Ten Things We Learned This Week

Try not to dry-retch at this one, but you're looking the World's Hairiest Car. It's Guinness certified and everything.

This week, Italian stylist Maria Lucia Mugno spent over 150 hours sewing strands of hair to both the interior and exterior of her Fiat 500. Why? To improve her own, incredibly pointless and pretty rancid record as the owner of the worlds most Wookiee-like car.

Back in 2010, Mugno covered the cute Cinquecento in 100kg of the finest Indian-sourced locks (our European hair is too weak, apparently) she could buy/shave/Veet.

But wanting to better her effort, Mugno recently added a further 20kg - or one shaven Chewbacca for you imperialists - of hair to her furry Fiat to set a new record.

With its newfound wig, cleaning the car presumably now requires an industrial vat of TRESemmé, while the ice scraper in the glovebox has apparently been replaced with a nit comb.

Seems there's no change in the handling dynamics of the vintage Fiat, with one onlooker described it as ‘a hairy ride'. Arf.

Fans of the Leonardo DiCaprio flick The Wolf of Wall Street may be familiar with a white Lamborghini Countach infamous for its role within a scene we really can't publish details of on this site.

But, in the most Wolf of Wall Street move to hit the City of London since the naughty Nineties, this week one driver a abandoned his pearly white Countach on London's Tower Bridge. Why? Because he wanted to shower London's parking officers in ‘fun coupons'? No. It just ran out of fuel.

However, the story turned rather darker when the police tracked the plate and arrested the owner, who was wanted for harassment.

"Police were made aware of a white Lamborghini car stationary on Tower Bridge," reads the official statement.

"The car had run out of petrol on the bridge at 6.30pm on 8 October."

"City of London police attended and discovered the driver was wanted on warrant for harassment. He was arrested and taken to an east London police station where he was passed into the custody of the Metropolitan Police. He remains in custody."

Senior tyre slayer and part-time ping-pongist Ken Block has been up to his old tricks, providing the internet with juicy video goodness.

However, our favourite driftmeister's latest vid is something of a departure from the normal smokey sideways forays in his 650bhp Fiesta.

Swapping smoke for snow, Ken and pro snowboarders Zak Hale and Ethan Deiss headed for Baldface Lodge in Nelson, British Columbia, to go shred powder, not tyres.

But not being a fan of funiculars, Ken thought he'd drive up the mountain in his 'RaptorTRAX' - a heavily modified F150 Raptor with tank tracks for tyres.

Modified by Special Vehicle Concepts in California, Ken's personal ski lift is equipped with snowboard racks, a roof basket, a rear-mounted winch, interior storage for snacks and drinks, an exterior stereo setup for blasting music, and exterior-mounted lighting rig to blind the snow into submission if they get stuck and, best of all, a tailgate-mounted BBQ for toasting some tasty marshmallows.

Check out the video of the supercharged 6.2-litre V8 pick up burying itself bonnet-first in the powder here.

Van drivers aren't normally known for their relaxed turn of pace. Which is why it came as a surprise to British police this week when one was caught travelling at an incredibly leisurely 19mph on the M1 in Hertfordshire.

Officers said they ruled out drink or drugs as a cause, and reported the driver for driving without due care. What they didn't realise was that the van was at maximum revs, merely weighed down by soon-to-be recycled red top newspapers.

We'd hate to break it to you, but life isn't like the movies. A Seattle man discovered this fact as he tried to half-inch a brand new Chevy Camaro Z/28 by driving it []through[] the window of a dealership. Yep, just like Kip Raines in Gone In Sixty Seconds.

However, this thief wasn't as diligent with his planning as Nicholas Cage and his crew.

After leaving a Camaro-shaped hole in the Lake City dealer's window, the crook didn't point his pilfered 505bhp track-spec muscle car to Long Beach docks and pray he could get there without jumping a bridge.

Instead, he just parked it up outside his house. Half a mile away from the scene of the crime. Busted.

Good news! Everyone's favourite Romanian SUV has just been made even more appealing. Dacia has ditched any pretensions the Duster had of playing family car (the kids would only whinge about the lack of radio and having to wind the windows themselves anyway), and has turned it into a pick-up capable of carting around 450 kilos.

Bad news! Only 500 Duster utes will be made, and they're all destined for one ‘key fleet customer' in Romania. Boo.

Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin announced on Twitter this week that he has been denied car insurance due to his apparently risky job title.

Whether insurers have confused him with his murderer-hunting character Inspector Rebus is as yet unconfirmed, but it has led a fruitful TG office quest for other occupations shunned by the world of car insurance.

Footballers, exotic dancers and funfair employees, we discover, feel the most pain. If you're a left winger, stripper or waltzer spinner contemplating public transport instead, then perhaps it's time for a change of career to a nurse, lollipop lady, or coastguard (seamless swaps, respectively), the friendliest career choices come renewal time.

Sick of being thumped into submission by heartless, insensitive drivers in their tough little Ladas, the Eastern European potholes are making an aggressive stand.

Gordey Efremov was trundling through Ukrainian traffic in his trusty Niva when it took a rather sudden and involuntary trip off road. A precisely Niva-shaped pothole swallowed up his car, leaving fellow drivers to help pull Efremov to safety as murky water flooded into the 4x4.

A broken drainage system resulted in heavy rainfall damaging foundations beneath the road, we're told, weakening its structure and causing the collapse. A local police spokesman fired up his Cliché-o-Tron 3000 to explain the incident, claiming ‘it was an accident waiting to happen'. Cheers.

The road-mapping chaps in Google's Streetview department have headed for the sandy wilderness around the Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi's Rub' al Khali desert.

With the unforgiving, low-mu conditions gauged to be beyond the abilities of its usual Vauxhall Astra with a camera plonked on its roof, Google chose to chop in its usual street-snapper for a man on a camel.

"With every environment and every location, we try to customise the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment", said Google's Middle East spokesman, Joyce Baz. "In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way."

Only a crueler publication than TG would suggest that said camel also boasts greater power and a more focused driving experience than the Astra. So we won't.

Merc is doing its best to replace the V8 hole left in our hearts by the departure of the SLS, as it continues to deluge us with news of its upcoming AMG GT sports-thing.

This week, we learned that the Germans will pay the equivalent of £90,000 for an entry-level GT, which aims it within a few quid (or euros) of the lavishly specced new Porsche 911 Carrera GTS.

It should be quite some fight, but then given how fantastically thunderous Merc's hot rod sounds in this video, it's one the AMG GT has every chance of winning. All we know is we can't wait to referee...