Dubai

Let’s face it — if you’ve ever shopped for a three-row 4×4 as a family vehicle in the UAE, the Ford Expedition was never on your radar. The most popular choices in the mainstream full-size segment have so far been the Chevrolet Tahoe and the Nissan Armada, both very capable V8-powered SUVs that are similarly-priced and well-received. But the Ford Expedition, which has actually been gaining ground in Saudi Arabia for a while now, has undergone a major transformation of sorts for 2015, mostly under the skin, so we pitched it against its closest rivals, a friend’s leased Tahoe and another friend’s family Armada,

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We’ve been hyped about this car from way back in 2012, when we heard it hit the American market. A turbo hot-hatch from Hyundai? That’s a recipe for some cheap fun! Here we were, expecting it to give the brilliant Ford Focus ST a run for its money. But then, the Hyundai Veloster Turbo actually came here, three years late to the party, and we drove it.

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The Ford Expedition may still look largely the same for 2015, but there’s been a massive change under the bonnet, the V8 being replaced by a turbo V6.

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The Lexus LX has somehow created a huge niche for itself around here, as the luxury truck of choice to stand out among a sea of Land Cruisers. Around since 2008 in its current form, this is the third facelift it’s received, and the first one that goes beyond just reshaped bumpers. We briefly drove the 2016 model at its UAE launch in Dubai.

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With all the controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s current woes with diesel cars, it is easy to forget that dirty diesel was never a viable environmentally-friendly alternative to petrol, ever. Diesel cars became a “thing” in certain parts of the world because they offered better mileage, which is all their buyers cared about, the environment be damned. But diesel cars have a variety of costly, heavy and inefficient add-ons to make them cleaner, just to meet tough emissions laws in Europe. If you want the cheapest form of energy for your car, there’s no better option than going electric. We tried out the all-electric VW e-Golf at Wolfsburg,

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With all the hoopla over higher petrol prices, there’s a lot of talk about hybrid cars in general. We’ve never had any interest in the Porsche Panamera before, for obvious reasons, but when the Dubai dealership offered us a plug-in hybrid version of the same car, we were all for trying it out, especially since we had the car for the better part of a week to put it through various scenarios.

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It’s been a busy month in the UAE as the Abu Dhabi Infiniti dealer opened a new showroom, the F1 in Schools programme had their finals, and the Dubai dealer for Nissan held a public launch for the new Maxima.

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Nissan’s well-known performance brand, Nismo, made its Middle East debut at a launch event in Dubai. It is the first time that an entire line of Nismo models are offered in the UAE and other GCC countries.

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The Nissan Maxima made a name for itself in the 1980s and 1990s with a “Four-Door Sports Car” tagline that somehow worked back in the day, for a not-too-heavy V6-powered front-wheel-drive sedan. Of course, the game changed over the years as the Maxima stagnated for several years and then simply became a higher-trim version of the Altima, while shamelessly still coming with “4DSC” badges as standard. But the new one for 2016 already captured a lot of attention when it first popped up in photos several months ago. Is it finally more Maxima and less Maximbady?

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