First Drive

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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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The previous-generation Lexus IS 300 was a compromised but attractive sedan, easily the carmaker’s sportiest offering for the better part of a decade, if we were to overlook the overpriced (and overrated?) LFA. It was going to be a tough act to follow in terms of styling, although it was a given that the replacement also needed to address the issue of interior space. After the rather good GS sedan, every model in the Lexus range got a “spindle” grille and now looks like clones of each other, so their designers had to do something drastic to make the new IS be more than just a GS-lite.

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The sub-compact market is a lucrative segment that’s dominated by a select few. With the Toyota Yaris and the Nissan Tiida laying waste to competition by everyone from Chevrolet to Volkswagen, the latest entrant to try their luck is Peugeot. They already had the little 208, but needed more of an edge in terms of space versus price. And so, we have the Peugeot 301, a car designed for “emerging markets” that concentrates on cabin space above all else.

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A never-mentioned fact about us is that, back in early 2005, a month or two after we started this website, the first test car we officially got offered was an Aston Martin DB9. What’s even worse is that, just as I sat in that car to drive off, we found out that none of us in the crew were eligible to drive it, since we were all under 25 at the time and insurance wouldn’t cover us. In the end, all I got to see was the fancy door handles and the cool interior with the button-operated gearbox, both giving a sense that the Aston was way ahead of its time.

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