Al Futtaim Motors didn’t hold back at this year’s event when launching the all-new 2014 Toyota Yaris sedan in the UAE. It is, after all, one of their best sellers. With the new Yaris, Toyota are probably going to maintain their lion’s share of the sub-compact market once again, thanks to the new looks and cheaper entry-level model.
Let me start off by saying that I was missing in South Korea for the past one week, not for a test-drive event, but to be part of a new programme by Hyundai, dubbed the Hyundai Global Club Invitation. It’s an event that involved flying in around 35 people from 14 countries who contributed to the cause of promoting Hyundai, mostly by starting local Hyundai clubs and such, while a handful of “bloggers” were along for the ride. Somehow I was representing the UAE there, although I didn’t know that when I agreed to go for this trip. Between the long flights and 4 days of touring Hyundai’s facilities as well as South Korea itself,
When shopping for a hot hatch in the UAE, the VW Golf GTI is on every potential buyer’s shopping list, usually as the only choice. But when shopping for a compact car here, the “regular” VW Golf is never on anyone’s shopping list. In fact, the GTI actually outsells the standard Golf here. The Golf is generally pricier than its rivals, but we’ll see if the extra cost is justified as much as it is in its GTI sibling.
The UAE is not a minivan market. Most of the vans trundling around the streets of Dubai are of the commercial variety, ferrying workers to work and tourists to resorts. In the midst of this, Honda has dropped their own minivan — a proper one, built in America and designed for families. While a somewhat popular segment in the States with several players, here in the GCC, the Odyssey finds itself almost alone in the face of a crossover onslaught. Still, Honda is doing well enough with local sales that they’ve now launched the facelifted 2014 version here, and shipped one to us for a run.
Yep, we’ve reached our peak. There’s nothing left to aim for any more. Being among the first bunch of people to test-drive the Rolls-Royce Wraith at an international media launch event in Europe is about as high as you could go up the ladder when it comes to overseas trips. The icing on the cake was the event itself — the sportiest Rolls-Royce ever, driven in the Austrian countryside with no chaperones!
As we’re sitting here, doing nearly 200 kph in a 2014 Bentley Flying Spur, sometimes it makes us wonder if a big car like this really needs the ability to do 200 kph. Or even 320 kph, which is the rated top speed of this redesigned limousine. How about the ability to do 0-100 kph in well under 5 seconds? In a car designed to carry royalty!
The all-new 2014 Range Rover Sport has finally hit the road in the GCC. The previous generation was Land Rover’s best-selling model since it was first launched here in the UAE back in 2006. The bar was set high already. Don’t let the new sleeker looks fool you into thinking it’s become soft; just the opposite.
The first time I heard about the Duster was when a Romanian colleague of mine proudly showed me pictures of a new Dacia on the internet, sometime back in 2009. A couple of years later, the Duster was introduced in the UAE with a Renault badge for an incredibly cheap price tag. Fast-forward to the present, and Renault claims that the Duster is a success story. We wouldn’t entirely refute that statement, considering the increasing number of Dusters we have been seeing on the roads. Even a buddy of ours bought a 2013 Renault Duster just a few weeks ago,
There we were, a Ford Raptor in our parking lot, and the only logical thing to do was to venture into the desert wilderness. So we were on the lookout for a rental 4×4 as a backup vehicle for desert-testing something as big as a tank, in case it needed to get pulled out! While we were looking for nothing less than a powerful V6 at least, we ended up with a 2013 Toyota Fortuner 2.7, thanks to the ridiculously ill-informed staff of an international rental agency.
So if you thought that every car manufacturer was going the ‘Ford Explorer’ way when it came to overhauling their existing midsize SUVs, you’d be wrong. There are a few manufacturers who decided to try the opposite route, taking a step backwards by choosing to transform a commercial pick-up into a four-wheel-drive wagon in a half-hearted bid to create a viable replacement for their already-cancelled midsize SUV. So what was essentially competing with the refined Toyota Prado, now tries to go after the simplistic Toyota Fortuner. That new wagon is none other than the all-new Thailand-built 2013 Chevrolet Trailblazer.
