There had better be some seriously big, bad dinosaurs featured in the new Jurassic Park movie that is due for release in 2015, because they are going to have one of the biggest, baddest automotive stars on the planet roaring back at them.
We are, of course, referring to the mighty Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG 6x6 that has just been revealed as the vehicular star of the fourth instalment in the successful franchise.
Off-road vehicles have always played significant parts in the series (after all, literally nothing beats a good dino/car chase) with the likes of the Ford Explorer and Mercedes-Benz M-Class being (eventually) chewed up by large lizards. And naturally we can never forget the brilliant scene in the first movie where that little frilled lizard thingy outwits Newman from Seinfeld in his Jeep Wrangler.
But the dinos will never have been up against something quite so big, tough, mean and ugly as the mighty 6x6 Merc, which was recently revealed as the automotive star on the next movie's Facebook page.
The Good Oil's inner 12-year-old is almost exploding with excitement at the idea of seeing the AMG 6-wheeler taking on something equally big and angry, but significantly more scaly.
While lucky European Aston Martin owners have been able to experience the joy of driving their V8 or V12-powered RWD monsters on snow and ice in controlled conditions for a number of years now, Aston Martin has now expanded the experience to its American customers by launching its first Aston Martin On Ice programme in the USA.
A number of tracks and courses were carved out of the snow banks in the brilliantly-named Crested Butte, Colorado, where Aston's driving instructors showed customers how to handle their powerful RWD machines on ice and snow.
Image 1 of 6: Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG 6x6 Showcar in Dubai 2013. Photo / Supplied
To be completely honest, The Good Oil really doesn't care much that they have started it
up over there though (unless someone wants to fly us over there to give it a try!), but just
look at that awesome picture! We really just wanted an excuse to run that picture somewhere.
We are the world
*Top Gear has been selected as one of the ''culturally acceptable'' BBC shows that the North Korean Government will consider screening on the heavily-controlled six and a half hours of programming that Korean Central Television airs each evening. The other two are Doctor Who and The Teletubbies.
''Extensive inquiries have been made about what these three shows involve and if they would be suitable for the [North] Korean people,'' a Pyongyang insider told the Independent on Sunday. Obviously not too extensive, however, given Mr Clarkson's propensity for causing offence.
Mind you, that Tinky Winky can be quite politically incorrect at times too ...
*An unidentified woman in Bavaria recently had her day go very, very wrong. She was enjoying the sunny day with the top down in her Mercedes convertible when she came up behind a manure spreader.
Yep, you guessed it, the valve burst and ``the manure sprayed across the road, partly over a train track and on to the convertible Mercedes,'' Juergen Thalmeier, spokesman for the Bavarian police in Rosenheim, told NBC News. Presumably while trying REALLY HARD not to laugh ...
Toyota GT86 performance visualiser. Photo / Supplied
In what has the potential to become the modern version of the ''holiday slides evening'' that The Good Oil was all-too frequently forced to sit through as a child, Toyota is launching its new ''Sports Drive Logger'' onboard telemetry recording device, as an accessory for the 86 sports car.
The logger collects data passing through the vehicle's controller area network (CAN) and also positional data from its dedicated GPS. CAN data can include GPS data, accelerator pedal strokes, steering angles, brake operation signals, shift operation signals, engine speed and vehicle speed.
This data can then be formatted for download to a USB memory stick. But here's where the fun comes into it. Rather than just dry numbers and track overlays, the USB stick can be jammed into a PlayStation 3 and with a handy copy of Gran Turismo 6, can be viewed as a real-time replay.
Yes, you will be able to force others to watch how crap you really are in real life on a game replay now!
A PS3 firmware update will enable the input of driving data recorded at certain racing circuits into GT6's GPS Visualiser to let users replay track runs and race against their own or their friends' data.
Toyota say that users will also be able to compare their own driving data against those of professional drivers.
Unconventional Heroes illustrations by Gerald Bear. Photo / Supplied
Gerald Bear not only has a brilliant name, he also has a wonderfully twisted imagination and an obvious talent for illustration.
Bear wondered ''what if the owners of iconic movie cars had lived in crowded European cities, on a bit of a budget and slightly more concerned about fuel costs?''
So his Unconventional Heroes series of illustrations were born.
If you have ever wondered what it would look like if Batman had to run around in a Citroen 2CV, if K.I.T.T. were created out of a VW Beetle or Doc Brown could only afford to make his time machine out of a Fiat 500 instead of a DeLorean, then wonder no more, as Bear has done all the hard work and created them as wonderful illustrations, along with a whole lot more.
Volvo recently announced the 50th anniversary of its Torslanda plant in Sweden. Nothing particularly special about that - after all, there are car manufacturing plants in Europe and all over the planet that have been churning out vehicles for longer than that.
Usually a plant's birthday is either ignored - because, after all it is just a manufacturing facility and they are usually pretty dull, or even pretty run down and crappy - or a release is made saying just how awesome and modern the plant is.
Volvo did neither of these things and instead released these brilliant pictures of cars being built in the Torslanda plant 50 years ago.
The keen-eyed among you will note the lack of robots, with the factory using the now obsolete ''human'' to assemble the cars. Plus the bloke in the brown coat looks like he is about to order the death of James Bond in an elaborate and easily-escapable fashion after he has just finished explaining to him the details of his evil scheme.
6 WHEELSObviously enough, the G63 AMG 6x6 has six wheels, but less obviously it also has: 5 DIFF LOCKS That's right - five differential locks to lock up all six wheels when needed. 2 PETROL TANKS With a massive combined capacity of 159 litres. 2 AIR TANKS And an on-board compressor so the air pressure of the tyres can be adjusted on the go.
