Ten things we learned this week: 9 June 2017 edition

And it’s set in his most memorable pose. Yep, if you still haven’t got over ‘Places Alonso Would Rather Be’ – and who has – then you can re-enact your favourite poses and even make new ones with this utterly brilliant toy.

Modelled perfectly on Alonso’s sunbathing pose, after McLaren-Honda’s disastrous practice and qualifying in the 2015 Brazil Grand Prix gave him a bit of free time, it even includes his fold-chair. It’s magnificent.

The price? An un-toy-like £97. But the fun it can bring to your life really will be priceless.

Use Twitter and you’ll be aware there’s a leading American figure whose mutterings must be followed. No, not him, but Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla.

As well as endlessly teasing new models and showing us crazy car tunnels, he imparts wisdom surrounding his Tesla and The Boring Company endeavours.

“Few people know that we started Tesla when GM forcibly recalled all electric cars from customers in 2003 & then crushed them in a junkyard,” he tweeted this week.

Those cars were examples of the EV1 (pictured above), an early foray into electric vehicles that went down hugely well with its select band of customers. But when GM concluded the whole electric thing was a bit niche and unprofitable (back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at least) the cars were sent to the crusher.

Sad, but if it hadn’t happened, it appears we wouldn’t have electric saloons and SUVs that are as fast as supercars…

What could possibly go wrong? Seat’s SUV onslaught continues with a big seven-seat model that launches in 2018. It will sit above the Seat Ateca (pictured above) and upcoming Seat Arona. But it is – as yet – unnamed.

Which is where you step in. Head into the wild and wonderful world of social media, armed with the hashtag #SeatSeekingName, and you can help the Spanish company decide what to christen its largest crossover yet.

To avoid any Boaty McBoatface incidents, there are rules. The name must match Seat’s brand values, and also tie in with ‘Spanish geography’, as per its usual naming structure. Boooo.

A quick look on Twitter proves you’re all being very sensible, too; ‘Seville’, ‘Gran Canaria’ and ‘Aragon’ are among the suggestions. There is one shout for ‘Seat Covfefe’, though…  

Stifle that yawn, for this is motoring business news that’s interesting. Honest. Jost Capito has one of the best CVs in the business – he launched the original Focus RS and orchestrated VW’s incredibly dominant World Rally programme, among many other things – and so his moves around the industry are worth following.

In 2016 he left VW, after three world consecutive titles in WRC, and the company on its way to a fourth. He moved to McLaren to be CEO and oversee its F1 programme. But after less than a year in the job, he’s repacking his desk and going back to VW to head up its R performance division.

Which is good news for everyone, surely. With his track record, how exciting could the next Golf R be? And we suspect he’ll want to see more R models alongside it, too. Field your suggestions for him below.

Car sales in the UK in May have proved interesting for many reasons. Firstly, because they’re down significantly. A total of 186,265 new cars found homes in May 2017, down over 17,000 on May 2016.

That’s a drop of over eight per cent, with diesels essentially to blame. Diesel sales have fallen 20 per cent year-on-year, while petrol sales rose a little and hybrids and EVs went up by a massive 46 per cent.

The result? Petrol is the dominant fuel in the UK market, with over 50 per cent of new cars sold last month powered by that most traditional of fuels. Whether it’s #dieselgate to blame we can’t say, though; VW’s global sales rose rather nicely last month…

Staying on sales figures, the 8,000^th Lamborghini Huracan has rolled off the Sant’Agata production line. It was a grey Spyder, and it’s destined for the UK.

Alright, so 8,000 probably doesn’t sound very many. But this is a supercar, don’t forget. And the Huracan has hit the figure in three years, where the Aventador took nearly five years to reach the 5,000 figure. The littler Lambo is the ‘volume’ seller, then…

There’s now the Performante version to aid sales figures further, too. See its controversial lap record at the Nürburgring here…

“I was feeling solid gold today when I drove in for work,” explained actor, singer and comedian Jamie Foxx via the medium of Instagram. That’s because his car is solid gold. Well, it’s painted gold, anyway.

Perhaps feeling pained that his Veyron is now outshone by Bugatti’s new Chiron, Foxx has given his previously black’n’blue Bug a far glitzier lick of paint. It seems all but the tyres, grille and glass are all gold. Probably for the best given their intended functions.

More gold news, and there appears to be a fine correlation between Great Britain’s gold medalists and motorsport prowess. You know all too well what a hand Chris Hoy is; now Amy Williams, gold medalist with the skeleton, has got her race licence and is ready to go. Williams has past form, having been a co-driver at Rally GB a few times.

She will compete in a celebrity race at Silverstone Classic in an old Austin, alongside other famous faces which include another four gold medalists – cyclist Jason Kenny and rowers Mark Hunter, Greg Searle and Jonny Searle.

Given they’re all so used to winning, though, it’s going to be difficult to explain only one of them can actually take the chequered flag.

This week, we drove the Volkswagen Arteon for the first time. It is an impossibly good looking saloon car that wants to take the fight to Audi, BMW and Mercedes.

But regular Ten Things readers will know that while sports saloons are good, sports estates are the best. And so friendly renderer X-Tomi Design has shown us just how an Arteon estate could look. Good, we think you’ll agree.

VW insiders have suggested the estate is being considered, too. Let’s hope they see X-Tomi’s efforts.

‘Medical robots’ is a mildly terrifying phrase to introduce to you as the weekend hones in, yet we feel, off the back of a Porsche survey, it’s one we must discuss.

For it transpires that “three out of four people in Germany would have no objection to being operated on by a robot instead of a surgeon at hospitals”, to directly quote the GT3 RS maker’s survey. Nope, we don’t see the link either.

A third of those surveyed were willing to be operated on by the ‘bots seemingly regardless of whether the risk of operation would be lower than at the hands of a fleshy human. Over half of all correspondents reckon robots are up to the job of caregiving for the infirm and elderly, too.

“Within three to five years, digitisation will have reached a point where robots could assume a wide range of tasks in medicine and caregiving,” says the superbly named Dr. Roman Hipp, a partner at Porsche Consulting.

Scared much?