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The very simple fix would be to buy my wife some thicker knickers. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to wash with her so I am going to have to fix the passenger-side heated seat in our Saab 9-3 by either buying a replacement heating element or by finding a second-hand seat on eBay and replacing the whole shebang.

You’ve met our Saab before, in 2018 just a couple of months after we bought it. We paid only £2300 for it and since then it has covered almost 50,000 miles and not let us down once. Most owners of old cars tend to fib a bit about reliability and I am no exception: the electric fuel pump packed up but at least it did so outside the house.

I became rather fond of the car as soon as we got it thanks to its smooth and economical light-pressure turbo engine, nicely bedded-in gearbox and hydraulic steering that is better than most modern cars’ EPAS systems. Last summer, my relationship with this Swede turned from strong affection to something rather more serious.

The turning point came with a visit to our local hand car wash. Noticing that the Saab’s black soft top was looking like an experiment from the Royal Botanical Gardens, he offered to clean it for £15 if I could leave the car with him. 

God knows what chemical was used but an hour later the top was like new, with all traces of green moss etc gone. Never have I spent such a small sum that reaped such epic reward. But back to the heated seat issue.

No second-hand seats in the correct colour were available on eBay but this was no bad thing because it would have been miserable if I’d bought a seat, fitted it and then discovered that its seat heater was broken too.

There’s a heated pad in the seat base and another in the backrest and, according to web-based Saab nerds, they’re wired in series, so if one goes, the other stops working too. Which one was broken? Good question. I decided to be safe and buy both.

However, while the backrest element is still available, the base one is not. This, I suspect, is down to demand because the seat-base one is more likely to get damaged. The only option was to take a punt on a replacement for another model of Saab and hope that it fitted. I winged it on a 9-5 part and crossed my fingers.

The modern equivalent of the Haynes manual is YouTube. The only trouble is that whereas the famed manuals were produced by people who actually knew what they were doing, this isn’t always the case on YouTube. For another recent titivation job – replacing the gearlever gaiter, which was torn and tatty – I consulted the experts on tubeworld.

One helpful poster demonstrated in his video how to remove the gearknob, which he achieved using an angle grinder. The job was successful but he almost destroyed the car’s interior. In the end I found my own method.

There is a half-decent video on how to remove the seat from the car and then remove the upholstery but the bloke in the video didn’t shut his young child in another room while making the film and the squawking youngster drove me mad, so again I did my own thing.

It turns out the heating element from a 9-5 is not similar to one from a 9-3 convertible, but with careful surgery with scissors, I got it to fit. Bloody complicated (and heavy), modern car seats. Wires all over the place for seatbelt pre-tensioner, airbag, bum sensor (for the seatbelt warning).

Thankfully, our car doesn’t have power seat adjustment or that would be more cable and kilograms. With the seat reassembled and back in the car, I crossed all digits that the problem was the heating pad and not some wiring fault deep within the car’s innards. ‘Had he checked the fuses?’ you’re asking. Yes, I had.

Success! My wife’s derrière is now kept warm on cold mornings. Now on a run, I replaced the cap on the screenwash bottle with a new one from China that cost £4. My next task is to tackle some rust on the body around the top of the doors and B-pillars.

I got a quote to have this done, and although £1800 is a fair price, it would be crazy to spend that much on a car worth only a bit more than that bill. Instead, I’ve bought some touch-up paint and will use some Jenolite to pacify the rust and hopefully be able to make an acceptable local repair.

I know what will happen. I’ll make the body look a lot better and then I’ll start thinking that the alloys are letting the side down and have them refurbished. Never mind, it’s a lot cheaper than leasing a new car or buying one outright.

And the Saab doesn’t beep or bong at me. In fact, it is now virtually speechless because I managed to do something terminal to the sensor that sets bells off if the passenger hasn’t done his or her seatbelt up. 

I’ve done plenty of very high speeds on Horiba MIRA’s ‘twin horizontal’ straights, but rarely quite like this.

The Bentley Continental GT Speed Hybrid that I recently road tested took me to the far side of 170mph several times, back and forth in opposite directions, all within the bounds of a measured mile, while simultaneously massaging my rather spoiled and considerable posterior.

I didn’t ask it to; I just forgot to turn that particular seat function off. And, well, there can’t be many cars that could have done both.

The irony was that the optional massage seats weren’t in fact switched on. Instead, I was experiencing what Crewe calls ‘postural adjustment’, fitted as standard and designed to relieve the load on your backside over a long journey.

You can read all about this latest Bentley in a six-page test in a few weeks’ time. Suffice to say, for now, that the Continental GT Speed is indeed a worthy purveyor of the brand’s inimitable and characteristically enveloping, cosseting, thunderously fast and pervasively special grand touring experience.

All 2462kg and 772bhp of it, replete as the car is now with a V8-engined plug-in hybrid powertrain that should keep it relevant for years to come.

And being a PHEV capable of electric-only running at one moment and then switching to the piston-powered kind within an instant, the next thing it made me wonder was: which is actually quieter?

