Donkey eats McLaren
Goats are most commonly considered the garburators of the animal kingdom, but your average donkey isn’t all that discerning either. Mostly, they enjoy grass, apples, and the occasional carrot.
Or, in this case, a German man’s carrot-coloured McLaren 650S Spider. Having parked next to a paddock, Markus Zahn of Geissen returned to his car, got in, and noticed a set of ears poking up in the rearview. Then he heard a crunch.
The big-Mac-loving donkey, named Vitus, managed to do some $30,000 worth of damage to the 650S, which the donkey’s owner had to pay for. In my opinion, if you park your root-vegetable-coloured supercar next to a farm, you take your chances.
BMW and Mini to offer in-car Amazon Alexa
Let’s not sugar-coat things: here’s the worst idea yet. Having brought gesture controls to their cars, BMW seems bound and determined to make things ever more complicated by partnering up with Amazon. Yes, you’ll soon be able to order stuff from your car while you’re driving home.
Picture a world of dull-grey skies and brightly lit towers, the roads crammed with traffic. Clouds of drones flit through the air, like flocks of starlings. Ninety per cent of the traffic on the road is cardboard recycling trucks crammed with single-use boxes. Miserable peons fidget in traffic, incapable of resisting the impulse to purchase again and again. In a building that towers high above all others, Jeff Bezos chuckles in his exoskeleton, made immortal by feeding tubes filled with re-animated sabre-tooth tiger blood.
Or, you know, we could actually pay attention to driving, maybe listen to the radio or something.
Nissan creates sweat-detecting seats
Meanwhile, in gross news, Nissan has teamed up with a Dutch company called Droog to create materials that can detect whether drivers have become dehydrated. The material, called SOAK, turns yellow when it detects the sweat of a dehydrated person, and blue when the sweat indicates you’ve been getting enough fluids.
Let’s just all take a moment to remember the last time we grasped the steering wheel of a rental car in our bare hands, and then all rush to the bathroom to scrub like a germaphobe. Ew. Ew. Ew.
On one hand, maybe helping people understand when they need
to grab a sip of water isn’t a bad idea. Dehydration can sap your concentration.
On the other hand, this sort of thing means we are probably three to five years away from someone building a seat that will detect if you’ve farted in it. Emissions controls? It’s the end of he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it.
brendanmcaleer@gmail.com
