Ten things we learned this week: 11 December 2015 edition

And no, it isn’t the work of TaxTheRich.

One particularly brave Japanese P1 owner has taken his near-million quid hybrid hypercar down to his cabbage patch, and rather than stop a safe distance away, simply carried on across the fields.

He appears to have a tractor, but then we imagine it falls far short of the Big Mac’s 903bhp.

‘Car Guy’, as he’s known, has past form, having taken his Ferrari F40 camping in Japan’s rocky wilderness.

Reckon it’s nice to see such cars being fearlessly used? Or would you rather they were mollycoddled in a pristine garage?

Yup. Lewis has declared his musical ambitions before, and it appears he’s finally ready to unleash his first R&B choon upon the world.

He’s impressed some big names with it too. “I played it for Pharrell, I played it for Kanye,” he told James Corden on US TV’s The Late Late Show, presumably referring to Messrs Williams and West.

“Hey man, it was nerve wracking for sure,” he continued, with the air of someone born nowhere near Stevenage. “People were coming over and nodding their heads, I was getting positive feedback from them.”

Ten Things is preparing its cassette deck as we speak.

Firm Ten Things fans may remember Land Rover Defender number 2,000,000, which was put together by famous faces. It goes to auction next week, with charities Red Cross and Born Free set to benefit from its sale.

It’s likely to fetch a handsome sum of money, with wealthy car collectors no doubt battling to get hold of it.

Not if Brian Reynolds gets his way, though. A Defender aficionado, he has set up a crowdfunding project to keep this most special of Landies in the UK, living a useful life away from the vacuumed bubble of specialist car collections.

He wants to gather enough cash from Land Rover fans to buy it at auction, and get it in a museum where it can be used, prodded and poked by the nation it’s born from.

Being an auction, though, it’s tricky to know how much to gather. Brian has targeted £100,000, but as we write, just five days remain until the auction and the fund stands at, um, £220. Good luck with it.

Rolls knows how to do opulence. This is undisputed.

Yet it’s nice to have it reinforced every once in a while, and how better to do that than a wood and leather cocktail hamper?

Or, to be more specific, an American Walnut Wood and Natural Grain Leather cocktail hamper? One which takes eight weeks to make?

“On opening, an automatic integrated light illuminates the Hamper in a warm glow, in turn reflecting from the mirrored surfaces to evoke the aesthetic of a luxurious cocktail bar,” says the bumf.

“Should the user wish to present their guests with canapés, two dishes find their place in the lower portion of the Hamper, either side of an ice bucket, whilst discreet drawers hold recipe cards and fine cotton napkins.”

Adding a lemon alcopop to lager, thus creating a Turbo Shandy, constitutes sophisticated cocktailing in the TG office. So we fear Rolls’s efforts are beyond us, particularly as its boozy hamper costs over £26,000. Y’know, like a Golf GTI does…

“I’ve got a great idea!” we imagine Merc’s marketing person said. “Let’s do a deal with Mario Kart to make a video for social media!”

Cue another marketing person misconstruing their request, and doing a deal with Super Mario instead, this video the rather compromised result.

Whether this actually happened or not is a mystery, but it does seem an exceedingly odd mash-up, one not cleared up in the slightest by Nintendo’s website, which excitedly plugs a Mercedes-themed level for the Wii game Super Mario Maker.

“The course, called Mercedes-Benz Jump’n’Drive, arrives today and includes an unlockable Mercedes-Benz GLA costume that shows Mario in the driver’s seat,” it shouts. “Once players unlock it by completing the level, they can add it to their collection of Mystery Mushroom costumes.”

Ten Things worries that it is too old to understand this sentence. Or that we simply need some Mystery Mushrooms to make sense of it.

Scary technology is rarely far away these days, be it robots riding bikes or cars that drive themselves, there’s plenty to keep us anxious.

So how do cars driven purely with brainpower make you feel? Over in China, that very thing has been developed. It’s been two years in the making, and it’s fairly rudimentary, with only shunting forwards and backwards currently possible.

But then autonomous cars never used to be able to pilot themselves around race tracks. And now they’ve got their own race series.

You have been warned…

Renaultsport engineer Thierry Landreau this week told TG that the next generation Megane RS - due around 2017 - will have the “same philosophy” as the current car.

This is good news: the raw, raucous and unashamedly driver-focused Megane (pictured) is currently the best hot hatch you can buy if thrills are what you covet. The sanitisation of its littler Clio sibling had us fearing the same fate for the Megane.

The new car will be five-door only, though, and Landreau wouldn’t be drawn on whether it will use a manual or paddleshift gearbox. “The best situation is to have both,” he told us, suggesting, like the Golf GTI, there’ll be the possibility of either.

Excited?

Not content with a range of cars, bikes, lawnmowers and boats, Honda is now branching out further.

The HondaJet is its first plane, a small business jet that can shuttle half a dozen people around in luxury. Several have been made and it’s been test flying for years, but the plane has now been rubber-stamped by America’s Federal Aviation Administration.

That means the 25 on the production line can roll out and be flown by their owners.

Want some stats? Its 483mph top speed is best in class, each of its engines produces 2,050lb ft of thrust, and of its maximum 4,173kg take off weight, a rather portly 1,000 kilos can be fuel.

In sadder plane news, VW is selling off its Airbus A319. It was one of many announcements made by new CEO Matthias Mueller, as he addressed the world this week about dieselgate, and the brand’s reaction to it.

The A319 - a large passenger jet akin to those you fly off on your holidays in - has been used to shuttle VW group big cheeses between its 12 brands and 100 factories.

“A company the size of Volkswagen needs its own flight service,” said Mueller, “but we don’t need our own Airbus, and that we’re going to sell."

In the wake of a scandal surrounding environment-damaging emissions, it’s probably a sage idea.

Picture credit: Juergen Lehle (albspotter.eu)

The dieselgate victims are piling up: to that plane, add the Skoda Roomster.

The quirky little people carrier has been a curio of the Skoda range for nearly ten years, but a second-generation car is no longer on the way.

Whether this is a direct result of post-emissions scandal penny-pinching is unconfirmed, but it does seem to tally with VW execs declaring all projects not deemed “absolutely necessary” would be wound up.

Skoda-fying a VW Caddy van for a more conventional Roomster MkII appears to fit that bill, to the anguish of bulbously-styled supermini-based people carriers everywhere. RIP, Roomster.