Top Gear’s Top 9: pointless but fun motorised gimmicks

It costs almost £5,000 to spec the ‘Bentley rotating display’, a sort of giant Toblerone in your dash with veneer on one side, three dials on another and a touchscreen set into the final face.

Crewe says the intricate mechanism inside has 40 moving parts and tolerances of less than 0.5mm. 70 per cent of customers spec it!

Folding mirrors aren’t amazing. But the way the DB12’s pirouette up onto their ends when folded is just a needlessly balletic piece of practical theatre.

And remember, those are probably Mercedes motors, so they might work this time next year. 

How do you know your silent Korean EV is ‘on’? Because the jellyfish-slash-discoball in the centre console flips over 180 degrees to reveal the Park / Reverse / Drive controls.

Totally needless, but if you’re going to compete with Tesla’s fart and karaoke modes, you need to have some imagination…

You knew McLaren was gaining a sense of humour when it engineered the whole instrument screen in the 720S to tip over revealing a slender readout showing just speed and revs when in ‘Track’ mode.

Just look how much TG's Paul Horrell is enjoying it here. The time of his life, he's having. Sadly the feature was binned for the revised 750S.

Not often a company flushed with cash, Jaguar still found the pennies to make the dashboard vents of the crucial XF saloon rotate into view when the ignition was activated.

For the second-gen XF, only the outermost vents span round for your titillation. Then it was facelifted, and boring ‘stationary’ vents came instead. Boo. 

Denmark’s 6.6-litre quad-turbo V12 hypercar is supposedly good for 280mph.

But you won’t ever see that. Not because there are few runways long enough to try it on, but because you’ll be too busy playing with the motorised flip-over speedo which conceals a hidden Apple CarPlay-compatible infotainment readout on its reverse face. 

Clearly worried people would revolt at the prospect of a Prancing SUV, Ferrari kitted it out with a fan speed / temperature dial which whirrs upwards from a flush position within the dash when you touch it.

Utterly, unjustifiably pointless? Yes. But isn’t that what supercars (of all shapes and sizes) are all about?

As standard, Porsche sells you a Taycan with a charging socket flap you push to pop open.

Or if you detest manual labour, for a princely £486 you can have a flap that electronically wooshes up inside the bodywork while you stroke the touch-sensitive trim that activates it. 

Woking was so obsessed about eking out a 250mph v-max on its three-seater streamliner, it ditched door mirrors and fitted cameras instead. Cameras which, in Velocity mode, scuttle into the bodywork to help the car go even faster.

“Priorities, officer – never saw you behind me as I was attempting 400kph.”