How apparent to you is the automobile gender gap? Have you noticed the role cars play in the war of the sexes? Or the role gender plays in the dominance of the car?

At a junction last week, while watching the traffic crawl by, I recognised a very senior figure driving a very modest car. One of the most influential people in the State, she looked just like someone's granny (whom she may well be) driving a granny type car. In gridlock-induced reverie I took pleasure in the thought that her self-esteem must be so firmly founded that, despite her handsome salary, she apparently doesn't feel the need to make a vehicular statement.

Only in stationary traffic would I have noticed her car at all. I still couldn't tell you the make. I am, as I suspect she is, car-blind. When neighbours fell victim to some opportunistic burglars who drove off in my full view, I could describe the perpetrators to the Garda; but the car? Em, sort of white-ish.

I attribute some of this to the trauma of having my first car - a secondhand Ford Escort - stolen and burnt out in Belfast 10 days into my ownership, with the maintenance manual and tool kit I had purchased still in the boot. I had intended to be one kind of car owner; after that I became another. I distinguish cars by their colours, their reliability, their safety and the number of children they can accommodate. This is not how most men think about cars. Not all men - there is John Gormley, after all.

Not all women are like me; look at Rosemary Smith. But in general, men use cars to keep score and women don't.

Men's relationship to cars is visceral. They even love their innards. It probably goes back to Dinky cars and Fisher-Price garages. Men who would never think of sorting out the household wash, buff their gleaming conveyances lovingly. In the world of company cars, what one drives is a finely-judged statement of position. To use one's own cash to buy a car which competes with the boss's can be a foolhardy act. I once had a company car - even asked for one. What can I say? I was playing the game by the rules.

Since keeping score feels more worthwhile when you are travelling faster than a bicycle, summer is a good time for drivers. This is why the gender gap is so acute in September, when AA Roadwatch announces the return of mothers and their children and the slowing of legitimate traffic.

How wilfully mothers drive such short distances, when they could so easily walk the two children and the buggy and take in a trip to the supermarket and the bottle bank on the way home.

An intriguing proposal to pedestrianise the school-run, with a few mothers walking a crocodile of children to school pushing a trolley full of schoolbags, unfortunately died without full exploration of its potential. I had visualised a crocodile of commuters heading for our DART station with the fitter men pushing a trolley full of briefcases.

The autumnal bemoaning of the return to school is part of the war of the sexes because what is sauce for the goose ("why not walk with those children, woman?") is seldom applied to the gander. This, although the gander's car by and large stays sitting in one place all day while the geese do all the messages.

But what is the point of a company car if the company never sees it - if there are not ranks of cars in the carpark, so that at an idle glance at coffee break everyone has the security of knowing their precise place in the pecking order?

The company car fetish took off in the era of high personal tax rates, and made a kind of sense then before benefit-in-kind taxation treated it as another form of remuneration. Now, despite the removal of this fiscal rationale, it has become an institution.

Although changing one's car every three years makes little sense for many families, although a smaller car or none at all might make better ecological sense, although remuneration in another form might be more welcome, this is how employers tell their employees that they are loved.

THIS is no longer just an executive phenomenon - and women are being seduced. I recently heard of a proud 23-year-old receptionist who had been given a car by her boss, judging that this was the best way to keep her.

In the 10 months to October last year, 214,855 new cars were registered in Ireland, compared to 170,322 in all of 1999. The Society of the Irish Motor Industry says we have not yet reached European average car ownership. By my calculation, we hit Denmark's level in 1999, so we can't be far off the average now. Many Europeans, anyway, seem to have the good sense to leave their cars at home during the week.

What motor industry do we have here? We make some components but we don't produce cars. We import them. What a great use of our new affluence. Our "industry" is best represented by the extraordinary new Taj Mahal-type car showrooms, monuments to the excesses of the 1990s.

Even the most myopic of us knows that when the "industry" stops setting the agenda, efficient public transport will rescue us from sitting at junctions speculating about other people's lives.

We will have to find a new way of keeping score. Warpaint?