Feature Stories

Japan has some quirky yet practical cars, a side-effect of the country’s unique culture as well as obsession with making life easier, be it with robots, gadgets or hugely-spacious cars with tiny wheelbases. Of course, we’re not getting 660cc “kei” cars on the streets of Dubai any time soon. What we have here is the 4-cylinder Honda Odyssey J, the slightly-smaller Japanese-built cousin of the full-size V6-powered American-built Odyssey minivan.

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We usually don’t look at too many small cars simply because the cheapest offerings from all brands are now almost similar to each other. We end up looking at some when we have to rent one out though, like this all-new 2015 Ford Fiesta we had rented for a week.

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Redesigned alongside the Chevrolet Silverado for 2014, the GMC Sierra is pretty much a clone of the aforementioned Chevy, save for the front end. The version we’re testing here is some sort of well-optioned trim, complete with body-coloured bumpers and shiny alloy wheels, but still stands one level below the chrome-grilled Sierra Denali model.

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It seems like just the other day when Toyota launched the 2012 Camry to much fanfare. So it seems prudent that the “all-new” 2016 Camry isn’t exactly all-new. Just launched today in the UAE, we took one for a brief spin around the cluttered “New Dubai” area.

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A day’s worth of travelling and transit flights brought us to the little town of Verbier in Switzerland, which, for the time being, had become overrun with all-new 2016 Audi Q7 midsize luxo-crossovers, as we were hosted at this sleepy skiing village for the international media-drive event. The Q7 is a big deal for Audi, as their best-seller has finally undergone a complete re-engineering after almost a decade unchanged.

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Does an SUV belong on a racetrack? There are several German brands trying to answer that question, but their offerings are so compromised in the pursuit of Nurburgring lap records that they hardly qualify as SUVs. And then there’s the new 2015 Range Rover Sport SVR, which set its own ‘Ring record for SUVs, however briefly it held. The difference between the SVR and other super-SUVs is that it can still go offroad. We drove one of these battering rams at a media event in New York last month.

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The Audi A6 has received a facelift for the 2016 model year, along with a few engine upgrades. The current generation has been around since 2012, and with the latest changes from the design department at the four-ringed German manufacturer, they have managed to make an already decent-looking midsize sedan even better. We had a long drive mapped out for us from Dubai to Ras Al-Khaimah, giving us some time to get accustomed to the new A6.

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Well, is it better than the 3-Series? Let’s get rid of that obvious cliched question first. We don’t know if the all-new 2016 Jaguar XE is better, but it is certainly equal to BMW’s often-mentioned benchmark, at least when it comes to the driving factor. We had to slum it out all the way in Navarra, Spain to figure that out.

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Some say it’s blasphemous to have a Ford Mustang with anything less than a V8. And yet, most of the Mustangs running around the UAE are of the V6 variety. True, the V6 used to be a joke, but it has held its own in the performance stakes for a good while now, easily matching up with older V8 versions of the Mustang. And now, with 2015 bringing us an all-new “modern” Mustang, there is a 4-cylinder offering as well, and it even costs more than the V6. Blasphemy!

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