Feature Stories

The end of the year is near, or possibly even the end of the world, depending on what you believe. It’s been a good year for us, with a 25% increase in visitors, 50% increase in pageviews, and 45% growth in ad revenue compared to 2011, enough to put a Honda S2000 and a Range Rover in our long-term fleet this year! We also started a mobile version in May as well as an Arabic website in December this year, our 8th anniversary, with the help of an ever-expanding team. Before we say goodbye to 2012, we figured you’d want to read some of our greatest original stories of this year that you’ll not find anywhere else,

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It seems like just yesterday when we drove the Isuzu D-Max around a racetrack in Bahrain. In fact, it was just earlier this year. But that was the old model. What we drove this week was the new 2013 model, completely new in almost every possible way. But why would you be interested in a pickup review? Well, we took it around an autocross course as well as offroad.

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Fisker as a carmaker has a bit of a checkered past. The American company was co-founded by a former Danish car designer who penned certain BMW and Aston Martin sports cars a decade ago, and then started peddling rebodied BMW coupes under the Fisker banner back in 2005. In 2008, they came up with a concept electric car so ridiculous that no one thought it’d get any further than the auto-show floor. After missing various deadlines, taking government loans and beating a Tesla lawsuit, the Fisker Karma beat all odds by finally hitting production in the summer of 2011.

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Volkswagen recently held a mega event for media, dealer staff and fleet customers last week at the Yas Marina circuit to celebrate their best ever sales period in the Middle East, witnessing 22% growth for 2012 over last year. The event consisted of an overnight stay at the Yas Viceroy hotel with various activities the next morning, such as track time with the VW Scirocco, drag time with the VW Passat CC, and skid-pad time with the VW Golf GTI. Now, the problem with attending a mega event means that there is a lot of standing around doing nothing,

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While we here in Dubai just witnessed the launch of the first road-legal electric car, the Fisker Karma for Dhs 500,000, and General Motors is still testing their Chevrolet Volt here for ages, poor countries like Bangladesh took the green initiative years ago. What you see here is the main mode of “baby” taxi transportation in my ancestral hometown of Barisal in Bangladesh. It’s built locally. And it’s fully electric.

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As I’m flying over Dubai and Sharjah towards Ras Al Khaimah in a Bell 412 crammed in with 13 other people, I am thinking that helicopter travel isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The flight is noisy, tight and industrial, completely at odds with the “luxury” experience we were supposed to be having. But damn is it quick. We reached our destination in only 20 minutes, landing at the Banyan Tree resort at the northern tip of the Emirates, having enjoyed a great view and not feeling fatigued at all for the 2013 Lexus LS launch event.

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We held our sixth quick meet back before the start of summer. Direct invites went out to our meet regulars while a last-minute announcement about the meet was made in the MyRide forums, so that we could keep it a small affair where everybody gets to talk to everybody. It was again a great afternoon, as our Honda S2000 made its first public appearance, and we brought along a Lexus IS 300C and a Lexus GS 350 so our attendees could take a closer look at them, and even take them for a spin.

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In a move that no one expected, the Fisker Karma just became the first plug-in electric car to officially go on sale in the Middle East. Mitsubishi briefly thought about making an entry here with the i-MiEV, while Chevrolet has a couple of Volts running around Dubai since last year for so-called tests that never seem to end. But the upstart brand Fisker managed to come to market first, with a launch event held in the UAE.

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This one was a long time coming. Sure, everybody else is busy comparing the Toyota 86 to everything from the VW Scirocco to the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. But aside from the Mazda MX-5, there was only one other car that’s similar to the 86 in recent history, and it’s the Honda S2000. It ceased production only 3 years ago, so it is still possible to buy one on the used market. And whadaya know, we actually own one in our fleet. And our car also happens to be one of the lowest-mileage S2000s in the world. This was going to be interesting.

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The most anticipated cars in this region are always the cars that are near the top of the sales charts, and the Nissan Altima happens to be one of those. As the second-best-selling midsize sedan in the Gulf, the 2013 Nissan Altima is going to be all over the streets of Dubai by the end of this year, and with good reason. The new car has improved in all the right ways.

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