Ten things we learned this week: 13 May 2016 edition

We don’t quite know what to make of this. Renault has been using cute little French Bulldogs to advertise its Renaultsport hot hatchbacks for a little while now, but its latest Facebook video doesn’t immediately make a lot of sense.

The ingredients are all good: the Megane RS is one of the best hot hatches on sale, and Frenchies are among the more adorable dogs. As a pairing, they’re excellent. We just can’t get our poor little heads around quite what point Renault is trying to make. And it rather makes us worry about quite how one goes about making a dog yellow.

Sinkholes are back! And they’re once again trying to ingest our cars into the Earth’s innards. The latest one has opened its aggressive jaws in Charlton, south London. Heavy rain pounded the road and eventually led to the tarmac ripping wide open, taking half a Vauxhall Zafira with it.

Fortuitously, the car ended up resting on a pipe beneath the surface, and so suffered minimal damage. It has been lifted out by a crane, and its owner has breathed a sigh of relief.

"In life you have good days and bad days,” Ghazi Hassan told the BBC. “This morning wasn't a good day. But I'm thankful me or my family wasn't in the car.”

His brother, meanwhile, who Ghazi was staying with, was considerably more nonchalant about his sibling’s misfortune. “I woke up very surprised,” said Abdul Ahmadzai. “I thought: 'There's nothing I can do' and went back to sleep."

Picture: Helen Jakeways

The world may be going crazy for Teslas, but not everyone is being swept along with it. The Los Angeles Police Department, for instance.

The LAPD has spent a whole year evaluating the Model S, after which it has concluded that worries about the debilitating effects of a power shortage mean electric cars aren’t quite right yet. We’d like to spend a year driving a 762bhp sports saloon just to jump to the kind of conclusion we can make from this desk right now.

It’s not been a complete waste of time, though; the LAPD is keeping EVs on its radar, the Model S holding particular potential for high-speed pursuit work. We can’t imagine there’s a cooler way to begin a car chase than with a Ludicrous mode launch…

Yep. You’ve heard of young driver schemes, the likes of Seat and Mercedes allowing little ‘uns in their cars (on closed tracks, naturally) to whet their appetite for learning to drive, and getting them as prepared as possible to slot straight into the driver’s seat.

Well now, Young Driver is offering 11 to 17 year olds who’ve already had tuition time in a 60bhp Skoda Citigo to upgrade to a 400bhp Bentley Arnage. One with dual controls to keep any ill behaviour in check.

“It’s something we imagine will be a special treat,” says Young Driver’s Kim Stanton, “and that someone who has had a couple of Young Driver lessons before might like to try to get a new perspective on how different cars handle.”

In the case of Arnage, quite tyre-smokingly, actually…

Some things that happen in the world manage to make Ten Things feel old, cynical and a little irrelevant. And Volvo has managed that this week.

It has started drip-feeding information of what’s believed to be its new V40 and XC40 models. Those will be key, key cars for the Swedish company, taking on the Audi A3 and Q3 and hopefully getting Volvos in the hands of younger people.

Which perhaps explains why said drip-feeding has occurred on something called ‘Snapchat’, the modern day equivalent of Pogs and Tamagotchis that the yoof seems so enraptured by.

All that’s been Snapped so far (we don’t know the lingo, but let’s go with that) is a couple of pictures of the new car’s lights, with plenty of emojis and bants to caption them. It all makes us a bit sad. We’re off to console ourselves with a high-octane game of Snake II.

The world of Formula 1 doesn’t just exist for viewer titillation. A good job, perhaps, given its inconsistency when it comes to providing entertainment.

Nope, F1 also exists to further technology. And not just in cars. This week, Williams has been assisting the neonatal staff from University Hospital of Wales to make baby deliveries as efficient as pit stops.

So the hospital is streamlining its trolleys, mapping out its floors and introducing new hand signals to make urgent healthcare of new born babies more accomplished.

However magic its seats, we don't imagine Beth Newell's Honda Jazz could have accomodated a pit crew. But nevertheless, she used it as her own mobile delivery room this week.

“Can I have a free car?” she tweeted after giving birth to her baby daughter in the back of her Honda Fit, the car we call Jazz on our shores. “It is a mess” was her succinct reason why.

Honda didn’t quite do that, but it did send her a loan car while it cleaned up hers, and sent nappies for the freshly born human. It’s a small price for the publicity she’s given the Jazz: who knew anyone under the age of 70 actually owned one?

Even those without a sporting persuasion can’t fail to have noticed that a team called Leicester have beaten the odds to win the Premier League.

Cue plenty of overreaction – talk of a Hollywood film on their triumph – and much scraping of the barrel to find opportunities to make money from the club’s unexpected success.

Like the man selling a car once owned by Jamie Vardy (he did some of Leicester’s best ball kicking this year). It’s a C63 AMG which he drove back when his team were a bit rubbish, and it apparently comes with football stadia still in its satnav destinations and a ‘dance album’ which Vardy managed to leave behind in the CD player.

The price for this tenuous souvenir? £38,500, which is around ten per cent more than other 2013-vintage C63 coupes are currently advertised for. You’ll have to be a very keen Fox to pay that.

Subarus are well known for their flat-four throb, the distinctive noise made by their unconventional engine layout. And the Boxer (so called because of the way the opposing cylinders appear to punch) is 50 years old, 16 million cars so equipped in that time.

The benefits are that it can sit lower in the car, dropping the centre of gravity. The first Subaru flat-four was a little saloon called the 1000 (pictured), but it’s the quick versions of the Impreza which have really given the engine its cult status.

Earlier today, news broke that Brad Pitt – star of Snatch, Seven and that episode of Friends you’ve seen a hundred times on repeat – will start the 24 Hours of Le Mans next month.

Before you get ahead of yourself, no, he isn’t racing: the 52-year-old will do the honours of waving the green flag to signal the start of the race at Circuit de La Sarthe.

And in tribute to the event’s famous guest, for this year only tyre changes, driver swaps and refuelling will be referred to as ‘Pitt-stops’. We may have made that up.