Around the tracks: An angry neighbour’s exhaust stunt, a BMW X5 with a massive grille, and Bentley furniture

When we’re not creating it ourselves, the CarAdvice team spends a lot of time finding and consuming motoring content from all over the world.

Here’s a handful of the photos, articles, videos or social media posts that most caught our eye last week. Some of them are brand new, others have been online for a while.

Enjoy them – just not too much, okay?

It seems some people are not as fond of throaty exhaust notes as others. US man Aaron Robinson learned this the hard way when one of his fed-up neighbours filled the exhaust pipes of his Ford Mustang with expanding foam.

Robinson shared a snap of the offending exhaust on his Facebook, along with the accompanying note from the anonymous disgruntled neighbour, which read: “I finally found you! You want our attention, you don’t want our attention. You have 14 days to fix the mufflers or put the stock [exhaust] back on.

"Don’t egg us on, you will only regret it. We encourage you to call the police, install video [cameras], nothing will work ... Fix your muffler!”

You can read the full story on Driven NZ here.

The increasing size of BMW's signature kidney grille on upcoming models like the 2021 4 Series has been the subject of plenty design debates, but is it possible we could see it grow even bigger in the future?

Possibly, yes. YouTube design account The Sketch Monkey has previewed what a possible next-gen X5 could look like if it featured a grille proportionate to the one on the 4 Series.

He makes a convincing case that this huge grille could be a mainstay across all incoming BMW models – watch his explanation below and decide for yourself whether this toothy X5 rendering is too much, or not enough,

This week, Bentley reminded us all it also makes furniture by releasing a new homeware range called the Newent Collection.

The collection includes a couch, chair, armchair and bed, all of which can be finished in Bentley's signature leather and veneer options, with choices echoing Bentley's automotive offerings and featuring names like "Burr Walnut" or "Smoked Liquidambar".

To the untrained eye, this collection may look like, well, just your average furniture with a Bentley logo whacked on it, but according to the British marque, every piece of Bentley furniture "is individually finished by hand and fuses traditional craftsmanship with new technology".

Unsurprisingly, these pieces don't exactly boast IKEA-adjacent price tags, either. The couch is priced at $14,710 plus on-road co... oh wait, never mind. Just $14,710. The most affordable piece is the chair, which costs $4230.

Car sounds can be so mundane. Those boring bell noises, the monotonous beeping – why can't we have some fun with it?

We already know you can modify Tesla cars to make fart noises, but what about the rest of us non-Tesla-owning folk? Don't we deserve some fun too?

Well, one man decided he wasn't going to put up with dull car noises any more, modifying his wife's 2015 Subaru Impreza to play the hit 1980s song Africa by Toto whenever she leaves her keys in the ignition by accident. (Stevo's fave music trivia: Toto frontman Joseph Williams is the son of film score composer John Williams, perhaps best known for his work on the Star Wars films.)

He detailed the process in an Imgur thread, explaining how he created and installed his own audio device in the car and then loaded it with SD cards featuring his wife's favourite songs. You can watch the process – and listen to the hilarious result – in the video below!

Few can resist the guilty allure of a story about supercar owners behaving badly – team CarAdvice included.

This week (because there's almost one a week) an incident in London caught our eye, involving a Ferrari 488 GTB that collided with one of the city's iconic double-decker buses.

Images of the aftermath of the incident, which occurred near Trafalgar Square, were posted to social media, with eyewitnesses reporting no one was harmed in the crash.

The car is allegedly linked to British rapper Swarmz, but it's unclear whether he was driving at the time of the incident.

Swarmz later took to Instagram and wrote a caption seemingly referring to the crash by that read: "Wasn’t Me ??‍♂️?? #skrskr"

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