Braidwood’s Senior Constable Richard Pearce has a way with words. When you read his impassioned pleas for sanity and sensibility on our roads, you can tell it comes from the heart.

It is a great pity that motoring journalists are not required to spend a night or two with police, ambulance and emergency services. A bit of time in the front line, helping to extract fragile humans from high-tech wreckage might temper the desire to admire cars that go ridiculously fast.

In the drive section of the daily paper recently was a glowing account of the new breed of ‘female high-flyers’, young women whose income allows them to spend on a car, what a more modestly remunerated person might spend on a house. After reading the story, I think ‘low flying’ would be more apt.

“The first day I took it out, I went straight from the showroom to the Hunter Valley and did 250kmh on the F3.” The drive section editor thought this quote from the inexperienced owner of a new Ferrari was worth making into the article’s subheading.

Was the thrust of the story a warning to commuters heading north to watch out for a carefree red blur? Was there any suggestion that you, after checking the mirror, indicating and pulling out to overtake a B-double hauling wheat, might be violently and catastrophically rear-ended by a ‘telecommunications sales manager’ hurtling along at 69 metres per second?

Nope. The story was a deadpan account of gender equality at the top end of the car buying market. Of course, motoring journalists would rather have a Maserati than a Mazda to take home and test, so it’s unlikely they’ll ever question the need for speed.

Why we need cars that can achieve speeds of greater than twice the national limit is nevertheless a question worth asking.

The new Holden Commodore HSV for instance, will propel its brave or foolhardy occupants along at 255kph and not one blurred telegraph pole faster, thanks to a speed governor on the engine.

But why couldn’t a production car, designed for public roads, be governed to say, 150kph? Surely that would still leave ample performance for overtaking; it’s well over the national speed limit. Where’s the need for the extra 100kph?

The twentieth century will be remembered as the fossil fuel era. In the industrialised countries, oil-powered vehicles went from novelty to ubiquity in what was, historically speaking, just a spin round the block.

By the end of that century though, it was realised that there is a downside to the burning of so much fuel in so short a timeframe. A vast amount of stored sunlight, trapped underground as sequestered carbon has now been released into the atmosphere and is affecting the climate of the planet.

Cars have become a way of life. The security of taking a ‘home’ with us when we commute is a comfort that many people will not want to relinquish. We may as well get used to the idea then, that cars will become smaller, lighter and slower. This is not a step backwards; it’s the only way forward.

There was a young fella in the paper recently, driving a flash new supercar, probably paid for with tomorrow’s failed investment scam and his bumper sticker boasted: ‘If you can read this, it won’t be for long.’

One way or another he’s bound to get his wish.