Probably not even the people who market them would describe this as a golden age for driving gloves. Apparently Jonathan Ross is a fan, but outside of the showbiz, Formula One and rally circuits, most of us these days prefer to do our driving naked - from the wrist onwards at the very least.
Many of the conditions which once might have made driving gloves look a smart idea - such as the high likelihood, around 1973, that your car had an inefficient heater, a driver's window that didn't close properly and a steering wheel made of greasy plastic - no longer really obtain in a world in which air-conditioning and touch-friendly plastics are available even in the cheapest Fiats.
As a result, a certain stigma attaches to the contemporary user of the driving glove - as if there were something not merely antiquated but even grimly fetishistic about the desire to slide one's hands into some snugly fitting leather prior to twisting the key in the ignition. I wonder where that idea came from.
Bravely pushing, as ever, at the boundaries of taboo, Wheels elected this week to test drive some of Britain's leading driving gloves, putting them through their paces in a variety of on-road situations in order to grapple, not only with their poppers and velcro fastenings, but also with the highly important question: are driving gloves a) a practical accessory, even now, and a valuable enhancer of the 21st century motoring experience? b) simply perv heaven? or c) both?
We chose gloves in a variety of styles and materials from the nation's two leading motoring handwear manufacturers, Dents and Chester Jeffries, both of whom use leather by Pittards of Yeovil, thus helpfully boosting the British leather industry in the wake of the foot and mouth crisis.
For the record, testing took place last Sunday on a return journey from London to Birmingham via Oxford. The car was a platinum black Audi A4 bearing three passengers and a partly-loaded boot. And I used two size-nine hands with the regular numbers of fingers and thumbs.
The idea was to assess each pair of gloves in the following critical performance categories: their appearance; their overall comfort; their grip, as it affected steering wheel, gear stick and dashboard controls; their thermal properties, and whether it was still possible to get a Jaffa cake out of a two-thirds empty tube without taking them off.
Unwrapping and sorting through the gloves prior to the journey, I had a sudden distilled insight into what Christmas was like for fathers in the 1970s. Though I guess not many fathers would have received a pair of Dents' Extrasoft 3000 Keyhole Gloves in cranberry leather.
Glaringly pricey at £45 and offering that controversial back-of-hand peephole, these Penelope Pitstop items were, almost inevitably, in their superb purpleness, the first to catch my eye. But I couldn't get them anywhere near my fingers, so I moved on to something more respectable from the Dents gentlemen's range.
Dents specialise in the classic, dad-friendly, Rover-owning, white knit, string-backed driving glove, in shades of leather running from ox-blood red to student pale. A reassuringly expensive £49, my pair from the tan-toned end of the range had lightly ridged palms - useful for additional purchase while speeding through the more hazardous kinds of traffic-calming devices - but which tended to bulk out the hands unhelpfully. Even in a tight fit, each of my fingers appeared to take on the size and consistency of a Mars bar. It was like driving in gauntlets. Or, worse, it was like gardening.
But better this, probably, than the lower-end version of the same style by Chester Jeffries (£29.50) which are made from thicker leather and have no airholes on the palm. Twenty minutes up the motorway, my hands felt like boiled-in-the-bag cod portions.
Where Chester Jeffries triumph is in their cheerfully cheap black nylon and leather combination - something of a snip at £15. These are Fiesta-priced gloves but they wouldn't disgrace themselves in a Jaguar. You assume the nylon content is going to heat up the hand in an unpleasant manner, but it doesn't thanks to the canny looseness of the mesh.
These gloves reach only to the wrist, provide ample rear-of-hand protection against splash-back from hot drinks in poorly-mounted cup holders, positively enhance rude gestures made at other motorists and have the indubitable advantage, in a beyond-car context, of resembling perfectly ordinary, non-driving gloves.
What they lack, though, is poppers - and purists would probably argue that the essential performance of wriggling one's hand into a motoring glove isn't complete without a final flourish in which one gets to pop the glove shut on the back of one's wrist.
On this ground, among others, the top-scoring glove in our test was the Dents black and tan number at a smooth £45. It's true that the all-leather nature of the glove (black back, tan palm) has powerful overtones of Cat Woman and the Jones's, Grace and Vinnie. But an hour of these and one was in second-skin territory.
Is the driving glove a second skin worth having? It's true that at no time during these experiments did my hands slip from the steering wheel into my lap or come crashing off the gear stick on to the handbrake. But nor do they do this when I'm not wearing gloves. It was also abundantly clear that many of driving's core pleasures - such as eating crisps and picking one's nose - are pleasures which driving gloves are actively antagonistic towards. One hesitates to cross swords with Jonathan Ross - but maybe you're better off bare.
· Giles Smith returns to test-driving cars next week. Gloves supplied by Dents and John Lewis on behalf of the British Glove Association. Available from leading department stores. For more information, visit www.gloveassociation.org or call 020-8464 0131.
