According to a press release by Hyundai Middle East, their “GDI” direct-injection engine will make its debut in the Middle East with the new 2013 Hyundai Genesis, giving it more horsepower and torque. However, they’ve said a lot of things before, such as the “launch” of the GDI engines in the latest Genesis Coupe models, which never made it to the local dealers.
We’ve just received word that the 2013 Mazda CX-5 compact crossover is now on sale in the UAE. Replacing the slow-selling CX-7, the CX-5 has been receiving rave reviews in the foreign press for being more of a driver’s car than most crossovers.
The MINI John Cooper Works Paceman, the seventh in the JCW line, will soon be available in showrooms starting March 2013 in the U.S. and not too long after, in the GCC; probably priced at around Dhs 200,000.
The end of the year is near, or possibly even the end of the world, depending on what you believe. It’s been a good year for us, with a 25% increase in visitors, 50% increase in pageviews, and 45% growth in ad revenue compared to 2011, enough to put a Honda S2000 and a Range Rover in our long-term fleet this year! We also started a mobile version in May as well as an Arabic website in December this year, our 8th anniversary, with the help of an ever-expanding team. Before we say goodbye to 2012, we figured you’d want to read some of our greatest original stories of this year that you’ll not find anywhere else,
If you think finding a Dirham on the floor is lucky, see what happens to this guy in Russia, who has an experience equivalent to finding a million bucks under his shoe. In Russia, most drivers have dash cams installed in their cars to basically fight off the motherland’s notorious corrupt traffic police or scammers trying to extort money out of drivers. With a country that big, some crazy footage is bound to be caught on video and here’s one fine example of a head-on accident, except that no one is hurt?
Land Rover has issued a recall of two models, the 2012 Range Rover Evoque and the 2012 Land Rover LR2, over a brake issue. Both models share a similar platform.
Our long-term Mitsubishi Galant continues to run strongly without any hiccups, despite raking up over 40,000 km in less than a year due to regular Dubai-Abu Dhabi runs. Besides the minor A/C fix few months ago, there really has been no costs involved besides our self-imposed 10,000 km interval services with the major one done recently at 80,000 km on the clock. However, as mentioned in our last report we faced a minor issue and that is the battery finally crapped out. Mind you, the battery was not changed since we bought it back in June 2011, so we guess its death was pretty much near.
Carbon Motors, the company that had been peddling the custom-built E7 police car prototype since 2008, has actually launched a vehicle, and it’s not the E7 police car. They’ve officially unveiled their TX7 Multi Mission Vehicle (MMV), essentially a big van.
So all Dodge Chargers cannot do a burnout. We are talking about the Dodge Charger all-wheel-drive version. Dodge is now offering a Sport package for the AWD models, to make it a more attractive proposition for customers.
In what has to be the most convoluted move in attempting to create a brand identity, Infiniti has decided to rename all their models to have their names start with the letter Q, dropping the G, M, FX, EX, QX and even the new JX, names that they’ve worked all these years to build up. So much for brand equity.