Around the tracks: Cars that look like celebrities, and dubious vehicle accessories

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?

Not only is this New York Times article a beautiful piece of writing, it's also a brilliant, highly moving portrait of what it's like to be black in America, through the lens of something we're all familiar with: cars.

"Few relationships in America are as complex as the Black man and his automobile," Ron Stodghill, writer and professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, writes in his piece.

"When you’re Black in America you also, paradoxically, learn to distrust, fear even, that lovely machine preening in your driveway. You learn the hard way the perils of hitting the road — that those beckoning back streets, city boulevards and wide-open highways are not always routes of thrilling adventure and escape, as advertised, but rather places where Black people all too often die, or greatly suffer at the hands of racist whites."

Mr Stodghill explains how motoring and racial violence have been intertwined since the days of the 'Green Book' guide to avoiding white violence while travelling the roads of 1960s America to today, where black people are the targets of police brutality at traffic stops.

He recounts how even his choice of car – a Dodge Ram pickup – is a defense mechanism against the prejudice that still exists in the country (and around the world): "I bought the pickup about a year ago partly for the extra cargo space, but also to avoid drawing the attention of Missouri police. In a region where pickup trucks are status quo, the Ram, I suppose, is my rather sad attempt at vehicular camouflage."

Essential reading for everyone, regardless of whether you're a car enthusiast or not. Full article here.

It all started with a tweet about an old Volvo XC70 strongly resembling Hollywood comedian Nick Kroll and then things devolved from there.

The initial poster, who was retweeted by Kroll himself, made the point the wagon has a similar facial arrangement to the Big Mouth actor and – they have a point.

That, of course, sparked a Twitter thread about other cars that share similarities with celebrities. Below, some of our favourites.

We see so many Mercedes-AMG G-Class cars in pop culture, on Instagram or on the streets of affluent suburbs that it can be easy to forget what they were originally designed to do: be an almost indestructible off-roader.

Thankfully, he's a reminder in the form of an engrossing Instagram video showing a G-wagen tackling an incredibly steep hill...

We've written about our disdain for fake car sounds and faux exhaust tips and vents on cars before, so a recent Tik Tok video of another questionable new car add-on had a few of us turning up our noses.

Tik Tok user lifequeen6363 uses the video-sharing social media platform to advertise their wares, which include all of the aforementioned fake bits and more.

One of the products they're spruiking is a set of stick-on exhaust tips that would have old-school petrolheads clutching at their pearls in horror.

Is this some budget-friendly ingenuity, or a travesty? You decide.

Leave it to an Australian driver to go viral on Reddit for having a raunchy number plate.

A registration number believed to belong to a Western Australian resident grabbed headlines for the risqué messages it bears when read in a reverse mirror.

We won't embed it into this article, we'll merely leave the link here and warn you – it is absolutely not safe for work.

MORE: Around the tracks articles