Ten things we learned this week

If an image cheerier than the one above has been published online this year, we want to see it. Without wishing to generalise, we're nigh on certain that everyone likes a) cars and b) dogs.

So the news that reached us from Canada, courtesy of CBC News, has pretty much made our week.

"At a glance, I thought it was a couple of old ladies driving a little car," said one onlooker as a Pontiac Vibe swung its way out of an animal hospital car park. His eyes deceived him. The Vibe's driver and co-driver were, in fact, a pair of pooches, presumably on their way home from a check-up.

The rather more prosaic truth is that a dozy owner had left their car out of gear, resulting in a pair of unsuspecting pets gently coasting their way down the road until onlookers intervened. Not before they'd snapped a picture that has made CBC's Nova Scotia news section the happiest corner of the internet this week, though...

Source: CBC News

Oh yes. It's a bumper week for dogs in cars, and this one's rather closer to home.

Adorable Don is a Scottish sheep dog (can dogs have nationalities?), who, clearly craving attention while his owner Tom Hamilton examined a lamb, prodded the controls of the farmer's tractor.

Going one better than those Canadian canines, though, Don didn't stick to a bumble past some camera phone-wielding bystanders. Instead, he burst through a fence and onto the M74 motorway, as reported by Traffic Scotland. Given its curious penchant for animal pictures on its Twitter account, Traffic Scotland must have been over the moon with Don's derring-do.

After briefly heading northbound, Don, the tractor and a potentially quite hazardous situation were halted by the central reservation, a smashed windscreen happily the only damage, allowing our furry friend to go back and live on the farm. And not in that way, happily...

Sources: Traffic Scotland

This week's final piece of motoring dog news comes from Austin, Texas, where a recent round of MotoGP took place. Marc Marquez's win took most of the headlines, but column inches were spared for a rather plucky track invader, christened Little Moto.

This one-year-old Shiba Inu mix, clearly a big Stefan Bradl fan, scampered on track to get a closer look at his two-wheeled hero, as pictured on the @Speed Twitter account. And as some cruel commenters pointed out, he achieved a more impressive lean angle than Bradl.

Little Moto's escapade brought a red flag on the practice session he'd scampered onto, but his fame was assured and, after spending just a week in the local animal centre, he has now successfully been rehomed.

And yep, we'd bet most of our money he was named after this shot was taken.

Fact fans! Or should we say, exceedingly nerdy fact fans! The Dacia Duster is the best-selling car in the whole of the Renault group. And that position only looks to be strengthened by its grittiest, most utilitarian iteration yet. Meet the Duster Commercial.

On first impressions, it looks barely like a van at all. But squint and you'll see the blanked out windows, which conceal the contents of its newly commodious 1150 litres of bootspace, able to swallow 500kg worth of goods.

It comes with your choice of two- or four-wheel drive, each linked to a 107bhp diesel engine. And while the Dustervan weighs in at a minimal £9595, it comes with Bluetooth, iPod plug-in-ability and a plethora of airbags as standard.

Tough, go-anywhere ability and incongruous looks: it's the car we'd pick for a smash'n'grab diamond heist...

If Amazon's proposals for automated, parcel-delivering drones put the fear of God into you, then rest assured that its latest idea is a little less boxset-head-injury scary.

You do need an Audi, though. German Amazon Prime customers - those with a four-ringed key in their pocket, that is - are busy trialling a scheme that sees the delivery man given a one-time access code to their car's boot in order to plop the parcel in when they're otherwise engaged.

We imagine you'll need a flashy new electronically locked tailgate, ruling out SWB Quattro owners, sadly. But then if we owned one of those, we wouldn't need every episode of Breaking Bad on Bluray to keep us entertained.

"How they've made 950bhp this usable, this playful and predictable, is nothing short of divine inspiration." The words of Ollie Marriage in TG mag, there.

But it seemed only a matter of time before someone got behind the oblong wheel of the LaFerrari and proved him wrong. And so we see this mildly beached £1million hybrid hypercar, which suffered social media infamy this week.

Apparently, though, damage was light, restricted to replacing one of the LaFerrari's exquisitely ornate wing mirrors, and some of its rear bumper and diffuser setup.

Following a prang in Monaco last year, it's not actually the first known LaFerrari accident. And sadly, we'll be staggered if it's the last.

"Well he would!" cried the cynics, as former F1 driver Webber - he of the Porsche payroll - exclaimed his love for one of his employer's products.

But still. Webber is one of the most likeable high-profile racers out there, and the new GT3 RS sure as hell looks like it'll be a car we'll enjoy the company of, too. So the combination of the two - on the Nürburgring's north loop, no less - sounds like a rather spiffing combination.

Contrary to rumours, Webber wasn't there to slash the 7:20 time already quoted for the RS, but instead seemed to be filming a promo video for the hardest cored 991-gen 911.

His unbiased, impartial, utterly independent view? "I'm not easily impressed re road cars on track. Tonight I was."

Following the bananas Bahar era and some questionable social media campaigns, we can't help but welcome the arrival of a Lotus press release that's, well, not massively weird.

Just as the Lotus Elise has finished extinguishing the candles from its 20th birthday cake, it's been announced that 40,000 examples of it and its numerous spin-offs have been produced.

Spin-offs? That's the sublime Exige, the crackers 340R and 2-Eleven and the rarer-than-rocking-horse-poo Europa.

The vast majority of those sales numbers are Elises, though, and in a moment of neat timing, the 40,000th to trot off the Hethel production line was the first 20th Anniversary limited edition. Lovely.

F1 spoilers are marvellous, right? They 1) look mega, 2) stop cars crashing into stuff when they go really fast (unless you're Pastor Maldonado), and 3) hone some of the aerodynamics that filters down to air-crafting cars like the Ferrari 458 Speciale and McLaren P1.

There's a fourth benefit, though, and it concerns the Munch Bunch and Cheesestrings we're buying at the shop later. Williams has seen the open-fronted fridges in supermarkets, observed the energy they waste and shopper-shivering they induce by spilling their cold air into the aisles, and spotted an opportunity to apply aerofoils to better direct the cool air onto the food, not the people lobbing it in their trolley.

Want some maths? Up to ten per cent of the UK's energy is consumed by its food shops, and up to 70 per cent of their energy bills are dedicated to their fridges. Trials have started, with Williams claiming it could nearly half those fridges' energy consumption.

Now all we need are DRS-equipped trolleys to better overtake the ditherers.

Budding Le Mans racers at the ready, it's time for your shot at playing racing driver. The seventh GT Academy is now open, its first qualifying round asking you to take a Nissan GT-R Nismo around Silverstone's GP circuit.

Anyone who doubted GT Academy's chances of success when it started back in 2008 must have only just finished mopping the omelette from their face. It may start with some reasonably friendly online qualifying rounds, but it quickly develops into full-bore motorsport training.

The end result has been a bunch of supremely talented drivers who've ended up with podiums at the Le Mans 24 Hours and recirculating rumours of F1 drives. And two of them - Lucas Ordonez and Jann Mardenborough - are set to complete for overall Le Mans victory in Nismo's new LMP1 car in June.

If that's not incentive to dust off your PS3 and enter, we don't know what is...