It’s here! The car you’ve been waiting for! You people keep complaining about everything. “It’s too expensive, there’s no third-row seat, it doesn’t have Bluetooth, it doesn’t have USB ports, it’s not fuel-efficient, it doesn’t have alloys, it’s not rear-wheel-drive, it’s not as reliable as a Toyota, blah, blah.” Well, here’s the car for you — the all-new 2015 Toyota Avanza. For only Dhs 54,900. Now stop whining.
The outgoing Japanese-built Toyota Yaris has had a rather short life-cycle in the GCC. Launched here in 2012, it’s already been replaced by an all-new Thai-built Yaris hatchback that’s been on sale in South Asia since late last year, and is a direct cousin to the current Yaris sedan. If the global politics confuses you, don’t worry about it — the 2015 Yaris is a nicer car than the one it replaces.
We were invited to an off-road event organized by Eastern Motors, the dealers for Jeep in Al Ain. Called the Jeep Funatic, the event was the first of its kind to be organized in Al Ain, and is similar to the Jeep Jamboree event held annually in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. While the Jeepers were expected to roll in their own Jeeps, we were handed over a ride by the dealer. Expecting nothing more (and less) than a Wrangler, we were in for a surprise, as the ride turned out to be a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited V6.
The all-new 2014 Ford Fusion has been on sale for a couple of months now, while the 2014 Ford Ranger is basically a carryover model, having been redesigned just a couple of years ago. But Ford decided to give us a taster of these two important models at the Dubai Autodrome recently, to highlight their best attributes. It was a generic event, like any other, but they then threw us a curveball in the form of the Toyota Camry and the Toyota Hilux, both there for us to compare with the Fords.
The last time we drove a Toyota FJ Cruiser, it was 2007 and the recession hadn’t hit yet. Fast-forward to 2014, and that recession has become a footnote in history, but the FJ Cruiser is still around, not looking any different than when it first started out. Now, depending on which rumours you believe, the FJ is on its last legs, and the UAE dealer has created some special models to keep interest alive. One of those models is the FJ Street, a pre-pimped offroader that’s intentionally more about style than about offroading.
As I was flying back from the Jaguar F-Type Coupe media drive in Spain, I sat next to a random passenger who happened to be an Australian mining engineer. He told me an equally random story. He asked me why the width of a Space Shuttle’s high-tech booster rockets are what they are. Apparently it’s because the rockets had to be transported via train tunnels, thereby limiting them to that size. What decided the width of the train tunnels? The width of the train tracks. What decided the width of the train tracks? The makers of the train wheels and axles.
Clearly, Infiniti is still in the start-up phase. Despite having started right after Lexus a quarter of a century ago, they’re still doing things a start-up would, such as continually changing the plan to keep going. They started off back then with nameplates like the Q45 and the J35, none of which survived beyond the early 2000s. Their flagship switched from a full-size sedan to a Nissan-based full-size SUV, the QX56. And most recently, they decided to dump all their old nameplates that were just beginning to gain traction, such as the G37 and the FX50, in favour of a Q-based naming convention that no one has quite figured out yet.
Mazda’s been on a roll for the past year, launching all-new models that use an all-new design language that basically adds luxury-car styling cues that go well with their sporty handling. Their latest introduction is the redesigned Mazda 3, a car we expected to hit above its weight. And from what we could tell from our briefer-than-brief encounter, it didn’t disappoint.
Depending on your views, Porsche either keeps launching a lot of new models, or they rarely launch new models. That’s based on whether you think every single variant of the 911 debuting like clockwork every few months is a new model, or whether you consider an entirely new vehicle line to be a new model. We are in the latter camp, and we were interested to see what Porsche had cooked up for the compact crossover segment, with the all-new Macan.
The first-generation Genesis sedan was supposed to be Hyundai’s game-changer. A valiant effort at building a contemporary luxury sedan with a sporting streak, it was a hit everywhere else except the Middle East. Now Hyundai has gone in a slightly different direction with the Genesis, not just improving it for the 2015 model year, but also choosing a more controversial approach to the styling.