first look

We’d been asking for a round with the new BMW 5-Series ever since it was launched last year. We weren’t invited to two launch events for the car. We asked for this specific car only five times since we saw it on the cover of the now-defunct CAR Middle East in October 2010, and many other feeble magazines since then. Even a relatively-new website called Crank & Piston got a round with it for a month. We’ve been told before that we “don’t fit the criteria” for interacting with certain European luxury brands, but this is ridiculous. However, now with 30,000 km on the clock,

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It’s funny that we’ve been testing a string of VWs for the past two months, but delayed driving till now the one VW that everyone’s been requesting us to test. This here is the Volkswagen Golf GTI.

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Continuing our series on Volkswagen (hey, they’re offering us car after car, so why not), this week we have the 2011 Volkswagen Touareg, a 4×4 that shares its platform with the pricier Porsche Cayenne. Considering we drove a Porsche Cayenne V6 just a few weeks ago, it felt a whole lot similar, yet different.

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You might be wondering why we’re driving the new Ford Explorer again. Aside from still trying to figure out whether it is officially a 2011 or a 2012, we had some issues with our previous grey test vehicle due to earlier abuse. So Ford has now offered us a fresh new vehicle to play with.

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The Renault Safrane has a bit of an awkward history. It is essentially a rebadged Samsung SM5 built in Korea and based on a Nissan Altima platform. It was first offered in the GCC around 2008 and was on sale in that older form right until earlier this year as a 2011 model. And then it was replaced by this all-new version, while still labelled as a 2011 model. Interestingly, we recommended the older version as a value-packed family commuter, even went ahead and purchased one for our long-term fleet, and whether anyone admits it or not, helped sell a whole bunch of them thanks to our endorsement,

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The Porsche Cayman R does not need to exist. It is merely a stripped-down Cayman S with 10 extra horses and tighter suspension. Maybe we need to correct ourselves — the Cayman R does not need to exist as a car that the general public can buy. What Porsche should do is slap on some stickers and sell it only as a professional track race-car.

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Our run with Volkswagens continues, this time with the VW Scirocco 2.0TSI. After driving the VW Golf R, we didn’t expect much from this one, but our time with the car has been pleasantly surprising.

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This is the first time we’ve ever driven the Porsche Cayenne outside of a racetrack. Memories of chasing 911s in the Cayenne Turbo at the Porsche Roadshow are still fresh in our minds, but the streets are a different thing altogether. And even if it was for only a day, we still got a decent look at the most overlooked of Cayennes – the base V6 version.

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Who would’ve thought that the new Ford Explorer would be such a hot topic? But it is. The redesigned 2011 Explorer has been around for a year now, but only now has it reached the GCC. And what we have here is one of the first vehicles to land in the UAE, and we’re the first to review it. Incidentally, the first shipment is already sold out.

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The Nissan Juke didn’t make much sense to us, considering the Qashqai was already on sale here. But it has apparently become a hit wherever it has gone on sale so far. This is the first time we got to look at the Juke in person, and it is seemingly nothing like the Qashqai on which it is based.

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