Ten things we learned this week: 20 May 2016 edition

A 23-year-old driver has sunk her Toyota Yaris in a lake in Ontario, Canada, reportedly after her sat nav instructed her to proceed into the water.

Luckily the young lady in question realised her mistake quickly enough to abandon the car through the window, swimming to safety while the vehicle sank to the depths beyond the slipway.

Local police said that combination of darkness, rain and fog caused the driver to miss the approaching hazard.

At least she didn’t do it live on TV...

Image credit: Andrea Vincze

In our minds, anyway.

It’s a reality of nature that cows aren’t shaped like bucket seats, as David Attenborough regularly attests*. As a result, there is always leather left over when designers have finished upholstering the interior of Aston Martin’s Vanquish.

The British carmaker has now put that extra hide to good use, as demonstrated in this video on YouTube. At its headquarters in Gaydon, a team was able to assemble a rather wonderful collage of the 6.0-litre V12 from the very leather that furnishes its interior.

BMW’s Art Car has competition at last.

*This might not be true.

Elon Musk’s latest invention, the Model 3, was revealed to the public less than two months ago, and as of the end April nearly 400,000 orders had been placed on the electric sedan.

Since then though that number has been revised downwards, now standing at a slightly-less-impressive-but-still-very-good 373,000.

Why the new total? Well, there are two reasons: firstly, the company has annulled 4,200 duplicate applications made by people who were supposedly too hasty when clicking ‘confirm’ on the online form.

Secondly, 8,000 people have had second thoughts and cancelled their orders altogether. Perhaps the reality of stumping up a $1,000 deposit for a car that is still being designed and that won’t arrive until at least late next year finally hit home.

Dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles are illegal on the roads of New York. And yet local police are finding that they are an increasing problem: reports say that the NYPD had seized more than 300 of the off-road motors by April, twice as many as during the same period last year.

Commissioner Bill Bratton was faced with a dilemma: with the summer season approaching, how could his team best communicate to the public that these machines were not going to be tolerated on the streets of New York’s five boroughs?

Um, by destroying them. With a bulldozer. Live on Facebook. Obviously.

Waving a chequered flag to signify the bikes’ lives were at an end, Bratton had the seized motors crushed with a bulldozer in what must be the motoring world’s equivalent of a public flogging.

Rest in pieces.

Image credit: City of New York Government

Bad news, fans of quirky saloons. The Citroen C5 is longer on sale in the UK. Consider Ten Things a bit glum.

Citroen's reasoning is sound, though. Just 237 were sold in the UK in 2015, down massively from the model’s peak, when 45,502 were bought by customers between 2001 and 2004.

Reports had suggested that Citroen was planning to introduce a brand-new C5, but that looks less likely now considering the growth in the SUV and crossover market in the last couple of years...

Remember a few weeks ago, when we mentioned the story of a Worthing resident whose recalled Vauxhall Zafira caught fire three months after it had supposedly been fixed?

Well, the tale has taken another turn. Vauxhall, midway through the initial repair process of the 234,938 Zafira B models it had sold by last December, has announced that it is planning a second recall after discovering more weaknesses in its design.

In a statement, Vauxhall said: “While the current action achieves the objective of returning vehicles to their original condition, after extensive investigations we have decided to go further and improve the overall robustness of the system.

“When the recalls are complete, all vehicles will have a new wax fuse resistor, a new blower motor and a new moulding at the base of the windscreen to address water ingress.”

Better safe than sorry...

A grim likelihood in motoring is that from time to time, pedestrians and cars are going to collide. Even with with the advancement of autonomous tech fast gathering pace, it’s a problem that surely isn’t going to go away.

Recognising this, Google has been racking its collective brain for ideas that could lead to potential solutions in the years to come. One of those brainwaves, showcased in the above photo, has been granted legal protection by the US Patent Office this week.

But what is the idea, exactly? In all seriousness, it’s a special glue that emerges from the bodywork in the event of an accident to stick pedestrians to the frame of the car. Really.

“The front region of the vehicle may be coated with a specialised adhesive that adheres to a pedestrian,” explains the patent, “and thus holds the pedestrian on the vehicle in the unfortunate event that the front of the vehicle comes into contact with the pedestrian.”

TG predicts that this could lead to a number of sticky situations.

For years, trucks and heavy goods vehicles have ignored the warning signs approaching an 11ft8 train trestle in Durham, North Carolina, often with disastrous effects.

Such was the frequency of accidents, a man called Jürgen Henn set up a camera in order to capture the mishaps, a decision which has spawned a YouTube channel that frequently gets tens of thousands of views each week.

His latest video features a truck striking the already-replaced-once protection beam on the edge of the bridge, the 107^th such incident since Henn began filming in 2008. Maybe his time would be better spent shouting warnings at drivers?

Image credit: Jürgen Henn – 11foot8.com

But only until Christmas.

The German Federal Court of Justice has ruled that Mercedes is not allowed to sell convertibles with its familiar ‘Airscarf’ neck-heating feature until the original, 1996 patent of inventor Ludwig Schatzinger expires at the end of this year.

Until then, the manufacturer must disable ‘Airscarf’ on new models or face a fine of nearly £200,000.

This might strike some people as a waste of time given that Mercedes will be allowed to reactivate the feature again shortly after Christmas.

Sounds like a lot of hot air to us...

The wheels on the bus have often gone round and round, but never quite like this.

1Rebel has announced its ambitions to convert a London bus into a moving fitness studio, which will allow commuters to engage in vigorous cycling sessions on their way to work.

If the plan is given the green light by authorities, the bus will pick people up and deliver them to the group’s base in the centre of the capital (for a quick freshen up before work), taking in all the sights the city has to offer whilst passengers pedal away on stationary bicycles.