The Lexus LS, Toyota’s full-size luxury sedan, is still around, lest you forgot about it with the big-nostrilled BMW 7-Series taking up the limelight and the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class around the corner. Lexus has gone ahead and given the 2021 Lexus LS a bit more tech to stay relevant. And yes, it finally gets a touchscreen.
McLaren and Gulf Oil International Ltd (yes, that Gulf with the orange-and-blue race-car liveries) have announced a multi-year strategic partnership which will see the iconic oil brand partner with the race team McLaren Racing and struggling supercar-maker McLaren Automotive.
ADNOC Distribution, the Abu Dhabi-based fuel and convenience retailer with outlets all across the UAE, has announced that customers can now earn loyalty points on every purchase of fuel and non-fuel products as part of their rewards programme, ADNOC Rewards.
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.
The infamous “Dieselgate” scandal involving Volkswagen had almost brought down the brand for using devices that cheat emissions regulations, while single-handedly bringing around the current decline in the popularity of diesel cars. And now another European manufacturer, Fiat-Chrysler Automotive, is being investigated for a similar issue and prosecutors searched the brand’s sites in Germany as a part of the investigation.
Revealed at the Geneva Motor Show in 2019, the CX-30 enters a new market niche for Mazda, slotting in between the CX-3 and CX-5.
Dubai-based fuel-delivery start-up Cafu has removed its delivery charges and will now offer their services for free.
Hard to believe that it’s been 8 years since the Volkswagen Passat’s last full redesign in 2012. That was the year when the European Passat and the American Passat diverged into two distinct cars, as the latter became a larger car with class-leading space for a midsize sedan, but also less sophisticated in terms of execution and features. The GCC market gets the American one. And it’s now on its second facelift, the first one being back in 2016.
In the Australian car market, car-based pickup trucks or Utes were quite popular. Some of these vehicles, like the Holden Maloo or the Ford’s FPV F6, took the pickup truck to levels of performance unimaginable for the genre. But taking their place are midsize pickups such as the Ford Ranger and the Toyota Hilux, both of which come with aggressive offroad versions. Now Nissan is thinking about cashing in on the combined opportunity of fast pickup trucks by dropping a V8 under the hood of the Navara, giving birth to a NISMO variant.
SUVs are so popular nowadays that they have all but eliminated market share for almost all other types of passenger vehicles, not least of them minivans. So to update their 2021 Kia Carnival, Kia took inspiration from the very popular “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” meme. The new Carnival minivan has been infused with SUV styling elements to keep its head high in this raging sea of SUVs.