Ten Things We Learned This Week: 14 August 2015 edition

Last month, Tesla announced a nifty referral scheme, whereby you could win a shiny new Model X – the firm’s all-electric, seven-seat SUV-crossover thing due to arrive early next year – by convincing 10 people to buy a Model S.

Review: Tesla Model S P85 D

And Norwegian gent Bjorn Nyland has just done exactly that. As the first official European winner of the referral prize, it was announced this week that Nyland would receive a ‘Founder’s Edition’ Model X with $25,000 of options.

How did he manage to convince ten mates to blow £60-odd grand apiece on an all-electric saloon? Well, Nyland isn’t your average Scandinavian Tesla enthusiast.

In fact, he’s been dubbed ‘Norway’s most influential Tesla owner’: in 2013, Nyland documented his exploits driving 233 miles on a single charge in sub-zero temperatures, and has a substantial YouTube following.

Cheating? Not exactly. But it does give Ten Things an idea: if all we TopGear.commers club together, can we generate some massive Tesla pyramid referral scheme through which every one of us ends with a free Model X? Where’s Mr Ponzi when you need him?

If you have a pair of spouses, and don’t want the awkward situation of showing favouritism by shoving one partner in the back of your car while the other sits up front, there’s only one hypercar for you: the McLaren F1.

With the driver sitting front-and-centre, and a seat recessed on either side, it’s the perfect car for the fair-minded bigamist.

Problem is, McLaren F1s are a trifle expensive nowadays. As in several-million-quid of expensive.

Luckily there’s a cheaper solution, and it’s coming up for auction in the USA. This is the ‘Centro 911’, a 2008 997-gen Carrera S Coupe with seating for three.

Painstakingly customised by Trinity Motorsports Group, this is no half-baked bodge job: not only have all the controls been moved to the centre of the car, but the driver’s seat even slides to the left to make it easier for the driver to get in and out.

The Centro 911 goes under the hammer at Mecum’s Monterey auction this weekend, and is expected to fetch between £54,000 and £74,000. Monogamists need not apply.

Yep, ten million pounds, every day of the working week. As our man Paul Horrell revealed, Merc’s R&D budget now stands at £2.1 billion annually. That’s more than the GDP of Sierra Leone. That’s a lot of cash.

But where does it all go? Reducing CO2, mostly. (Though presumably there’s also a significant outlay on rubber bands to fire at arch-rival BMW when the Munich firm comes up with concepts like the stunning 3.0 CSL Hommage racer, too.)

Click here to find out how Merc spends all that cash…

Ten Things yields to no one in its adoration of the automobile, but must concede it suffers one tiny flaw: you cannot, sadly, squeeze even the smallest of cars into a standard backpack.

Enter Japanese engineer Kuniako Saito and his ‘WalkCar’ transporter, an electric skateboard-contraption no bigger than a laptop.

Powered by lithium-ion batteries, the WalkCar weighs around 2kg and will run for up to 7.4 miles on a single charge. It can reach a maximum speed of 6mph, and Saito claims it’s powerful enough even to push a wheelchair.

Its inventor is funding the project on crowd-funding website Kickstarter, with customers expected to receive their WalkCars early next year. Prices are pegged at around £500.

This, or Lexus’s hoverboard?

You likely heard, this week, of Google’s grand restructure, the American giant rebranding its parent company as Alphabet.

But it seems Google might not have done its, um, Googling. Turns out BMW owns a fleet service company with the same name, and indeed the domain name Alphabet.com.

And it’s not planning on giving it up without a fight. A BMW spokesperson told the New York Times that Alphabet remained a central part of the BMW business, and that the domain wouldn’t be sold at any price.

Doubtless Google/Alphabet’s planned venture into self-driving cars hasn’t done much to smooth the waters between the two companies.

Read more: BMW’s new M4 GTS concept

BMW, Ten Things is not one to dish business advice, but… have you seen the size of Google’s chequebook? Drop the ‘not selling at any price’ schtick and instead make them a reasonable offer. We’ll give you Alphabet.com if you give us, say, THE REST OF THE INTERNET…

It seems bonkers dashcam footage is no longer the sole preserve of the Russians. A terrifying clip has emerged from Tainan, Taiwan, showing a small car being lifted up and flung down the road by a vicious local tornado.

Hit this link to watch the clip – and keep an eye out around the eight-second mark for the flying hatchback on the right-hand side of shot.

No injuries were reported in the tornado. Still, it’s a sobering reminder: don’t mess with nature. Unless you’re in, say, a Marauder…

West Midlands Ambulance Service was this week called to the aid of a pensioner who had plunged his car into a Warwickshire lake.

When they arrived, they found the 80-something-year-old gent was indeed in grave peril, his car almost entirely submerged. But the ambulancemen discovered that, far from panicking, the doughty pensioner was instead chilling out in the driver’s seat, smoking a pipe and chatting to the farmer while awaiting rescue.

“The man had gone to the farm to fish in its lake,” said an ambulance service spokeman. “After his car ended up in the water, he smoked his pipe and chatted to the farmer who went into the lake in his waders. Firefighters carried him from his car back onto land.”

Remember, all, smoking’s bad for you. As, admittedly, is driving your car into the middle of a lake.

Photo: West Midlands Ambulance Service

North Yorkshire police this week caught a drink-driver after spotting the offender trying to inflate his car’s tyres with a petrol station’s vacuum cleaner.

Concerned onlookers called the rozzers after spotting the man acting strangely at a Scarborough filling station. After the vacuum cleaner inexplicably failed to inflate his tyres, the sozzled driver then attempted to fill them… using the forecourt water line.

The man was found to be almost twice the legal limit, and will appear before magistrates later this month. Don’t drink and drive, kids.

The 1995 Hungarian Grand Prix witnessed arguably the most absurd incident in F1’s long and glorious history of absurd incidents, and the crowning moment of Taki Inoue’s short race career.

If you need reminding, here’s how it went. The hapless Japanese racer’s Footwork engine caught fire midway through the race, so Taki stopped at the side of the track, gesturing at the fire marshalls to dash over and extinguish his car. With the dawdling marshalls struggling to grasp the urgency of the situation, Inoue jumped from his car and legged it to the barriers, seizing an extinguisher.

But as he turned back to his Footwork, Taki failed to spot the safety car careering over the grass at him. It clattered into the back of his legs. Taki was thrown over the bonnet before tottering back to his feet, still gamely clinging to the extinguisher.

Painful? No doubt. Funny? Unquestionably. As this week marks the 20th anniversary of Taki’s tumble, hit these words to read about the time we met the man himself for a quiet pint. Or six…

Earlier this week, our man Ollie Marriage got a first drive in the Vantage GT12, Aston’s 595bhp, V12 answer to the Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

It’s fair to say he rather enjoyed the experience. As did his ears.

“It’s chuffing loud. I mean REALLY chuffing loud,” eulogised our follicularly impaired road-tester. “Off the scale, three counties away loud.

“And the noise is glorious, a proper soaring, cackling, last-night-of-the-proms V12 that makes an F-Type sound like a damp fart in the Albert Hall…”

Click here to read Ollie’s full verdict on the GT12, including a very quick clip of the V12 doing its last-night-of-the-proms thing...