It’s interesting to see how far car scenes have movies have progressed over the years. Many of you might have seen the new James Bond movie Skyfall already, and would’ve noticed the blatant Jaguar-Land Rover product-placements in there. You also would’ve seen this Land Rover Defender in the movie, but without that huge rig on top. So what is that on the roof?
It’s not often that we get invited to Bentley’s events, but this was probably the most interesting one yet. We were given a tour of Bentley’s service workshop in Dubai, run by Al Habtoor Motors, the UAE dealer for the British brand. This 189,000 square-feet site in the middle of nowhere also happens to be the largest Bentley workshop in the world. They also opened a new dealership in Abu Dhabi, displaying the one-off Bentley EXP-9F 4×4 concept there as well.
For the 28th edition of the São Paulo Motor Show the French manufacturer Renault has brought to their stands the DCross concept.
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.
Our Range Rover has been busy for the past month, getting back into top shape. A trip to the dealer was in order, especially since the 100,000 km service was due as soon as we bought the car. That in itself made for a good story.
Apparently we’re the first local media to drive this Volvo XC70. Not the most popular of cars here, but it has been around for a few years now, on and off, in this iteration. But for 2012, there are major changes under the skin. First and foremost, this is the T6 model.
So if you thought that the crazy automobile recall saga had ended, you were wrong. Since our last post on the recalls earlier this year, there were an insane amount of recalls that followed, from almost every car manufacturer in the world you can ever think of, almost all of them being issued following instructions from the U.S.-based NHTSA agency. And we could not bother to post each recall issue as a separate story, the task being as equally tedious as the reader-response to these. Here are all the recalls that could potentially be relevant to our region since April 2012.
This here is a Fiat Bravo. We wouldn’t have given it a second look when we spotted it a month ago, except that it had all these weird wires taped onto the exterior. Indeed, it’s possibly a GCC-spec prototype of the 2013 model.
It’s not the end of the world, but 2012 has been a bad year for us. While we made loads of money, our luck with cars hasn’t been as sweet. Earlier this year, we broke off the stupid front lip on a Toyota Land Cruiser tester, for which we had to run around for a police report. Then in the summer, someone put a small scratch on a Porsche 911 tester, for which we had to run around for an even bigger police report. And then there was an “incident” with this Renault Koleos tester in the middle of a Ramadan afternoon.
The French auto-manufacturer Renault has introduced their latest iteration of the hothatch, the Renailt Clio RS 200.