This is it. The car that melds your muscle-car fantasies with your practicality needs. The 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT is expensive, but with performance that keeps up with all sorts of overpriced German SUVs, it’s a relative bargain.
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.
Jaguar is keen to promote the F-Type as their new hero of the line-up, its position further solidified by the news that the long-running Jaguar XK is going to end production by this summer, with no replacement planned anytime soon. However, as big of an improvement as the F-Type is as a sports car, it is missing the main reason that I bought the XK for: cargo space.
While the other cars on our fleet are just toys, the Range Rover is the family vehicle and performs the bulk of our transporting duties. We’ve also trusted it as our luxury ride for important time-sensitive meetings and airport drop-offs. As such, it needs to be reliable. Thankfully our greyish-green Vogue has served us faithfully since 2012 with only minor niggles, especially since we properly take care of it. But it is nearly a decade old and has 111,111 km on it, so we decided to do the inevitable overhaul after it started showing signs of tiredness.
The all-new 2014 Honda City has been officially launched for Saudi Arabia, UAE and other GCC markets, at a media event in Dubai.
If you’ve driven in Dubai long enough, you must’ve been in at least one accident. The traditional routine is to call the police or go to the nearest police-station, but soon you will apparently be able to report your own minor car accidents using your smartphone.
Al Habtoor Motors, the UAE dealer for Mitsubishi, held a “launch” party today for the 2014 editions of the Attrage sedan and the Mirage hatchback.
One of our readers caught this body-kitted 2014 Nissan Tiida at the Dubai showroom of Arabian Automobiles. The kit is now an optional extra, in case you are into that sort of thing.
The other day I had the misfortune of coming across a self-aggrandising comics-worshipping nincompoop who ran his own video-game blog that no one ever heard of, jabbering about which cars are good and which aren’t, because of his vast experience with Playstation racing games and taking “selfies” with other people’s cars. I generally walk away from pointless arguments with “progressive” hipsters nowadays, but if I had told this armchair-racing expert that the Bentley Continental GT V8 S is better than the much pricier GT Speed model, he’d have a hissy fit!
If you remember, we took a 2015 Mazda 3 hatchback for a spin a couple of weeks ago, and found it to be promising. This week, we got the sedan version, essentially the same car with a boot, and got to dig deeper into what we were expecting to be the best compact car ever, given how good the Mazda 6 is.