Your favourite TopGear.com stories of 2012

Oooh, isn't it nice! It's the new Viper, and you were rather fond it. Well, you were fond of looking at pictures of it - our gallery was the 9th most clicked-on story this year.

Hardly surprising - it looks incredible, and a subtle departure from the chicken-n-waffles hooligan it replaces. Inside, the cow peelings are soft and sumptuous, the stereo is by Harman Kardon, the abundance of screens are TFT, and there's no wibbly stitching. This is something you could enjoy every day, not just when you fancy the inimitable thrill of nearly dying in a car crash.

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Mondeo, eh? You surprise us, Internet. Still, this is a very important car for Ford - it's one of a new swathe of World Cars (which is the manufacturer's drive to stop building lots of models that cater for local tastes, and build one really, really good model for the whole world).

The Americans'll be getting it first (albeit with a Fusion badge), but we have to wait till the middle of next year. Shame, ‘cause it looks pretty darn tootin'.

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If you're of a certain vintage, you'll remember the unbridled joy attached to turning a small piece of plastic shaped like a car into a small piece of plastic shaped like a robot. But fumbling around awkwardly seems to have lent the whole enterprise a sense of frustration for this bloke, who made his own, fully automated Transformer that steers, drives and reverses as well as walks and gesticulates. No wonder this is our eighth most viewed story.

If you've not already seen it, watch the video. It's incredible. And we promise there isn't a Citroen C4 in sight.

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The Juke-R story was born for the internet - you could watch, mouth agape, as Nissan gradually melded one of its ferocious GT-Rs with a slightly camp Juke, thus creating the moist superfluous, and splendidly pointless vehicle in the known universe. Then the company confounded us all and announced it'll actually start building them.

But before we knew they were getting produced, we thought we'd get some wheel time in one. And found ourselves street racing with a Lambo, Ferrari and Mercedes...

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Even if you thought The Dark Knight Rises largely involved a man rolling around on the floor clutching his back like an extended, big-budget version of that hilarious viral video where a German jumps into/onto a frozen pond, you've got to admit that Batman's got pretty tidy wheels.

But The Tumbler isn't mere CGI flimflam - Oscar-winning special effects maestro, Chris Corbould, built a running, driving V8-powered Batmobile, and we hopped in for a very special hotride.

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There's something deeply inconspicuous about a bright yellow Lamborghini Gallardo. Something that says look at me, and my massive bank balance. Which, if we're honest, suggests that the driver's a bit of a clot.

So it's with some delight that a man not only witnessed, but captured on film a bloke having a bit of an accident with (and probably in) his one. Nobody was hurt and the damage wasn't major, so it's OK to laugh. Which you did. A lot of you...

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If our stats are anything to go by, pictures of supercars produce sensual, mouse-click-inducing pheromones that leak out of computer screens. Especially if they're pictures of a Ferrari. Especially if it's new, and lays claim to being the fastest Ferrari ever. Even more especially if it's taken onto the historic banked circuit at Monza.

Which is precisely why this story's nudged into the top five most viewed on TopGear.com in 2012.

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Back in March, we spotted that a certain caped crusader had been pulled over by the rozzers (it was actually a benevolent Gallardo owner, who'd dressed up like Batman to visit poorly children at Georgetown University Hospital).

He was sparred a ticket, and became a viral sensation in the process.

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For three exhausting years, Toyota drip-fed us with news, concepts, stats and fiendishly unrevealing pictures of its GT86, but in January it finally arrived. And we managed to get one of the first drives, which tickled your pickle in a big way... Jeremy was just as keen, naming it his car of the year. 

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Even though we didn't get a wink of sleep at the epic Dubai 24 hours, we found a few minutes to drop into a little second-hand car showroom. And by little second-hand car showroom, we mean enormous cave of AWESOME. It's called Al Ain Class motors, and it's probably the best supercar dealership... in the world.

This is number one, people. Click through to find out why. You won't be disappointed.