The Lamborghini Urus is a crazy-fast machine, but it commands a crazy price too. For the ones dazzled by its charm but has not enough dime to shell for it, Lambo’s parent company has come up with another choice. Audi has launched the quickest RS version of their flagship Q8 SUV, dubbed the 2020 Audi RS Q8. It is almost as quick as the Urus but induces a less fatal heart attack with its smaller price tag.
With the entire global car market making a vigorous shift towards crossovers, sedans are turning more and more irrelevant by the day. Especially in the small-car segment, individual buyers are wooed by the high-riding hatchbacks on stilts. But sedans are not dying without a fight. Honda has launched the seventh generation of their sub-compact sedan, the City.
In the sub-compact luxury class, the Mercedes Benz CLA had been enjoying monopoly with its “four-door coupe” crammed into an unattractive small package. But now, the German giant’s arch-rival is here with an offering. The BMW 2-Series Gran Coupe is here to fill in the narrow gap (if there was one) between the 1-Series and the 3-Series sedan. And it looks like an economy car.
The revived Maybach brand is not new to SUVs. Their Mercedes-Maybach G650 Landaulet was a swan-song to the previous generation of the G-Wagen but was an offering for an extremely small niche. But this time around, the new Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 SUV is ready to properly lock horns with the top guns in the game, the Bentley Bentayga and the Rolls Royce Cullinan. Unfortunately, in a week which also saw the launch of the Aston Martin DBX and the Tesla Cybertruck, the gussied-up GLS-Class feels utterly forgettable already.
The Nissan Sentra has been an uneventful middle ground between the existing mundane Sunny and the larger Altima in Nissan’s lineup. The sedan has now been given a complete makeover for 2020. Has it helped in adding some character to the Sentra?
The “SUV” fever in the car industry has affected everything right from tiny hatchbacks all the way to huge luxury SUVs. Manufacturers are jumping on this bandwagon to grab a piece of this ever-growing higher-ground-clearance pie at the cost of killing “regular” car sales. With Bentley, Rolls Royce, Lamborghini and soon Ferrari joining the fray, Aston Martin has thrown its hat in the ring with the Aston Martin DBX, the British brand’s first SUV.
Using legendary monikers to sell new models is not a new strategy. A lot of manufacturers have been letting their new offerings ride this wave of nostalgia. But this can sometimes end up being quite controversial, depending on the model they slap their name onto. You saw it happening when Mitsubishi revived the Eclipse name on a crossover and when Chevy slapped the Blazer name on yet another crossover. And now, Ford has taken it to an all-new level by launching the Ford Mustang Mach-E, an electric crossover.
The last generation of the Jaguar had a massive factory problem. One of several electronic control modules on the HID headlights used to keep shorting out in some way or the other every time there was some sort of power surge, such as when your battery dies or sometimes even randomly, maybe once every two years. This used to cause the auto-levelling function to go stupid, making the headlights point permanently downwards even though they are perfectly working fine otherwise (while flashing a warning light in your gauge cluster permanently as well). Oddly enough, the warning light was for the turning-headlights feature,
Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s first electric pickup truck at an event in Los Angeles, California. The thing you see in the photo is no joke. Looking like something out of a 1980s sci-fi movie, the Tesla Cybertruck will come in three versions.
A complete mental recalibration is called for. This is just the first three-quarter-throttle squirt out of the pitlane and onto the front straight of the Dubai Autodrome, yet it’s already evident the forward thrust being served up here is on the gob-smacking end of the scale. It feels as though I’ve been implanted in a movie that’s playing in fast forward, and the grey matter is still trying to comprehend this madness.