When the Italian police unveiled their state-of-the-art Lamborghini patrol cars, they cannot have been short of volunteers itching to take the supercars in pursuit of speeding criminals.

A team of elite drivers was trained to chase down speeding motorists and deliver urgently-needed transplant organs in the futuristic vehicles, capable of reaching more than 200mph.

What they apparently were not prepared for was a distracted motorist who pulled out of a petrol station without looking.

Today, a bandaged and bruised police driver may have had a tough time explaining how he managed to write off one of the force's prized Lamborghinis when he rammed it so hard into a line of parked cars that one of the stationary vehicles ended up on the police car's roof.

According to the police, the crash was caused by the driver of a slow-moving Seat Ibiza who emerged without looking from a service station, clipping the Lamborghini and sending the vehicle swerving into the parked cars.

The front end of the Lamborghini was crushed in the accident, near Cremona, and the driver and a passenger were injured, although not seriously.

The Lamborghini Gallardo, worth £130,000 and capable of reaching 62mph in four seconds, was one of a pair donated by the Italian manufacturer to the police to do battle on Italy's roads, where 1 million motorists are injured annually and 4,731 died last year.

Both cars include transmitters to send images back to HQ, a defibrillator for accidents and a fridge for transporting donor organs. The two officers were returning from a convention in Cremona, where they had been addressed a student audience on road safety.