Ringo Starr's old Mercedes is up for sale and you should buy it immediately
Here is a Mercedes-Benz S-Class that's been graced by magic. Nope, we're not talking about that extraordinarily large 6.9-litre V8 under the bonnet, but one of its previous owners - none other than a man named Ringo Starr.
Mr Starr apparently used to be in a mildly successful popular music group called The Beatles, and certainly liked his Mercs fast and powerful. This SEL is based on the LWB S-Class, built in 1981, and gets everything you would imagine from an S-Class of this era.
In 2006 it was even sent back to Mercedes in Germany for a full restoration costing a cool 20 grand or so, and is being offered up for sale for a not inconsiderable £39,995.
It appears Spyker has gone bankrupt
Seems Dutch supercar manufacturer Spyker has officially not got any money left to build its Dutch supercars. In a statement released earlier this week, it was confirmed the company had gone bankrupt, but CEO Victor Muller is still adamant he can turn things around.
"I would like to make clear that as far as I am concerned, 'this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning,' to quote Winston Churchill," he said.
Fingers crossed they'll be back on their feet soon.
Lewis Hamilton is SPOTY
The BBC's Sports Personality of the Year contest is as much a signifier that Christmas is coming as copious mince pie consumption and advent calendar chocolates.
And it's given us an extra warm and fuzzy feeling this year, with F1 champ Lewis taking the title. And by considerable margin; 209,920 viewers picked up the phone and voted for Hamilton, with second place Rory McIlroy - he apparently does impressive things with golf sticks - garnering 123,745 votes.
Naturally, Lewis had his closest partner in crime with him to celebrate with. Nope, not Ms Scherzinger. Roscoe the dog...
New Zealand pensioners don't understand key fobs
A mildly distressing tale emerges from our Antipodean chums in New Zealand, where Mollieanne and Brian Smith - aged 65 and 68 respectively - ended up locked in their brand new Mazda 3 for a dangerously long time.
Or so they thought. See, Mr and Mrs Smith had left the 3's manual and key outside of the car, and somehow ended up locked inside. Assuming the key's location outside of the car meant they were trapped, they spent a whole night inside, trying to smash windows and sounding the horn in vain to attract attention. It was only once they were rescued the Smiths discovered they could have unlocked the car with a button inside.
"It's not a design flaw with the car," Mazda New Zealand General Manager Glenn Harris told The Otago Daily Times. "What we have said to the [dealer] network is, with new technologies, don't forget to show customers how to use them in their entirety [and] how to override them. There is always a manual process to override them."
This isn't how valet parkers should drive
We're far from technophobes here at TG - quite the opposite - but it's always nice to see some vindication for the dizzying amount of new tech being shoehorned into cars.
And vindication comes in no starker form than the footage at this link, an unwitting American's Corvette Stingray showing the benefits of fitting a performance data recorder to your muscle car. Because when you hand your pride and joy over to a valet parker, you never know quite how fast they'll steam through multistorey car parks in it...
The Golf R just got cooler
Staying with performance data recording, VW has this week announced its Race App, showcasing it via our favourite hot hatch of the moment, the supremely talented Golf R.
Costing 299 euros, a LogBox garners a load of data - speed, acceleration, G forces and the like - and then uses Bluetooth to stream it all to an app on your smartphone, recording best lap times for you to benchmark yourself against. This sort of tech isn't new, but it continues to titillate our inner nerds.
The king of Spain has had his Ibiza restored
Well, Seat did it on his behalf, presented King Felipe VI with the car he first owned as an 18-year-old whippersnapper. The picture above shows just how happy that made him. Though somewhat teasingly, after Felipe had a poke around it, Seat snaffled the Ibiza off to its historic cars collection. Given that our royals often roll around in Range Rovers and Astons, we imagine he's not fighting to get it back off them.
Skoda made a million cars this year
Well, a bit more than that. The Czech company surpassed a million annual sales for the first time ever on December 10, when a white Fabia rolled off the production line to a rapturous response. It was promptly donated to a Czech children's charity, so the millionth customer was instead the buyer of the green Octavia vRS pictured above.
Anyone still telling Skoda jokes really is off the pace now.
Tractor Girl has made it to the South Pole
Manon Osservoort - better known as Tractor Girl - has completed her mission to drive a tractor to the South Pole. It's the culmination of a trek that started in her home country Holland five years ago, her final stint following the tracks of Sir Edmund Hillary, who traversed Antarctica in a tractor back in the 1950s.
While a tractor looks like a particularly fine machine to ease the battle against the world's wintriest conditions, progress sounds painstaking, with speeds dropping as low as 0.5mph in the worst of the snow. Top work, Tractor Girl.
Rumours of a new Ford GT are strengthening
Talk of an all-new Ford supercar have made frequent appearances since production of the wonderful GT came to a close in 2006. But they're gathering in strength and consistency at the moment, with some sources suggesting we'll see an all-new supercar, which would transform into a Ford Le Mans entry in 2016 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the GT40's legendary win. We've got everything crossed that all of this happens...