Ten things we learned this week: 19 February 2016 edition

Livestock in the road. A stray dog. Ducks crossing. These are the typical animal-based jams suffered on UK roads.

At the weekend, though, Chris Hollingshead encountered something altogether larger and scarier on his drive home on the Isle of Wight.

“That priceless moment when you're driving home from work at 3am and the road is blocked by a 20ft Triceratops,” reads his Facebook post accompanying the image above.

It’s not, you’ll be glad to know, Jurassic Park made real, rather some mischievous drunks purloining an extravagant ornament from a nearby garden and placing it in the way of traffic.

We’re just glad he stopped in time. That could have been a Tyrannosaurus wreck.

Over in Russia, normal rules do not apply. If you want to do a bit of light off-roading, you use an 8x8 Avtoros Shaman.

For the hardware on offer, its £88,000 is a bit of a bargain. But it’s still a heck of a lot of money. Enter the wonderfully pragmatic alternative: a makeshift Lada tank.

Yup. Take one Lada Riva (they’re plentiful in Russia, so you can haggle hard on this) then add around £1,000 worth of tanky things, and you end up with this. It’s not stylish, but as this video proves, it is fearless whether you’re driving forwards or backwards.

We’ll take ten.

The little BMW i3 is a joyous car. Fun to look at, interesting to drive and lovely to sit in, it also happens to have a plug-in drivetrain that ought to help future proof BMWs.

You lot aren’t convinced though, it seems. Sales have not been swift. Which is why, perhaps, the special edition treatment is being rolled out.

Meet the i3 by Mr Porter. That’s a menswear website, if you’re wondering. It’s said to be inspired by tuxedos and pinstripes suits - look, there’s a line down the side of it! - and it comes with a 'Mr Porter Essentials Travel Kit'.

This includes not only the fetching manbag in the photograph, but an umbrella, a Leica camera and a bowler hat. Essentials is the right word. Ten Things never, ever travels without a bowler.

The price for all this? Um, £43,500…

‘What could go wrong?’ news from America, now, in the shape of Chevrolet’s new ‘Delivery Center’ at Daytona.

Based on the famous circuit’s infield, you’ll be able to pick up your new car there, with the potential to drive it on track. Your first few miles in your brand, spanking new 650bhp Corvette Z06? Sounds like a great idea…

As well as a certificate to authenticate your car’s Daytona delivery, you will also get a (so far unconfirmed) keepsake. Whether this is the dishevelled bumper of your trashed ‘Vette remains to be seen.

Last year, you may be aware, Porsche won Le Mans. Its 919 Hybrid ended Audi’s winning run in style.

At its heart is a V4 petrol engine. A 2.0-litre unit that revs to 9,000rpm and produces around 500bhp, no less. And this week we’ve seen it naked, without lots of car enveloping it, for the first time.

It looks lovely. Clever. Sophisticated. But it also, to our eyes at least, looks ever so slightly like this…

Ten Things likes the modern world, but it also fears elements of it. Some of that fear came to the surface this week thanks to news from Adrian Flux.

The insurer has added the occupation of vlogger - as well as professional gamer, drone operator and app developer - to its 2,000-plus list of jobs to choose from when buying cover for your car.

If your inner traditionalist is squirming, then Flux is ready with a riposte, for its job database continues to include much more archaic careers. Good news for almoners, lengthsmen and water diviners the country over.

If you have £360,000, you can buy many things from the car world. A Lamborghini Aventador SV. Three examples of every model Caterham makes. Sixty Dacia Sanderos.

Or, um, a garage. For one car. A garage in Chelsea, London has just been auctioned for that princely sum - twice its estimate.

Parking in London is difficult, and often pricey, at the best of times. But it would still take rather a lot of parking fines or hours in on-street parking to make the chunkier part of half a million quid stack up as value.

And given the tightness of the entrance angle (it’s the black door on the left with the white sign), you’d struggle to get that Lambo in it…

Picture credit: Savills

McLaren’s modern-day Longtail - the utterly lovely 675LT - sold out almost instantly, 500 lucky owners bagging theirs very early doors.

If you weren’t quick enough, then fear not, as one of McLaren’s prototypes is now for sale.

You’ll have to accept left-hand drive, and be willing to drive it back from Germany. Though as a first place to drive your brand new supercar, an autobahn strikes us as an utterly excellent place to do it.

The price? £290,000. Cheaper than a one-car garage, that.

Footballers, particularly those who play for big bucks in the Premier League, don’t often have the best reputations. Earning hundreds of thousands a week for doing your hobby tends to do that.

They don’t help themselves sometimes, though. Allow us to point you to Joleon Lescott. He’s a defender for Aston Villa, though after his team were beaten 6-0 last weekend, you might surmise he’s not very good at it.

Villa’s fans, no doubt apoplectic after the match as it pushed their team closer towards relegation, were given a further kick in the teeth when the picture above was published from Lescott’s Twitter account shortly after the final whistle.

It is a Mercedes S-Class Coupe, modified and worth much money. Lescott claimed it was the result of an accident in his trousers, the picture somehow being tweeted while his phone was in his pocket as he drove. Quite what he was driving he didn’t allude to…

“We’d be crazy not to do an SUV,” DS’s Eric Apode told TG this week. He’s the executive vice president for DS product development. DS, don’t forget, is Citroen’s new luxury offshoot, and is planning a future six-model line-up.

One of which of course, will be an SUV. “From 2018,” he said, “we will start launching a completely new line of products – six. In three or four years, we will completely renew the range.”

It is, of course, far too early to say what the very first DS model will be, but “among the six models, an SUV will definitely be one of them.”

They won’t look the same as any Citroen or Peugeot, either, Eric assuring us that you must be able to distinguish one from a distance. Plus, when pushed on the possibility of a performance saloon – not a hardcore, out-and-out M5 or AMG rival, but a fast, luxury barge – he simply said “yes”.

Watch this space…