One conviction for driving a vehicle with a "sustained loss of traction" can perhaps be put down to the rash indiscretions of youth; two to an openly rebellious attitude to the law; but a third, for which this week a Milton teenager was told he stands to have his car crushed, can only be put down to a combination of contempt for authority and wanton stupidity.
That said, another could simply be that ancient and battered Corollas are ten-a-penny these days, eminently disposable and so constructed as to give little pause to any self-respecting car-crushing machine.
It wasn't always so. New Zealand in the late 1960s and early 1970s was still a little like Burma with respect to the availability of motor vehicles. In the days before Japanese imports, they were absurdly expensive.
Consequently, people kept whatever they had on the road for decades - and suburban Saturday mornings tended to be a cross between a lawn-mowing clinic and a car mechanic's masterclass.
My first car had four wheels, a low-slung chassis and a gear stick - more a knob really - that protruded from the dash. It was painted red. Born in 1954 of French provenance, it was the kind of vehicle that roamed the celluloid streets of European New Wave cinema. Especially the gangster movies. We called it "the beast". If it had an archetypal driver he was probably a young Gitanes-smoking Gerard Depardieu.
Three of us, barely knowing one end of the spanner from another, pooled our precious savings and acquired our first car for the princely sum - and it was just that in 1973 - of $360. Anyone with an ounce more mechanical nous could have told us that we had just bought a pile of trouble - but, hey, there are some things you just have to find out for yourselves.
And find out we did in a stuttering voyage of discovery that finally juddered to a halt a year or so later when we reluctantly came to the conclusion that ownership of an early 1950s Citroen L15 was more compatible with either someone who stripped gearboxes for a living, or had the funds to pay someone else to do the same.
As students that was not certainly not us. So we parted company, as I recall practically gifting the car to an enthusiast from Dannevirke in return for his taking it off our hands. But that was not before the beast had afforded us one or two adventures.
Memory has fragmented them, but one centred around a trip from our Palmerston North campus to Wellington to sell capping magazines.
The hawking was fine but the transport just a little temperamental: the beast's brakes developed a habit of locking up every time we stopped at the traffic lights - and could only be unjammed by reversing.
This predicament developed into something of a pantomime, with each stop requiring one of us to leap out and prevent other vehicles from coming within five metres of the rear end of our trusty transport - to enable us to unlock the brakes. Thus we stopped, started, reversed and lurched around the capital.
On another occasion we pub-crawled all the way to Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast, taking the beast, a battered old show trophy to the home of one of my co-owners. Once there we covered the rear dash with barely cured possum skins and drove back again, somehow convinced that the newly decorated interiors would enhance our hitherto faltering attempts to impress members of the opposite sex.
Needless to say, they didn't. On another occasion, midwinter, we took our "wheels" on a trip up the desert road to Taupo and the bach belonging to another of the co-owners. It was winter and it began to snow. The pitiful 1950s wipers were no match for the weather and we travelled through the night taking it in turns to drive with half a frost-bitten head out the window to watch the road ahead.
The beast, with an early homemade version of a "bull-bar" attached to the front, was a pretty solid unit to pick a scrap with and at least one wooden bridge at the bottom of a steep and icy turn came off the worse for wear as a result of a collision on that trip. You could say it was a "sustained loss of traction" of a different kind.
Somehow we managed to get it home again, but the well-camouflaged mechanical hiccups of the beast had begun to become all too readily apparent. Its days were numbered. The possum skins had failed to make a remarkable impact on our social lives, exams were approaching and the money was running out.
If a car crusher capable of taking on the beast had even existed we would have been quite happy to send it on its way.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
