Dubai

The Honda NSX, or rather Acura NSX as it will be called in most markets, is a car that’s been painfully dragged on through the development process for almost a decade now. First announced in late 2007 as a concept, it was cancelled in 2008 due to the recession, then revived again as an actual Japanese SuperGT Championship race-car in 2010, then became a hybrid in 2011, and was finally unveiled in 2012 as a near-production concept, except that it was nowhere near production-ready yet. It’s still undergoing development, and the latest prototype is now doing the rounds of the UAE for hot-weather testing,

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The Ministry of Economy announced recently that all cars must be serviced at every 10,000 km, effectively banning the 5,000 km intervals that several Japanese-brand car dealers follow, something that consumers have effectively thought of as a rip-off all these years. The decision was made to “uphold consumer interests.”

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It was time to get some new tyres for our Jaguar XK, since the old ones had “expired” as per the RTA. Considering it’s always a hassle to go get tyres changed, we decided to try shopping for tyres online, on the only local tyre site we’d heard of in Dubai.

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This is the “new” 2016 Mazda 6. It just seems to be a facelift, but in reality, it’s actually a pretty major change, when you consider the all-new interior.

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Guess what? We’re special. Special enough that Chrysler is offering a car here that is not offered in North America. The 2016 Chrysler 300 SRT is still built there, but will only go on sale in a handful of overseas markets such as South Africa, Australia and Japan as well as all the GCC countries. And we got our hands on a fresh example.

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When we got the Alfa Romeo 156, it was covered in a thin layer of dust on the inside that seemed to be semi-permanent, stuck in the nooks and crannies of the textured dashboard, door panels and centre console. The dark-tan leather was also blackened from years of neglect. After some hard scrubbing, the leather became a bit lighter, but none of the dust on the rubberised plastics seemed to come off. We then noticed an ad for Green Steam car wash and gave them a call to check out if it’s a cost-effective alternative to an expensive detailing job.

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The Volkswagen Beetle is back in our part of the world. The last “new” Beetle was there for a decade, unchanged, which showed the staying power of that design. And well, the “real” Beetle before that — that stayed almost unchanged for the better part of last century. VW hasn’t gone crazy with this redesign, but has done enough to just about make out that this is a new model with a more sporty twist.

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