Ten things we learned this week: 8 July 2016 edition

That’s because Mercedes will now offer you its maddest car in 1:18 scale model form.

Yep, if you’ve always fancied a G63 or G65 – powered by turbocharged V8s and V12s respectively – but don’t have the requisite fuel reserve, garage space or, um, driving licence, your prayers have been answered.

Mercedes has teamed up with model maker GT Spirit to produce 463 models (to match the G-Wagen’s internal product number, fact fans) in the array of colours applied to the real-life G-Wagen Crazy Color editions. Which one takes your fancy?

Or at least it does if this unofficial Audi concept is to ever see the light of day. Which we suspect it won’t. It’s the work of some talented designers, namely Artem Smirnov and Vladimir Panchenko, and it has some choice highlights.

It’s designed to be autonomous and electric powered, with the batteries low down for a nice, ground-hugging centre of gravity. The driver, meanwhile, puts in any required operations from the cockpit up top for the best possible visibility.

They’ll have an F1-style steering wheel, apparently. Might want to look at F1-style canopies, too, if they’re to stay dry carrying UK-bound fuel.

Or it will do in 2025, it seems. That’s the year by which the Finnish city, handily pictured above, wants to see its residents eschew private car ownership in favour of a combination of its public and private transportation services.

Cars still form a part of it, but the idea is residents will always use the most efficient form of transport available. So rather than just hop in a car, you could call a bus to a point of your choosing via a smartphone app, and its route would be malleable to best suit the passengers riding aboard.

Sounds great, but Finland has given us some of the world’s most talented racing drivers, don’t forget. Ari Vatanen, Henri Toivonen, Mika Hakkinen… plenty of very, very fast people are Finnish. Would they have got into cars quite so much under a system like this?

And just imagine what Kimi Raikkonen has to say about it all…

Picture: JIP

Forever the preserve of concept car fantasy, without ever making it into reality, it seems the side mirror-killing camera is finally here, and ready to attach itself to cars more mainstream than VW's rare-groove XL1.

The Japanese government has approved their arrival on cars from this autumn, with around a third of its country’s cars expected to boast the technology by 2023.

Closer to home, BMW has been extolling the virtues of the tech via its mirrorless i8 concept. The benefits? Not just safety, but the car’s drag coefficient and wind noise levels.

Convinced?

In Britain, you’ll often find people complaining that their local roads are crap. Soon, that could literally be the case.

That’s because students in North Carolina have come up with the idea of paving roads with swine manure, something which apparently cuts both costs and environmental impact.

It won’t be the sole, um, ingredient in road building, but the waste product of pigs could provide the adhesive that keeps roads stuck together rather than a pile of their constituent materials.

Far from being poo-pooed, it’s an idea that picked up an award at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Energy Business Competition. The students dung good.

This much we might have surmised before Red Bull released this video.

Yep, not content with its 900bhp, ten-tonne Kamaz 4326 making an appearance at the 2016 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Red Bull seems to have decided on driving the thing all the way to Sussex from its team’s Russian base. A journey of nearly 3,000 miles.

The final 100 miles, we’re told, were the most tortuous of all, as the Kamaz somewhat inexplicably made it past Harrods. Given it’s further from the south coast than Goodwood by quite some margin, we suspect it’s either a satnav error or a publicity stunt.

Click the link above to watch the video and make your own mind up…

If Ten Things owned an E-Type, we would never let it out of our loving gaze. We’d certainly never lose the blooming thing.

And yet that’s exactly what happened to E-Type chassis number 62, the glorious red thing you see before you. It was sold new in 1961 in Scotland, but after being passed between owners north of the border, sort of disappeared off the radar completely.

But the result is that one of the earliest E-Types of the lot, now found again, is up for sale in seemingly superb condition. It will be auctioned by Silverstone Auctions at the end of July, and you’ll need at least £140,000 to secure it.

If you do, just make sure you keep an eye on it, yeah?