Ten Things We Learned This Week

This is a 1999 Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Roadster - one of just six ever built - up for auction at Bonham's Goodwood Festival of Speed sale in late June.

And if you have a spare £1.8m burning a hole in your zirconium-plated trousers, you really ought to buy it.

Here's why. Back in 1997 Mercedes entered the FIA GT1 series, and under championship rules each car needed a road-legal equivalent. And so the firm began building the numberplated GTRs, even when the GT1 class folded in 1999. Mercedes had promised cars to customers, and to avoid beatings from oligarchs' henchmen, it delivered.

Each car packed a 6.0-litre V12 with 612bhp and to make them a little cosier, Mercedes threw in some leather and a glovebox, and traction control to help keep things in shape. Just 20 coupes and six roadsters were built at a cost of about one million Euros each.

Even the roadster would do 0-62mph in around 3.4 seconds, and a top speed very close to 200mph. It was a notorious pig to drive, but hey, just look at it. A lot more beautiful than one-seventieth of a Picasso, Ten Things reckons.

It's a question that's consumed philosophers through the ages: just how fast is poo?

And now, courtesy of Reading Buses, we have the answer: 76.785mph. That's the speed a bus powered by the smelly stuff hit this week at Millbrook, setting a new land speed record (for buses), no less.

The people-ferrier is powered by biomethane produced from bovine dung. Or cow poo gas, as it's more commonly known.

"At Reading Buses, we love it!" gushed CEO Martijn Gilbert in possibly the most enthusiastic cow-poo-related statement ever recorded.

"We're modern, fast and at the cutting edge of innovation," chimed in chief engineer John Bickerton. "We wanted to get the image of bus transport away from being dirty, smelly and slow."

Nothing like a bit of cow poo to dispel accusations of being dirty and smelly, Ten Things has always thought.

Ten Things has long had a soft spot for Dartz, the Latvian firm responsible for the Prombron and a whole bunch of whale-penis-leather-related controversy.

And the certifiable coachbuilder this week demonstrated its charitable side, donating a bottle of RussoBaltique vodka and Imperial Prix 1912 caviar to the Cannes Film Festival's charity auction. Both are considered to be among the finest of their type.

The booze'n'fish-eggs combo finally sold for 125,000 Euro (a little under £100,000), rather more than several of the cars that went under the hammer in Cannes.

Remember, kids: don't drink and drive. Getting amped up on caviar first, however, is just fine.

JLR's Special Vehicle Operations unit has this week revealed a creation dubbed ‘Project Billy', a Defender equipped with a giant glass cabinet out back.

Now, usually such transparent automotive boxes are employed to ferry popes on their official popely duties. But the Defender's glasshouse will transport a celebrity rather smaller, but equally as sacred to some: the Webb Ellis cup.

That, for the uninitiated, is the trophy awarded to the winners of the Rugby World Cup, to be held this June in the UK. Over the next 100 days, the trophy will tour the UK in its glazed cabinet, waving graciously to British rugby acolytes and bestowing its blessings upon crocked prop forwards. All hail the grand priest of the egg-chasers!

The latest installment of the Jurassic Park film franchise lands this summer. Called Jurassic World, it will feature dinosaurs, woefully under-engineered fencing and, of course, a Mercedes Unimog Ambulance.

Yes, this Mobile Veterinary Unit is where raptors go when they get sick. Quite how a vet might apply a tourniquet to an enraged dino's claw without getting substantially devoured remains unclear, but at least you'll be unlikely to hear the bloodcurling screams from outside the sturdy Unimog.

We're told a GLE Coupe also features heavily in the film, as the ‘official car of Jurassic World operations manager Claire', and at this point we stopped reading the press release because frankly it all went a bit downhill after the whole DINOSAUR AMBULANCE bit.

In the biggest recall in US auto history, nearly 34 million vehicles fitted with defective airbags from Japanese maker Takata have been declared defective.

It has emerged that Takata's airbags can be infiltrated by moisture, causing the bag to explode with excessive force, shattering a metal canister and potentially firing shrapnel in the passenger compartment. The defective airbags have been linked to six deaths and more than 100 injuries worldwide.

The recall affects 11 carmakers, including Toyota, Nissan. Honda, Daihatsu, Mazda and Mitsubishi. It dwarfs even the highly publicized GM recall last year, which saw some 2.6 million cars being recalled for faulty ignition switches.

33.8 million potentially defective airbags is, stat fans, one for every man, woman and child in Morocco.

OK, it's all relative. But the world's cheapest car has, in a break from its busy schedule of being a significant sales disappointment, been treated to an upgrade and some new kit. And when we say ‘some new kit', we mean ‘some kit'.

The Nano ‘GenX' receives such dizzy luxuries as a ‘new steering wheel' and even an automated manual transmission for the fearsome 38bhp two-cylinder petrol engine.

On the design side, the tiny Tata gets a new front grille that's far cheerier than it really should be, plus a set of ‘smoked headlights'.

Clearly Ten Things is far too mature to make the obvious fire joke. So are you. You are.

Those familiar with British road customs will know there are two cast-iron road rules never to be contravened: you ALWAYS get out the way of a fire engine on blues-and-twos, and you NEVER try to sneak past a lollipop man.

So what happens when the immovable object meets the unstoppable force? Well, it turns out that nee-naw trumps lollipop, news emerging this week that a school crossing patrol officer from Luton, Bedfordshire, has been suspended for halting a fire engine on its way to a 999 call.

Firefighters, we're told, had to physically remove the man as he continued to help children to cross the road outside William Austin junior school, despite the fire truck flashing its lights and sounding its sirens.

"Four or five firemen got out of the vehicle and escorted him off the road," revealed one onlooker. "It was like watching a car crash." Only without the cars. Or the crashing.

Ten Things hereby files this revelation of physics in the buttered-toast-strapped-to-cat's-back-paradox sub-folder.

So says US Vice President Joe Biden. The Veep made the internet-comment-section-poking statement while speaking to students at a Commencement Day event - graduation in English - at Yale University in Connecticut.

"Corvettes are better than Porsches," said Biden, one of just three human beings on Planet Earth not being touted by bookies as the new presenter of a popular car programme. "They're quicker and they corner as well."

So there you have it. The end of 911 vs ‘Vette tests; we've wasted our time strapping timing gear to them and arguing subjectively about their finer merits in the laybys of twisty mountain roads.

That said, it's unclear which particular Porsche Biden had in mind. Perhaps Cayenne hybrid rather than 911 GT3 RS?

Mind, with a US election next year, the US administration's Corvette policy could change. We'll keep you posted.

Bad news! Ten Things has, this week, failed to bring you any news about dogs in cars.

Better news! We have this incredibly aww-inducing picture of five tiny-wee robins (a worm of robins, collective noun fans) chirping away inside the engine bay of a Land Cruiser Amazon.

Dave Merchant, from Somerset, found the chicks as he checked his oil, and reckons they've covered around 250 miles since nesting. But he's adamant they're safe now.

"The fact that I was driving the Land Cruiser around while the robins were nesting and that the birds hatched successfully shows what a good car this is," says Merchant. "As soon as I saw the chicks I of course stopped driving the car and I won't use it again until they have flown the nest."