Isn’t the answer obvious? Ultimately, yes. But the size of the decisive margin might still surprise you. There is certainly a bit of a myth abroad that any car capable of electric running must be quieter and more refined than any that isn’t and that EVs are all whisper-quiet.

When you break out the noise meter and record what’s actually going on, the truth turns out to be a fair bit more complicated.

All of Autocar’s cabin noise testing is done on the MIRA mile straights – the same surface where our benchmark acceleration numbers are generated. So while the test conditions on the day can vary, we keep the input factors as constant as we can.

In the new Continental GT Speed, running at a steady 50mph with the engine off, the meter fluctuated around 61.7dBA – but then rose to only around 62.2dBA with the engine running.

It’s as confounding to read it again now as it was to observe it first hand, because your ears aren’t lying to you.

You can hear the instant the engine starts and easily perceive the difference it makes to the cabin’s ambient noise level, even when it’s only bumbling along just above idle – and then you look down at a meter that might as well be shrugging its shoulders and saying ‘meh’, like some uninterested adolescent.

The Continental GT Speed is a modern luxury car of particularly high standards for mechanical noise isolation, needless to say. In the average PHEV, we could probably expect a greater disparity.

Nevertheless, in any car moving along at a 50mph cruising speed, the greatest individual source of detectable cabin noise usually isn’t the engine, even when there is one fitted. Road noise and wind noise are already more prominent. 

And here are some numbers to prove it. The Mercedes-Benz EQS is an exceptionally quiet car, for example, generating just 58dBA of cabin noise at 50mph, but that will have a lot more to do with the fact that it’s a £130,000 luxury Mercedes than simply an electric car.

At the same speed, Cupra’s Tavascan EV is producing 61dBA of cabin noise – but so is the Dacia Duster Hybrid.

The BMW 120 M Sport generates a very respectable 62dBA and the new petrol Audi S5 only 63dBA, yet the Kia EV6 and Audi Q6 E-tron – electric both – each generates 65dBA.

It’s something to think about if you imagine that adopting an EV will automatically be something your eardrums will thank you for. They might – but only if you buy the right one.

The Volvo S90 has been updated with a fresh face, upgraded interior technology and extra electric range for the plug-in hybrid version.

Visual changes include a new front grille, which matches those on the revised XC90 and XC60 SUVs, as well as sharper-looking lighting signatures front and rear, bringing it into line with the new ES90 EV.

Additional sound insulation is aimed at boosting interior refinement and adaptive suspension has been standardised across the range.

Inside, the 11.2in touchscreen infotainment system has been updated to improve its responsiveness and it can now be updated over the air.

The car will be offered with a choice of mild-hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains. Volvo has yet to release performance figures but the PHEV’s electric range has been increased from 46 miles to 50.

The new S90 is not expected to arrive in the UK. The saloon was removed from Volvo's line-up in the UK two years ago due to poor sales and the brand’s emphasis on electric models at the time. That left Volvo buyers to choose from the smaller S60 saloon, the V90 estate or one of the firm’s SUVs.

Volvo is instead prioritising international markets for the S90. The model will be rolled out in China this summer, with other countries following thereafter.

“The S90 is a key part of our product portfolio for the coming years in some of our Asian markets,” said Volvo product and strategy chief Erik Severinson.

The S90’s de facto successor, the ES90, is due in the UK next year. Prices will range from around £70,000 to just below £90,000.

Nissan has now finished testing autonomous cars on UK roads, as its EvolvAD project has come to a close – the last part of an eight-year scheme.

This bit was to see whether a self-driving Nissan Leaf could operate outside of cities and in less connected areas, on residential and single-track country roads, to discover what types of technology will be necessary to drive in such complex environments.

Nissan says the trial has been “tremendously successful”, but you may note that there aren’t autonomous cars serving your neighbourhood yet. Over eight years, autonomous Leafs have driven 16,000 miles over all kinds of terrain. You may also note that doesn’t sound very far.

Autonomous cars are still a long way away, then. And it’s unclear whether they’re viable at all and whether we will ever get there. If you’ve driven a car with any assisted driving technology, you will know how hopeless it can be.

But, but, but. To remind us why it’s doing it, Nissan put a 93-year-old in one of these cars and had it drive him around to show what it could do.

Because while autonomous technology might take the weight off while it drives you to work, more importantly it can also be used to keep mobile the people who need it most – those who can’t drive themselves.

People lament losing personal mobility, their ability to drive, because it gets really expensive when they can’t, and that’s because employing drivers is the expensive bit in any commercial road transport. I have a local bus service that operates limited hours and has to be underwritten by the council for that reason.

So if it costs even, say, £300,000 to equip a vehicle with autonomous driving technology, if the vehicle operates all the time and the technology replaces several drivers, it will pay for itself quickly.

The prospect of self-driving vehicles is bad news for professional drivers. But for people who need to get around, who can’t drive, who can’t get to a bus and who can’t afford taxis, it could make the difference between staying in a home or community they love or being carted off to a home less dignified.

It can make independence more affordable, more viable. And for that reason, it’s worth seeing if it will work.