The good oil: Stig's identity revealed

The Stig. Photo / Supplied

No more guessing games about the identity of The Stig, the mystery man on TV's Top Gear. It's former American speedway driver and stuntman Ben Collins, who doubled for Daniel Craig in the latest James Bond movie. A British newspaper outed Collins, 33, after he spilled the beans to a photographer. The name "Stig" was Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson's doing. New boys at Clarkson's former school - Repton, Derbyshire, founded in 1557 - were known as "Stigs".

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The new Australian nickname for Kiwis is "tablets". Why? "Because they are inert, covered in writing and hard to swallow," said an old Sydney mate over lunch across the ditch.

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The cheeky TV ad for the Mitsubishi Lancer, where crooner Dean Martin sings The Birds and the Bees over the top of a father driving the car while explaining the facts of life to his son, can only be shown after 9pm in Britain. Clearcast, the British advertising standards people, ruled that sexual innuendo throughout the ad could be seen as inappropriate for younger viewers. A grown-up woman in New Zealand went further. She rang Mitsubishi NZ's head office in Wellington to complain that it was offensive.

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Thieves who stole a Mercedes-Benz from outside a restaurant in New York found keys to a Porsche in the glovebox. So they used the Merc's satellite-navigation system to find their way to the owner's house, where they nicked the Porsche. The incident prompted insurance companies to warn car owners not to leave keys of any kind in a car - and to remove their home address from sat-nav systems.

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Australian carmakers are under pressure to build more fuel-frugal cars. Fewer than one in five new cars sold across the ditch last year were built there. The Holden Commodore remained the best-selling car for the 13th year in a row, but the total of 51,093 was just over half 1999 Commodore numbers. The Toyota Corolla was the second most popular, only a few thousand behind Commodore. The Ford Falcon was fifth. The Mazda3 was favoured by private buyers.

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Hyundai is to make bullet-proof versions of its top-end Equus sedan for private and government use. The project follows a request from the South Korean Government for home-grown armoured vehicles for key figures, including President Lee Myung-bak. A Hyundai insider said: "It doesn't make sense that the world's fifth-largest car-making country is still using foreign-made, bullet-proof cars, and that is why Hyundai is working on the project." Mr Myung-bak uses a Mercedes-Benz S600 Pullman Guard and a BMW Security 760Li.

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A woman driver in Britain, who was talking on her hands-free mobile phone when she crashed into an oncoming car, killing its driver, has been convicted of careless driving. Lynne-Marie Howden, 43, was found not guilty of causing death by dangerous driving but was convicted on the lesser charge of careless driving. She was banned from driving for 12 months and fined $5700. The court heard that she was travelling around 30km/h less than the speed limit at the time, but prosecuters argued that the phone call distracted Howden enough to cause the accident. Hands-free mobile phone use is not illegal in Britain, but research has found that using a mobile behind the wheel makes drivers four times more likely to have a crash.

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An armed gunman fled wet and empty-handed after an attempt to rob a carwash in Portland, Oregon. The man was waving his gun around demanding money when the weapon literally fell apart in his hands and clattered in pieces on the ground. An employee grabbed a high-pressure wand and hosed the man out of the place.

alastair.sloane@nzherald.co.nz