, preferring to blind other road users.

All rear high intensity fog lights can be removed as well as removing the apparent hidden switches which make the lamps run all the time except during periods of mist, fog, snow or other hazardous driving conditions.

Remove ALL external mirrors. They are apparently unused by the majority of drivers even if they're still attached to the vehicle. Most seem to be smashed off or adjusted such as to not annoy the driver in to taking any reckless action such as viewing the road behind. The rear view mirror can also be removed as that is also similarly never adjusted to look at the road behind, many elderly drivers quite obviously having last used one to see if Mr Hitler was coming down the road during the phoney war. If you remove the mirror I would offer the option of a stick-on doodad for people to hang their fluffy dice, wiggly elvis, dream catcher or other similar windscreen vision impairments from.

Hub caps and wheel trims can also be done away with. Firstly they never seem to stay on the car for long because they're so crappily made and secondly why do we need them as, being plastic, they perform no functional purpose whatsoever?

As more and more drivers seem to be uninterested in wearing their seatbelts you may as well make them an optional extra, similarly you could replace the rear window and side windows with a sheet of plywood as no one seems to take much of an interest in what's going on there when they're driving. In some circumstance you could probably also do the same with the front windscreen as most people seem more intent on their mobile phone, their newspaper, their radio twiddling and their passengers than the other road users around them.

Finally and most radically I'd suggest removing the lower left hand corner of the windscreen where the tax disc is supposed to be displayed. As this now seems to be an unnecessary burden to the vehicle owner, especially in certain areas of south east London, the removal of this portion of the car can only improve the egress of high volume music that normally emanates from these disc-less vehicles.

As I said at the start, observing as I have the lack of need for the above in many vehicle including those of the police, I would suggest that the adoption of my options would save the local constabularies a small fortune and enable them to send even more officers on community/lesbian/scumbag rights awareness courses and enable the average driver to have more money to spend on something necessary like yet another new mobile phone or 50" tv.

HOWEVER........

There is always a possibility that the police could start nicking people for driving vehicles in crap condition, driving badly, using mobile phones while driving, not observing road users and conditions and generally behaving like total pillocks from behind the wheel of a something with a greater killing power than many weapons.

OK you can come out now - the moaning is over - for now!