Ten Things We Learned This Week: 20 November 2015 edition

Regular readers will know Ten Things’ love for animal-car stories is second to none, even if said animal happens to be stuffed and broadly fictional.

Which is why Ten Things was squeaking in happy delight at reports emerged from China that appeared to show the owner of a Lamborghini Gallardo being stopped by police for having a GIANT TEDDY strapped to his car’s roof.

The driver, it’s said, had bought the behemoth bear as a gift for his girlfriend. Chengdu’s traffic police, however, failed to see the romantic side, viewing the toy as a potential hazard to other road users. By which, presumably, they meant, “parents now being given a hard time by their toddlers for buying them such a very small teddy”.

Dangerous? Romantic? Clearly there’s only one way to settle this. Ask the bear. He looks happy enough, doesn’t he?

Actually, no. No he doesn’t. Untie the poor lad!

The machines are rising, and they shall show no mercy.

American news channel CNN this week revealed the terrifying plight of Josh Hood, the manager of a car wash in Louisiana.

Hood was sluicing down his beloved facility when, the security video reveals, he and his hose were rudely grabbed by a vast rotating loofah contraption. The poor manager was sent spinning round and round, trussed up by his own hose and powerless to escape.

Eventually, the evil machine chose to drop Hood to the deck, leaving him with, in his own words, “just a little road rash on my knees.”

“It was scary,” admitted Hood. “I was in the military, and that was scarier that anything I’ve been through in the military.”

This is just the start, Josh. Fear the machines.

To watch CNN’s bizarre, breathless report on the fearsome incident, click this link.

If you’d like to recreate precisely one element of the glittering, high-celeb lifestyle of England’s most capped outfield player, today’s your lucky day. Ol’ Goldenballs’ ol’ Range Rover Sport is up for auction.

In no way confirming everything we thought we knew about Premiership footballers, the Range Rover Sport – the V8 petrol version, obviously – features ‘a striking Kahn body kit’, black alloys and ‘every optional extra conceivable’ including quilted seats, twin rear screens and Gary Neville.

We made the last one up.

We’re told the Rangey has done 62,000 miles, and is expected to fetch around £25,000 when it goes under the hammer. Though no longer wearing its original ‘DB1001’ number plate, it DOES include a log book detailing ‘a speeding summons in the name of David’s sister Joanne’.

Will the glamour never end?

If you feared the autonomous era would be marked by self-driving cars hurtling breakneck across cities as their occupants clung helplessly on, think again. Autonomous cars, it seems, are cautious in the extreme.

Google has admitted one of its self-driving cars was stopped on a public road near its Californian campus, not for exceeding the speed limit, but for driving at 24mph in 35mph zone. Google’s self-driving cars are limited to 25mph for ‘safety reasons’.

It’s an offence in California to drive ‘at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic’, so Mountain View traffic officers – presumably with no small measure of confusion – stopped the driverless car for a quick chat.

“The officer […] made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speed along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impending traffic,” revealed Mountain View’s police department.

Whether the cop threw in an extra caution for the pod-car ‘looking a bit smug’ remains unclear.

This week’s ‘Disappointing Human’ award goes to the Yorkshire eejit who broke into a Leeds supercar showroom before smashing in the windscreen of a mint Veyron with a metal bar.

The unidentified vandal forced his way into Kahn Automobiles on Kirkstall Road, stoving in the SuperBug’s screen then fleeing from the scene.

The 2006 Bugatti – one of just 450 Veyrons built – was listed on the Kahn website with a price tag of £899,875. With just 16,000 miles on the clock, Kahn described it as in ‘beautiful condition’.

Not any more. Kahn confirmed they reported it to police, who are investigating an incident of burglary on the premises.

A spokesman said: “CCTV showed a white male with his hood up had used a metal bar to smash one of the showroom windows, and then used the bar to hit the windscreen of a Bugatti car causing damage. He then ran off from the scene.”

Strong work, fella. You’re a hero.

To celebrate 45 years of Range Rover, Land Rover this week drove the latest version of its flagship SUV across a bridge constructed of nothing but paper.

No bolts, no glue, no cheeky brickwork hiding beneath the sheafs. Just paper and more paper, happily supporting the 2.2-tonne 4x4.

The stunt was intended, we think, to highlight the Rangey’s lightweight aluminium construction. Ten Things is more taken by the extraordinary power of paper, a material it had previously only thought suitable for the construction of tiny planes. And blotting.

Steve Messam, the artist behind the stunt, said: “Paper structures capable of supporting people have been built before but nothing on this scale has ever been attempted. It’s pushing engineering boundaries.”

Ten Things wants answers. Why have engineers spent centuries, and countless billions, constructing bridges of metal and wood and brick… when they could have saved a whole lot of time and effort by wedging a few old copies of the Daily Star in the gap?

Ten Things had long imagined Aussie police to be common-sense, salt-of-the-earth sorts, coppers who would chuckle approvingly at, say, the engineering ingenuity of the gents behind a pair of motorised picnic tables.

It would seem not.

Police in Western Australia have reacted in po-faced fashion to CCTV footage of nine young men apparently trundling along the Perth beachfront on a pair of wheeled, powered tables.

What the tables are powered by, or how they’re steered, remains unclear. All we know is that the Aussie coppers aren’t impressed.

“Police are concerned for the safety of those riding on the tables with no protective clothing, especially when on roads alongside motor vehicles,” said a police spokesman.

“There are overall safety concerns particularly if a traffic incident was to occur, resulting in the persons subjecting themselves to potential injury.”

Police are studying the footage to identify the rogue picknickers. We’re told the table’s ‘drivers’ could be charged with driving an unregistered vehicle, and even drink-driving.

Strewth.

As this video proves, you don’t want to crash at the Nurburgring. It’ll generally prove expensive and embarrassing.

And you really, really don’t want to crash at the Nurburgring if (a) you’re 16 and not yet in possession of a driving licence, and (b) your mum’s waiting in the car park.

But that was precisely the fate that befell one sorry teenager this week. Pitching up to the final Touristenfahrten of the year, the lad set out for a few laps of the Green Hell in his mother’s Chrysler Crossfire, while she presumably got stuck into a fiendish sudoku.

Perhaps predictably, the lad crashed. Hard. Ten Things imagines this led to a rather frosty atmosphere on the drive home. If, indeed, the Crossfire was even capable of driving home.

To add insult to injury, German media are reporting that, on the drive to the Ring, that very same Crossfire was clocked at 215kmh in a 130kmh zone. Who was driving remains unclear. Whichever way, bad day.

Reddit user ThatGuyBeezy returned from work on Wednesday to find his car in very slightly better condition than when he left it.

While Beezy’s ride had started the day with a mere three hubcaps, it now had four matching wheels… and a note on the windscreen.

“I noticed your car only had three hubcaps,” read the hand-scrawled note. “My car, at one time, also only had three hubcaps. I couldn’t find the same ones, so I bought a different set, but for some reason, saved the old ones. You happen to have the same ones. Enjoy the sweet hubcap playa.”

OK, it’s not, in strictly financial terms, the most generous act of charity in history. But who, truly, can put a price on hubcap wholeness?

Ten Things ends this week with a short safety film demonstrating the perils of passengers airing their feet from the window of a moving car.

YouTube user Zim Killgore uploaded the short helmet-cam clip, with the chilling warning: “Don’t stick your feet out the window, or else I’ll grab ‘em.”

Which, to be fair, is exactly what he did, pinching the toes of one jazzily-socked window-hanger. The speed at which said socks retract into the car proves Killgore’s unconventional methods to be effective at reducing the incidence of foot-hanging.

Watch the video here.