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I’m counting the days – well, it is just over a year – until I don’t have to do the school run anymore. Inevitably it will be replaced by the sixth-form college run, but I’m hoping that there will be a bus involved at some point. For the moment, though, there is no bus, either school or public, to get my nipper to a place of learning.

The added complication to my school run isn’t the rush hour hell in the morning or evening which many experience, it’s the fact that there is a hospital opposite.

When I spoke with Carsten Priest, aka Mr M, on the launch of the new BMW M5 last year, he told me a fair bit about the forthcoming M6.

And I got the impression at the time that, if anything, he was even more proud of the work his team had performed on the coupe (than the saloon) because they’d had a bit more freedom to let rip.

Porsche’s CEO, Matthias Mueller, has never seemed convinced by making a variant of the VW BlueSport roadster – whose future is now in doubt – to sit beneath the company’s Boxster.

At the Paris motor show in 2010 Mueller told me there was no point making the BlueSport just for the sake of increasing Porsche’s production volumes; regardless of how much Volkswagen’s advisory board wanted him to do precisely that, from 100,000 to 150,000 cars per year.

I thought the days of British car-makers dragging defeat from the jaws of victory were long gone in the modern era of more professional management. But Land Rover’s absence from the Cobo Hall on the day the Evoque scooped the prestigious North American Truck of the Year must rank as one of the dumbest marketing decisions made by Brits for a long time.

Given the historical importance of the US market to JLR, and Land Rover in particular, the decision to turn its back on Detroit was a strange one in itself, regardless of whether a major gong was in the offing.

To see Sergio Marchionne passing through a motor show on press day - especially a North American motor show - is to see power made real. He is always at the centre of media scrum, which follows him around like a giant cloud of people.

Most the hacks involved are either Italians, fascinated by Fiat’s effective takeover of Chrysler, or Americans, wanting to know what this king from over the water is going to do to with one of their biggest car companies.

The seven-car shortlist for Car of the Year, revealed this morning, seems to show that the world's oldest and most thorough 'best car' competition, now in it's sixth decade, is in full health again.

In recent years there has been a tendency for jurors to choose simple, high-value cars at the expense – excuse the pun – of more premium, more technical advanced models. This year's group, which includes the Vauxhall Ampera and Land Rover Evoque, puts those days in the past.