Long-Term Car Updates

It’s been possibly a year since I’ve personally driven my own Honda S2000. My brother, sub-editor Marouf, gets to enjoy it more as a runabout on occassion, keeping the mechanicals greased. It’s the cost of being busy building a business and owning three other more practical child-friendly cars and having a string of test cars that we have to drive as part of our jobs. But the other day, I finally found time to go for a round. Damn, I had forgotten how this thing drives.

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I was a little nervous about ordering a car I’d never seen in person especially since I had seen the meek-looking normal 1-Series at the dealership and it didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence. Any doubts I had were dispelled as soon as I laid eyes on my car at the dealership upon its arrival. With the M Sport kit, the M135i looks far more aggressive and purposeful than the vanilla 1 series. The M Sport front bumper especially adds a lot of presence (and a bit of menace) to the car. I really love the stance of the 1-Series with its long hood giving a laid back stance courtesy of the longitudinal engine,

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We always knew our Toyota FJ Cruiser would become sought-after one day, just like the original FJ40 it gets its name from. What we didn’t know was that it’d happen so soon.

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Our Jaguar XK went in for its annual service the other day. We generally take our car in only once a year because we do maybe 4,000 km per year with this car, and modern synthetic oils can last that long without any ill effects, despite what your dealer or your great-granddad told you. Here’s an idea of what the regular cost of running a Jaguar XK looks like.

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Everyone in the DriveArabia family likes Alfa Romeos until sarcasm kicks in. So, when our buddy was planning to leave the country for good, all we cared about was his car — a 2003 Alfa Romeo 156 V6 with 250,000 km on the clock. As mentioned by him, we knew the car had some “minor” ongoing issues and our plan was to keep the car for a while before we sell it off. It was registered under the Editor-in-Chief’s name, as he wanted a taste of Alfa ownership as well. On the day he was leaving, I dropped him off at the airport and took over this car.

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The rainy season is finally upon us in Dubai, if you can call it a season. It hardly rains around here, but when it does, it pours and brings parts of the city to a standstill. With mini-floods building up on dipped roads and certain underpasses, it’s one of those times when we really appreciate our Range Rover.

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It was time to get some new tyres for our Jaguar XK, since the old ones had “expired” as per the RTA. Considering it’s always a hassle to go get tyres changed, we decided to try shopping for tyres online, on the only local tyre site we’d heard of in Dubai.

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So it has been a year and 30,000 km since we bought our Renault Megane. Buying this car was an experiment, as it is the least noticed and least trusted car by the general public. Contrary to popular belief though, the car has chugged along rather well, probably due to the fact that it is almost purely a Nissan underneath, from almost every nut and bolt, right up to the engine and transmission. It may not have exceeded our expectations, but it has never let us down either. For the price paid, we actually do not have any complaints.

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One of the reasons people buy Toyotas in the UAE, aside from resale value, is that they’re supposedly cheap to maintain. We finally got to put that theory to the test when we went in for dealer service at 10,000 km.

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The Range Rover we had originally intended to keep for only two years is now going to complete almost three years with us in a few months, beyond which we will probably continue to keep it for a while longer, as there’s nothing else that’s quite as appealing at the moment, aside from another Range Rover. Of course, that means keeping up with the maintenance on a decade-old car.

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