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Does anyone really and honestly believe that if Top Gear devoted its single hour on BBC2 each week to ramming home the dangers of driving badly, it would make any difference? I sincerely doubt it. Seventeen-year olds would still be out there, running into trees, lamp-posts, bus shelters and ordinary innocent people like you coming the other way.

Aha, say the detractors, but Top Gear actively encourages speeding.

Truth be told, we don't any more. Not really. In the last series, we went caravanning, we drove some amphibious cars across a reservoir, we built a Caterham in a garage, roadied for The Who and built a convertible people carrier. None of these items had anything whatsoever to do with recklessness or speed.

And in the series currently sitting on the shelves waiting for Richard to be better, we have tested tractors, built our own stretched limos, and repaired a stretch of road in Warwickshire. Again. No speed stuff there.

When we do report on a supercar, it's almost always from on our own test track, which is about as far removed from the B4568 as James Bond is from the real world of espionage. And, in my opinion, just as likely to cause car crashes as 007 is to cause drive-by shootings in Nottingham.

Of course, there are plenty of people out there who disagree. Writing about Richard's accident, Johann Hari said in The Independent recently 'Speeding is one of the biggest killers in Britain'. What? More than heart disease? And Neil 'rent-a-soundbite' Lyndon was paid some money to argue much the same thing in the Daily Mail.

Radio 4, I'm told, ran a piece where negative reporting of Richard's accident was intercut with moving details of some poor chap who'd been killed by a reckless youngster.

Meanwhile, the government's road safety minister, Stephen Ladyman, has been dropped from some anti-speeding campaign or other because he said he was 'distressed' to hear that Top Gear might be axed.

There seems to be a belief among those of a Guardian persuasion - and they're the ones in charge these days - that with more speed cameras, and no television motoring shows, the death toll on the road could be reduced from 3,200 a year to zero. But that simply isn't possible.

Even if there was a blanket nationwide speed limit of 20, there would still be 28 million vehicles passing within a few feet of one another at a closing speed of 40. People would still die. It is the law of both probability and averages.