Saudi Arabia

The Volkswagen Teramont didn’t make sense on the surface when it debuted a few years ago, considering the Touareg was still around. But it made perfect sense when you delved deeper into the specs sheet — compared to the 2-row Touareg, the Teramont had a third row of seating, and was actually larger and cheaper. While the latest Touareg moved even further upscale, the Teramont is holding the fort in the meat of the mid-size SUV market, going up against Ford Explorers and Nissan Pathfinders. And it has just received a nip-and-tuck for the 2021 model year.

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With the new Stinger, K5 and K8 coming out in the past few months, Kia is bent on sprucing up their sedan lineup, even as others are trimming their sedan count down to zero. Now it is the time of its compact sedan, the 2022 Kia Cerato. The refreshed Cerato showed its face off in new pictures of the equivalent Kia K3 revealed in its South Korean home market. The Kia Cerato GT Hatchback also gets a preview along with the sedan. 

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Carasti, a UAE-based car subscription platform, is now offering a “mini lease” option, where a user can order a brand new car for 12-to-24-month lease, with no paper contracts and home-delivered, using just the Carasti app. The company has raised a US$ 3 million Pre-Series A funding round to fuel their expansion with further such offerings.

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Nissan revealed the 2021 Nissan Patrol Nismo in a global debut that was held in through a virtual event hosted at Expo 2020 Dubai. That’s apt, considering the Nismo SUV is a Middle East exclusive, and has never been offered anywhere else.

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The last time we wrote about child car-seats was a decade ago, when education on the importance of child seats was still in its infancy in the Middle East. Since then, many of us have become parents ourselves. While there has a been a lot of progress on the adoption of child seats, mostly thanks to new laws in the UAE and elsewhere, many folks still feel clueless on what is the best type of seat for their children. So here’s a fresh guide for young parents on what’s best for each age group.

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Nissan Middle East has unveiled the 2021 Nissan X-Terra with a web event that marks the return of the popular Xterra nameplate, albeit with a hyphen in the badge and based on the ASEAN-market Terra. 

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Lucid Motors, a new maker of luxury EVs set to compete with Tesla, has announced a range of 832 km on a single charge for its forthcoming Lucid Air all-electric sedan, far higher than its rival, the Tesla Model S.

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In the Philippines, Toyota has revealed the Yaris with a new face. Known as the Vios there, the design update to the front looks quite familiar to the previous generation Toyota Camry which was sold here.

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Saudi Arabia’s Public Transport Authority has received instructions from “higher authorities” earlier this year to set a maximum limit on the ownership of private vehicles, according to Al Watan newspaper.

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Toyota’s SUV line-up in the GCC is already crowded, with every niche filled with a model or two, mostly with offerings built in the Far East. However, Toyota offers a completely different set of SUVs in the West, such as the C-HR, the Highlander and the 4Runner, which fill segments in North America that are already taken here. So as a compromise, Toyota is now offering hybrid versions of some of those SUVs in the Middle East, as a way to differentiate them from existing offerings here. First came the C-HR HEV (while killing off the short-lived Prius here), and now the Highlander HEV has debuted in UAE and Saudi Arabia.

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