Our freebie Volkswagen Passat CC has now completed its break-in period, so we’re finally getting to open up the throttle and listen to that 3.6-litre V6. The same engine powers the new VW Touareg as well as the pricey Porsche Cayenne V6, and we loved the motor in those SUVs.
It’s time to close the chapter on our 2000 BMW M Roadster, our first attempt at owning a near-exotic car. We bought it in early 2008, and sold it last month, barely driving it for 7,000 km in more than three years. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know if you plan to buy a premium sports car on a budget.
Back in the early days of summer this year, we asked Volkswagen Middle East if they’d be interested in providing us with a long-term car. We were fine with any car, as long as it was for a decent amount of time, and we even offered to pay part of the cost. They soon got back to us, offered us a VW Passat CC V6 for no cost, and even let us choose the colour. While we didn’t ask for any specific colour, we found it rather astounding that VW would import a brand-new unmolested car from Germany just for our test.
The 2012 BMW 3-Series sedan has been unveiled, complete with a quirky new face integrating traditional BMW design cues. It might look like a facelift of the current model, but the compact rear-wheel-drive sedan has actually grown in size.
It isn’t every day that we get to drive a Rolls-Royce. It isn’t every day that we get to drive an electric car either. But there we were, driving the Rolls-Royce Phantom 102EX, the British carmaker’s experiment with electric cars.
German auto giant BMW has just expanded their line-up of hybrids with the launch of the all-new BMW 5-series-based hybrid, dubbed ActiveHybrid 5.
We’d been asking for a round with the new BMW 5-Series ever since it was launched last year. We weren’t invited to two launch events for the car. We asked for this specific car only five times since we saw it on the cover of the now-defunct CAR Middle East in October 2010, and many other feeble magazines since then. Even a relatively-new website called Crank & Piston got a round with it for a month. We’ve been told before that we “don’t fit the criteria” for interacting with certain European luxury brands, but this is ridiculous. However, now with 30,000 km on the clock,
Riding the green wave, Volkswagen Middle East participated in the second stop on the Western leg of the Asia Pacific Natural Gas Vehicle Associates (ANGVA) Green Highways 2011 event held in Dubai recently that is dedicated to raising awareness among local industries of the importance of making natural gas and energy efficient cars available.
It’s funny that we’ve been testing a string of VWs for the past two months, but delayed driving till now the one VW that everyone’s been requesting us to test. This here is the Volkswagen Golf GTI.
So after 8 months and over 20,000 km, the Mondeo has departed. In an unanticipated move, I spontaneously decided to sell the Mondeo as the idea of owning a four-wheel drive, which sprouted up from nowhere in a corner of my brain, and had incurably spread all over my mind like cancer in short notice.