Feature Stories

This one has been a long time coming, even before the Lamborghini that I test-drove recently. It wasn’t bias; it is just that this cheap crossover is actually quite popular regardless of our review, so much that you might end up counting at least as many of this vehicle as any popular Japanese crossovers on the road. And ‘this’ crossover, which we sourced from a close friend, is none other than the 2013 Hyundai Tucson 2.4, aka “Tuck-Sun”, as it is known to most people, including some of the local dealer’s sales staff.

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Every now and then, a new carmaker enters the market. But how often is it, that many of them go unnoticed. One could possibly shun the new car we have here, citing reasons that the logo could be ripped off from Lexus. However, this particular vehicle has no specific relations with Lexus, or even Japan. As a matter of fact, the Luxgen 7 SUV we have here is from Taiwan.

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We are currently living in the age of the super-SUV, a crazy new market niche that’s populated by 4x4s that suck offroad, but can chase down sports cars in the straights and, with enough balls, even around corners. And the current poster-child of this unfathomable fad at the moment is none other than the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, the most affordable of this expensive lot that’s otherwise dominated by the Germans. We drove the 2014 iteration of the Jeep SRT8 at the launch of the updated Grand Cherokee range in Dubai recently. Apparently it’ll only go by “Grand Cherokee SRT”

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Well, not exactly prototypes. Ford invited us to hang with their engineering team who are responsible for testing whether upcoming models can handle the hot weather that we’re blessed with in the UAE. While all three of these cars — the 2013 Ford Fusion, the 2013 Lincoln MKZ and the 2013 Ford Ecosport — are already out in some other markets, the three cars that we drove are actually early pre-production models, and not cars that were just taken from a showroom in America or elsewhere. They’re being prepared for GCC release as 2014 models later this year.

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Premium hatchbacks are a uniquely European concept and one that I’m sure causes a lot of confusion in the GCC. Why would you spend 4×4-level money for a small hatchback? However, if you look at it from the European point of view, they make a lot of sense. The cost of buying and running a new car in Europe can be staggeringly high due to taxes on the car, annual taxes to renew the road licence, regular road tolls and the cost of fuel. In that environment, a smaller car makes a lot of sense. However, many drivers don’t want to give up the prestige and comfort features of a luxury car,

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The fifth Xplore UAE, an annual off-road event organised by local Nissan dealer Arabian Automobiles in association with ENOC Lubricants, clinched the Guinness World Record title for the longest desert convoy of off-road vehicles. The March event, which attracted the largest number of participants in its history, also raised Dhs 50,000 for the Rashid Paediatric Therapy Centre.

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So it was the usual monotonous evening when the big daddy of DriveArabia rang up to “offer” me something that I had least expected to come my way, before the world ended — to test drive a Lamborghini Gallardo, that too, on a racetrack. I was truly surprised, as much as he was by the friendly gesture from the Lamborghini dealers in Dubai, for the opportunity to briefly take the wheel of the luxury supercar manufacturer’s entry-level offering, the Lamborghini Gallardo LP 550-2.

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As much success as Hyundai is experiencing nowadays, truth be told, they have a big gaping hole in their sales figures for models beyond a certain price-point. One of the those models is the Hyundai Centennial. As even Hyundai owners might not know, the Centennial is the flagship of the Korean brand, designed to tackle premium brands head-on. The car has been around for a couple of years now, but we finally took one for a spin at the launch of the mildly-facelifted 2014 model.

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After its dramatic birth back in the late 1990s as a 5-door Smart Car-alternative that went up on two wheels at the sight of a moose, the Mercedes-Benz A-Class went on to become rather popular in Europe, even though it was nothing more than a city runabout that shared the same badge as an S-Class. Of course, it never caught on in the UAE, where people prefer their luxury cars to look like, well, cars. But more than a decade later, the A-Class changes its ethos completely and comes back as a proper hatchback, apparently in search of buyers who don’t have white hair.

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Infiniti recently invited us to try out the 2013 QX56 at a media event. We were more than familiar with the QX56’s capabilities on the road, thanks to the long-termer we had in 2011. We didn’t explore its off-roading credentials at the time beyond mountain-driving, but since it is a reskinned Nissan Patrol after all, Infiniti wanted us to do more with it this time around.

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