Ten things we learned this week

A heart-warming story from Pembroke, west Wales, as a tortoise has received a new lease of life thanks to some nifty wheels. Yes, it's the world's first Tortoise Car.

Say hello to Mrs T, the 90-year-old victim of a rat attack that saw her front two legs gnawed off while she was hibernating, leaving vets with no option but to amputate the appendages.

Jude Ryder, Mrs T's apparently pragmatic owner, turned to her mechanical engineer son Dale for help. He solved the problem by fabricating a front axle for Mrs. T and gluing the wheels from a model aircraft onto her shell.

"It was like fitting her with a turbocharger," Jude said. "She's going double the speed she used to and seems quite happy. But it's difficult to tell with a tortoise."

Could Top Gear suggest Mrs T might benefit from the fitment of an ACTUAL turbocharger? Add a coat of red paint, and the nonagenarian tortoise could be transformed into one of those homing shells from Mario Kart...*

*Top Gear does not suggest you do this to your tortoise

See the Tortoise Car in action here

News of a Dacia Sandero hot hatch had most of us checking our watches, worried April 1 had come around again already.

But rejoice, because it's real. The Renaultsport Sandero will be made for Latin America, where the budget hatchback wears the badge of Dacia's mother company.

And this rather rev-tastic video from the circuit suggests the RS Sandero means business, dubbing it "an innovation that will tremble the race tracks". Really.

With what, we don't know. We do know the Sandero is loosely related to the Mk2 Renault Clio, so we've got everything crossed for a cut-price rebirth for the wheel-cocking Clio 182 Cup of old.

That may be in vain...

"We all knew that the Evora 400 would be capable of exceeding expectations," cried Lotus of its new sports car this week. "Our initial pre-production tests provided immense confidence and a SIX seconds lap time advantage [over the regular Evora S] at Hethel."

Always wishing to serve our dear readers, though, we've read between the lines and the statement is somewhat different. "We still make sports cars!" it appears to read. "Look, here's one that's really quick!"

Yep, seemingly just hours after news of a China-built, Lotus-badged hybrid SUV landed, so did news of a mid-engined Lotus sports car churning out a 1m32s lap time that makes it six seconds quicker than its base car. At Lotus's own test track.

If ever there were a plea to purists to keep the faith, this is it.

This is the amazingly wacky Eshima Ohashi bridge in Japan. It's the vital connection between the cities of Matsue and Sakaiminato that spans a mile across Lake Nakaumi, and looks like something straight from Thorpe Park.

It's got a 6.1 per cent gradient on one side and a 5.1 per cent on the other. That allows for the main bridgey bit to stand high enough above the water for ships can pass underneath.

Sadly the speed limit on the bridge is just 25mph. TG suggests that, for one day only, the Japanese authorities close the bridge to regular traffic, abandon that silly speed limit, and let the world's most powerful cars indulge in the sport of Automotive Ski Jump...

A disparity between the official NEDC test's green numbers and those actually seen in the real world has long frustrated many. And while we are big XC90 fans at TG Towers, our hunch is that the numbers cranked out by its plug-in hybrid T8 trim may have just set a high watermark for unattainability.

See, it's a two-and-a-bit ton off-roader with 400bhp, yet the official figures that will help shift T8s from showrooms are 49g/km and 134.5mpg, the equal of a plug-in Prius. Fill even half of its seven seats before using its throttle in the fashion of, y'know, a normal person, and we rate your chances of matching those as slim to none whatsoever.

This is not Volvo's fault, of course. It has meticulously revised for, and then triumphantly passed a rather outdated test. Surely the men in presumably white coats running the whole thing have noticed such discrepancies by now?

A survey by YouGov has revealed Italian drivers are three times more likely than Brits to prang their car when parking.

Just shy of a quarter of Brits admitted to damaging their car in the last five years, with 10 per cent of these prangs suffered while parking. German and French drivers produced similar stats, shining the light of shuffling-speed shame fully on the Spaniards and Italians.

The latter marginally outcrashed the Spanish in order to top the table of clumsiness: 26 per cent of Italian prangs have taken place at walking pace, with half of the 1913 Italians polled admitting to recently bashing their car in one way or another.

Given the population of pockmarked Puntos and Pandas in any Italian city you care to name, we reckon the other half are telling porkie-pies.

As shocks go, this isn't one. The son of Formula 1's most decorated driver being fairly handy behind the wheel, paddles and pedals of a racing car comes no surprise, especially given the frequent father-son fastness across motorsport.

But still, 16-year-old Mick Schuey's first Formula 4 victory - in the German championship's first weekend - is a welcome good news story given the tough times he's undoubtedly suffered recently.

With his dad unable to attend, granddad Rolf was on the sidelines to see Mick lead the 18 laps of the Oschersleben round's third race, a day after he'd picked up ‘best rookie' for climbing from 19th to 9th in the first.

Well in, Mick.

A Manchester man known as ‘W***sy' is using the classic, um, undercarriage-based classroom graffiti tag to force councils to fill in potholes.

Fed up with the state of roads that have led his friends to pothole-related bike accidents, the anonymous self-described ‘road artist' takes his spray paint can and adorns any offending crater with a phallic perimeter.

"I wanted to attract attention to the pothole and make it memorable. Nothing seemed to do this better than a giant comedy phallus," says the artist. "It's also speedy, I don't want to be in the road for a long time. It seems to have become my signature. I just want to make people smile and draw attention to the problem. It seems to be working."

It does. Within 48 hours of the work appearing, many of the potholes have been filled in. Obviously Top Gear does not condone such lawless behaviour. Write a letter to your local councillor instead, kids.

Ever been stuck queuing at the supermarket, communal frustration emanating from everyone held up by a shopper - usually of elderly persuasion - counting out coin after coin of silver to cover a £45.38 trolley?

Well, that's a mere taster of the day a bunch of BMW salespeople had in Beijing recently. Ms Li, a Chinese 7-Series buyer, decided to pay for a £10,000 fragment of her new limo with bank notes worth around 10p each.

It took 20 employees around six hours to count ‘em all out, before she whipped out her credit card to cover the remaining £90,000, no doubt yielding a huge sigh of relief that the counting could cease. But why couldn't she have just put the whole lot on plastic?

In one of the most disturbing car adverts this century, Audi has found a unique way of enticing potential buys into its dealer showrooms: CGI-ing the birth of an Audi RS3 from an R8.

As you'll see, it starts with building, overly-dramatic classical music and the faint, distant beep of a heart monitor as an R8 appears in some sort of Avatar-esque operating theatre housed in a weird car hospital of the future.

It gets worse, as the car receives some sort of epidural, triggering a freaky automotive birthing procedure. The V10 screams, fluids cascade on the floor, and the walls of engine bay contract, expelling an RS3 foetus from its rear end.

It's deeply, deeply odd. Watch it from behind the sofa here.