Ten things we learned this week: 28 October 2016 edition

Try to get somewhere in Britain and there’s a good chance your journey will be hindered by a van bearing the name of a supermarket, as it dawdles merrily about the place delivering shoppers’ online orders.

They dawdle with good reason, given the fragility of the fruit, veg and other groceries on board. Which is why we reckon rallyist Kris Meeke’s audition as van driver will not prove successful.

In a glorified advert for the new Citroen Dispatch van, Meeke and co-driver Paul Nagle pack up the new panel van before treating it like it’s a DS3 on a WRC stage.

The angles it cuts are quite impressive. Whether you’d agree when your Monster Munch multipack turned up as mere crumbs is another matter…

Oh yes. If there’s a better headline on the internet this Friday, let us know below. This week, Anheuser-Busch – the brewer behind Budweiser – managed to get 51,744 cans of beer along 120 miles of the Colorado highway without a driver. Sounds like some party.

It’s thanks to a partnership with Otto (owned by Uber), a company working on self-driving tech for trucks. It says an actual human person helped the truck with ramps at the beginning and end of its journey, but then spent the rest of the journey in their sleeper berth.

The idea, of course, is that large lorry deliveries don’t have to be limited by their human operator’s annoying tendency to become tired after a whole day of driving. Needless to say, several steps of lawmaking stand between trials like this and actual lorry drivers having a kip while 51,744 Buds career along a motorway unattended.

Quite some beer run, nonetheless though…

The internet loves debating what the Nissan GT-R is capable of beating… Porsche 911, Corvette, um, Mount Everest…

Yep, this week a man called Kah Chuan Hoong drove his GT-R from Singapore to Everest Base Camp, his big Nissan apparently being the first supercar to make it there. Alright, so it’s not the top of Everest itself, but that is clearly a hugely ambitious airlift short of impossibility.

And a hike to the 5,150-metre high Tibetan camp is something we suspect many cars might have an issue or two with. The GT-R’s four-wheel-drive system was no doubt a help, the same true of what looks to be some handily jacked-up ride height as the car wades through water in Kah’s Facebook gallery.

“Finally arrived at Base Camp on Monday 24 October 2016 after more than 18 months of dreaming and planning,” says Kah. “I'm changing my return route. The roads between Basu and Nyingchi are so bad it's not worth taking the risk to be a hero twice. So I will spend four extra days going via the desert and grassland areas of Qinghai & Lanzhou then into Sichuan, Yunnan, Thailand, Malaysia and back to Singapore around mid November.”

Doesn’t it make you feel good to see these cars being properly used?

Well, perhaps not your very next one. But Uber has revealed this week that it’s looking to airborne travel as a way of cutting journey time, and even saving money.

It would involve the use of vertical take-off and landing crafts (VTOL) and could shave heaps of time and money from user’s journeys: an example involves a trip from San Francisco to San Jose, currently $111 and over two hours by UberX, but $129 and 15 minutes by the proposed VTOL. In the long term, that would apparently drop to a mere $20. Yikes.

“Normally, people think of flying as an expensive and infrequent form of travel,” says Uber. “But that is largely due to the low production volume manufacturing of today’s aircraft.” Bigger demand would mean larger production volumes, and hence lower costs.

You can pore over the full 98-page proposal for Uber Elevate here. Fancy a VTOL for your next tipsy ride home?

If you’ve ever tried to commute around the section of M25 that passes the world’s busiest airport, you might argue it already is an integral part of it.

But the awarding of a third runway to Heathrow has led to discussions on how it would be integrated into an already bustling corner of Britain. And one member of parliament has been quoted as saying a ramp over the M25 – which planes would take off from – would be more cost effective than London’s orbital motorway scurrying under the new runway via a tunnel.

Sounds exciting. And scary. But it’s also a long way off – there’s all sorts of arguing to happen between now and 2025, the potential date the runway would be completed by.

"It is a very gentle hill up which the planes would take off rather than a flat surface,” says transport secretary Chris Grayling. “It's what happens at very many airports around the world."

Each new car we drive at TG seems to have a newly sophisticated layer of crash avoidance beeps and bongs to either warn its driver into an avoiding an accident, or bypassing the fleshy human altogether and stamping on the brakes itself.

Great for not crashing into things on the road, then, but not so hot when it comes to not crashing in a car wash, apparently.

American magazine Forbes has found that cars, concerned by the massive rotating brush that’s heading right for their windscreen, are actually crashing to try and avoid it, while the advent of the electric handbrake is scuppering the use of more complex, conveyor-based systems.

Our advice? Get outside and clean the blooming thing yourself.

Been thinking about spending £264,000 on a Rolls-Royce Dawn, but been unhappy that it’s colour scheme didn’t complement your favourite pair of chinos?

Fret no longer, for your Mugello Red, Cobalto Blue or Mandarin trousers can now look at their best alongside an identically hued roof on your 571bhp V12 convertible. Hurrah.

The mixture of white paint and coloured roof is quite striking, and you may or may not be delighted to learn it’s entirely echoed by the car’s interior. Better not spill anything.

Rather than a particularly wild afternoon on the online configurator, these three cars are the end product of a process that involved ‘textile specialist’ Cherica Haye from the Royal College of Art and ‘leather technologist’ Michelle Lusby, whose CV includes handbag maker Mulberry. Hands up if you knew those were actual jobs…

If your trick or treating goes particularly well and you come home with around £600,000 in your Halloween bucket, then why not treat yourself to an example of the world’s first sports car?

It’s a Vauxhall Prince Henry, and way back in 1914, when it was sold, its modest 25bhp yielded a 80mph top speed. Pretty much twice what you’d get from anything else at the time.

Still not convinced? This particular example – up for sale for the first time in 46 years – was bought new by a man called T W Badgery, who (with the help of his chauffeur) put 140,000 miles on it by the time it was sold on in 1931.

It returns to sale at the Bonhams Bond Street auction in London on December 4, its estimate an appropriately princely £500,000-600,000. Tempted?

At the Paris motor show last month, we were fairly smitten by the Audi RS3 LMS racecar. It was one of the more lairy-looking cars on display, and also one of very few that was a genuine surprise.

Seems like it’s winning other fans, too, having won its class on its first outing in a VLN race at the Nürburgring. In fact, RS3s took the top two places in class, finishing 17^th and 22^nd overall from a grid of 140 cars.

The higher placed car was driven by Jordi Gené and Kelvin van der Linde, the former familiar to TG after his record-breaking visits to the ‘Ring in fast Seats.

Looks like the RS3 could have a successful first season ahead of it in 2017…

Here at Ten Things, we quite like an estate/wagon/tourer/shooting brake (call ‘em what you will). So the fact Alfa Romeo has hinted the Giulia could be getting a more practical version makes us very happy indeed.

Last year, we got a hold of Jochem Hinloopen’s delightfully brown rendering of what a Giulia wagon should look like, were it ever to happen. And according to Automotive News Europe, we're likely to get a real version. Perhaps not with the Quadrifoglio’s 503bhp powertrain, but we live in hope.

Seems the Giulia has done well sales-wise so far, selling twice as many units as the Jaguar XE in Europe in September, putting it fourth in class behind the established Mercedes-Benz C-Class, BMW 3 Series and Audi A4. But it’s still some way off numbers wise, those three all having broader appeal thanks to their estate versions. Alfa, you know what to do…