You know how fashionable it is to say we live in a car world where no one repairs stuff? Well, it’s just not true, and today I met a bloke who proves it.

He’s Gerry Pennell, one of a network of quiet neighbourhood geniuses with the skills and wit to tackle jobs others can’t. He was finishing an Audi A3, 15 years old but healthy, whose owner had backed it into the tray of a truck, awkwardly mangling its tailgate and surrounding surfaces.

The insurers wanted to write it off but the owner liked the car so Gerry (who’s equally adept at panels, paint and mechanicals) sourced a tailgate on eBay, cleverly split the outer surfaces to reshape them before uniting them again, repainting the tailgate and squaring everything up.

Within a day or two, the car was fit again for not much more than the owner’s insurance excess. Best sight of all was the quiet smile across Gerry’s chops that made it clear he doesn’t just do this stuff for the money.

97 Cropley column audi repair

Tuesday

As the population of electric cars increases, I’m seeing driving styles radically changing.

On one hand, you have petrol-powered traditionalists, impatient and barely conscious of or concerned by the rate at which they consume energy. On the other, you have the I’ve-got-religion EV brigade, who slipstream furniture trucks on motorways (eyes clamped on their ‘miles to go’ readouts) and who would rather die than be caught accelerating up a hill.

Today’s drivers are at liberty to choose from widely disparate cars and driving styles to suit their temperaments, but at some time in the future the two styles will have to get much closer. Some drivers are going to have to change even more than their cars.