We have been following the rise of Chinese cars in the Middle East with a lot of interest now. The barrage of new brands and models has been ongoing for the past decade now, but all the offerings have been lacklustre in one way or the other. They are getting better with every iteration though. So when we got the new Haval H2 for a test-drive, we were hoping China’s carmakers have finally caught up to the competition.
What do you do when you run out of names for your car-based crossovers? Toyota seems to have found an answer by naming its crossovers after all its hatchbacks and sedans. After the Yaris Cross debuted a month ago, they have laid their hands on another name, revealing the all-new 2021 Toyota Corolla Cross in Thailand.
The Lexus LS, Toyota’s full-size luxury sedan, is still around, lest you forgot about it with the big-nostrilled BMW 7-Series taking up the limelight and the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class around the corner. Lexus has gone ahead and given the 2021 Lexus LS a bit more tech to stay relevant. And yes, it finally gets a touchscreen.
In the Philippines, Toyota has revealed the Yaris with a new face. Known as the Vios there, the design update to the front looks quite familiar to the previous generation Toyota Camry which was sold here.
Revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in 2019, the CX-30 enters a new market niche for Mazda, slotting in between the CX-3 and CX-5.
In the Australian car market, car-based pickup trucks or Utes were quite popular. Some of these vehicles, like the Holden Maloo or the Ford’s FPV F6, took the pickup truck to levels of performance unimaginable for the genre. But taking their place are midsize pickups such as the Ford Ranger and the Toyota Hilux, both of which come with aggressive offroad versions. Now Nissan is thinking about cashing in on the combined opportunity of fast pickup trucks by dropping a V8 under the hood of the Navara, giving birth to a NISMO variant.
SUVs are so popular nowadays that they have all but eliminated market share for almost all other types of passenger vehicles, not least of them minivans. So to update their 2021 Kia Carnival, Kia took inspiration from the very popular “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” meme. The new Carnival minivan has been infused with SUV styling elements to keep its head high in this raging sea of SUVs.
The 2021 Mazda 3 is unique for a hatchback design. While controversial, it does look more premium than it actually is. To match this show with some go, Mazda has decided to drop the long-awaited turbocharged engine inside the engine bay of the 2021 Mazda 3 hatchback and sedan.
Nissan has just introduced the production version of the all-new Nissan Ariya, an electric crossover SUV that we last saw as a concept on our trip to the Tokyo Motor Show late last year.
The third-generation Kia Optima was a design revelation for the boring sedan segment when it was launched in 2011. The fourth-gen followed in 2016, bringing some edgy styling to the table and the once ugly duckling turned into a darn good-looking swan. For its fifth gen, Kia has dropped the Optima name altogether and has launched it as the 2021 Kia K5, which has been its Korean-market name for the past decade.