Ten things we learned this week

Animals in, on or around cars never fail to titillate Ten Things. We fear the genre has reached its zenith, though, in the sleepy town of Clyst St Mary in the south-west of England.

News reaches us from The Guardian that local peacocks have been causing thousands of pounds of damage to Clyst's car population.

How so? ‘Agitated and frisky' peafowl have, it seems, being spotting their reflections in the metalwork, mistaking their own fizzog for a rival, then launching an attack on the poor car. Locals have been left dismayed at the damaged caused.

"The pecking has completely ruined the back of my car," ranted one Clystian, immediately bagging a podium spot in the ‘best quotes on TG.com this decade' contest.

Picture: Jebulon

With little in the way of on-track shenanigans to discuss in Shanghai last weekend, Formula 1 headlines have instead focused on victorious Lewis Hamilton's post-race celebrations.

There's nothing unusual about a bottle of posh fizzy plonk being thrust into the winner's mitts, before its contents are effervescently shared with his fellow podium sitters.

After his Chinese win, though, Ham turned to 22-year-old Liu Siying, one of the female hosts up alongside him on the podium. Pictures of him spraying his champers directly in her face spread far and wide, prompting condemnation of Lewis as a ‘sexist bully'.

Siying apparently saw the funny side, though, exclaiming: "It lasted for only one or two seconds, and I didn't think too much about it." Let us only hope that's the last time Lewis hears that sentence.

Go to school in North Korea and, as well as finding maths and PE on your timetable, you'll also discover ‘Kim Jong-un's Revolutionary Activities'.

A report by The Telegraph uncovered a manual that's been issued to North Korean schools, informing the little ‘uns that Jong-un was a child prodigy. The highlights? The Dear Leader could drive at the age of three, and was a victorious yacht racer at nine.

Cynics have suggested that the suspect CV is being peddled to infants in a bid to boost the dictator's flagging popularity.

But then maybe his childhood was ram-packed with extraordinary achievements? After all, his father - Kim Jong-il - could walk and talk at eight weeks old and wrote the six greatest operas in the history of music...

Picture: © Pyongyang/Xinhua Press/Corbis

‘Slowest car in its class', read the advert. It's how Peugeot flogged its 306 GTI-6 in the late 1990s. The premise of the Pug's curiously depreciating tagline? That having a sixth notch on its gearlever made the scorching little hot hatch exotic and rarefied when all but the spangliest supercars had five ratios or fewer.

Fast-forward a decade and a bit and things have changed. The manual gearbox is no longer the dominating force it once was, automatics taking over. You'll mostly find those with six or seven speeds, but recently we've seen eight and even nine ratios start to boggle our minds and keep our paddle-flapping hands busy.

Get ready to flap your left paddle even more frequently into roundabouts, though, as the 11-speed auto is on its way. Yep, ELEVEN. One-One.

The next Ford Raptor is due to get a ten-speeder, yet Ford has registered a 5000-word patent for an even more stocked ‘box. Naturally we've pored over every one of those words to provide this analysis: TOO MANY GEARS.

If autonomous cars put the fear of god into you, then hard lines: they're coming, presumably of their own, robotic accord.

Nerves ought to be eased at the achievements they're racking up. Audi has figured out how to go really quickly round a circuit autonomously. And now a Q5 packed with Delphi's self-piloting trickery has driven 3400 miles from San Francisco to New York, 99 per cent of them autonomous.

As well as the presumably uncomplicated highways, the scary robot SUV also negotiated roundabouts, tunnels, all sorts of weather and aggressive ‘fellow' drivers.

We'll be impressed when you can do it on B-roads alone, AudiBot...

As the UK general election looms on the horizon, politicians are throwing around all sorts of promises. Naturally many of these involve cars, and the greenification thereof.

Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems, has announced a £100million prize pot, to be awarded to the first low-emission car that makes it into the UK's top five bestsellers.

That translates as a car the pumps out fewer than 75g of CO2 per kilometre becoming affordable enough to elbow buyers out of their default Golfs and Astras by snaring 60,000 annual buyers. The first manufacturer to crack it would pocket the £100m jackpot if the Lib Dems get into power.

But they won't. So as you were...

Concerned Lambos aren't as barking mad and hand-shakingly scary as they were in the days of Diablos and Countachs?

Help is at hand courtesy of Californian tuner Vorsteiner, who has injected some downright naughtiness into the mildly sane Huracan. There's no extra power, but there is a demonic spoiler and 21-inch rear wheels.

The Verona Edizione is finished in red and black, too, the accepted colour scheme of the devil himself if ever there was one. Frightening enough for you?

Ford's designers still have some ink left in their felt tips. After recently dropping the GT and Focus RS, they've found enough capacity to doodle outside the world of performance cars.

Boys and girls, meet the Ford GT-inspired electric guitar. Look, it's the same colour and everything!

It's hard to get truly excited about a one off marketing stunt, but the GTar actually forms part of a portfolio of other GT-inspired man-cave accessories to be showcased at the Salone del Mobil furniture design expo in Milan. Our other highlight? A foosball table shaped like the supercar's vents, which features live grass...

Long distance car-versus-train battles are no recent invention. Back in 1930, Bentley chairman Captain Woolf Barnato won a race from Cannes to Calais against the famous "Blue Train" in his Speed Six.

Despite suffering a puncture, Barnato famously had enough time to make it to his favourite London club for a G&T before the train carrying the continent's wealthiest arrived at the northern tip of France.

To mark 85 years since his victorious gin-sipping, Bentley has handed four Mulsanne Speeds over to its coachbuilder Mulliner, which has applied a smattering of interior niceties and exterior details to create the Mulsanne 'Blue Train'. Well, it's blue, and it's the size of a train...

As for Barnato himself, the grandeur of his name doesn't disappoint. He served in WW1, played cricket professionally, and won Le Mans three times consecutively behind the wheel of a Bentley. Gent.

Overdue biopics about Enzo Ferrari (pictured) are like buses, if the old adage is true. You spend ages waiting around for one, only for two to seemingly turn up at the same time...

Earlier this week the internet was somersaulting with hype at the prospect of film epic about Il Commendatore, with reports suggesting Robert De Niro slated to play the man himself, albeit with no one officially confirmed to direct it yet.

No sooner had De Niro told Italy's Il Messaggero newspaper about his upcoming role, director Michael Mann announced he was wrapping up the development stages of his own Ferrari flick, though as yet no star has been cast.

So one film has De Niro as lead actor but seeks a director, while Michael Mann is all set to direct a competitor but is in search of a bloke to play Enzo. Are we the only ones adding two and two together here?