It’s not everyday that I get a call to come down for a press event in Abu Dhabi, a couple of hours before the actual event. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, but this time it was a chance to drive, briefly, cars from the Rolls Royce range. The BMW-owned firm had two Ghosts and one Phantom lined up for a limited excursion around the streets of Abu Dhabi. While not a proper test drive, a Rolls Royce is still a Rolls Royce after all.
There are only a few tested cars that we’ve ever marked as major events in the history of this feeble website. There was the Nissan GT-R. There was the Bentley Continental GT. And this weekend, there was the Honda Civic Type-R, a car as overrated as this website, and yet so legendary. We indulge in making fun of Honda fanboys all the time, but this is one car that almost turned us into Honda fanboys.
The 2nd DriveArabia Meet took place on Friday the 9th of April, 2010. Again, two of us organised it, and this time 17 people showed up, most of them new people who did not come the first time round, and even an off-duty journalist from an upscale magazine. Again, our little street party was competing with events such as some classic car auction at Times Square Mall and some BMW safety campaign at Creek Park.
For the second time ever, DriveArabia.com enthusiasts will be meeting up this weekend to show off their cars, talk about cars, and hang around cars. Our BMW M Roadster as well as our Honda Civic Type-R test car will make a special appearance.
Kia is putting a lot of faith into their all-new flagship model, the 2011 Cadenza. In fact, they are going all out to promote the full-size sedan. While even large outfits like Ford and VW cheap out at media driving events, Kia lined up close to 30 brand-new cars for the day in March. In fact, the fleet of Cadenzas was so big that most of the gathered GCC media scribes ended up one-person-per-car. I certainly enjoyed my privacy when pushing the limits of the car, instead of worrying about any aging passengers vomiting in the passenger seat.
The Chevrolet Cruze is yet another product that is part of General Motors’ competitively-revamped product line. With so much riding on it, we were hoping we had finally found something to topple the Honda Civic. Unfortunately, after our tests, the current Civic remains the “best” compact car of its time. However, the Korean-built Cruze is a much more palatable proposition, considering its base price undercuts that of the Civic by more than 25% in the UAE!
There was a time when BMW said they refuse to make an M version of the 7-Series because it would be too far away from the concept of the ‘M’ cars. They still believe that, so there is no M7. And then they went ahead and created the BMW X5 M. While the death of the original ‘M’ philosophy is lamented, the new ‘M’ philosophy opens the door to a whole new range of physics-defying vehicles that can finally take the fight to AMG, while butt-slapping Audi back to the hole they came out from.
So we finally get our hands on the all-new BMW Z4, if only because we now have friends within BMW. We suspect our tester, with 12000 km on the clock already, is really a 2009 rental model, but for the purposes of this preview we’ll refer to it as a 2010, to avoid appearing outdated. Remarkably, the car looks to be in perfect shape, which can’t be said for most test vehicles we get from Infiniti. Maybe the German firm is now concentrating on durability more than the Japanese themselves?
This is one vehicle that I wasn’t even aware it went on sale in the UAE. The 2010 Cadillac SRX, a distant cousin of the lowly Chevrolet Captiva, carries the torch for the outgoing SRX, which was actually a larger vehicle. We were actually supposed to drive it next week, but a GM man suddenly showed up at my doorstep with the crossover yesterday, and I was like “ehh, okay?”
Almost a year after we drove the V8-powered 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS at a constrained launch event, we finally managed to get our hands on a Camaro again, if only for a couple of days. This time, it is the base V6 model, which is good, because we never tried it out before.