Morris Garages, the well-known (in Europe at least) British brand that’s best known for making little sports cars back in the day and hopped-up Rover-based sedans most recently before they shut shop. The brand eventually became a part of China’s SAIC, and they’ve launched their own steady stream of economy cars since then, culminating in the brand’s first crossover SUV — the MG GS.
When the all-new Toyota Fortuner debuted a year ago, it created waves with its new-age styling that still somehow looked like a tough offroader (unless, say, the poor attempt that is the new Land Rover Discovery). What we didn’t expect were all the other improvements, including an interior that is surprisingly upscale at first glance.
The Ford Edge Sport has been around since late last year, as the top dog in the redesigned Edge line-up. While we did drive the regular Edge Titanium in Jordan in 2016, the Sport is an entirely different beast.
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If you look beyond the hype, the Jaguar F-Type isn’t anything ground-breaking when it comes to sports cars. Based off of a decade-old chassis with carryover engines, its claim to fame was always the noise rather than the dynamics, at least when compared to various rivals. So we weren’t expecting a whole lot from the SVR version of this car. But boy were we wrong.
The name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but then again, most car names don’t nowadays. The Geely Emgrand X7 Sport is the latest player from China to take on the Middle East crossover market. And it’s probably the closest in terms of killing the Made-in-China stereotype.
The Skoda Octavia is long forgotten here as a viable contender in the compact segment, but when we finally took one for a spin, we found it to be a value-packed alternative to the venerable VW Golf.
We’ve been following the development of the Bentley Bentayga quite closely. We saw it up close in concept form, with that much-derided front-end. We saw it in its world debut at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, where we saw its famous Breitling dash-clock option that costs as much as the car. We even saw it in Dubai at the 2015 Dubai Motor Show where we interviewed one of the designers. Unfortunately we never got a chance to get behind the wheel since it hit the roads in 2016, but we were finally given this blue one to try out for a couple of days.
The American-built VW Passat got a minor facelift last year, having been on the market since 2012. We thought it’d have a bigger impact on the midsize sedan scene, given that it easily has the most cabin space in this segment, but key features were missing that may have caused it to become an also-ran. Several of those issues have now been addressed.
Honda has been busy trying new things lately, and while we may never see the fruits of their labour when it comes to the NSX or the Type-R, we are now getting a base version of the latest Honda Civic with a 1.6-litre engine. Spec it up for a few bucks though, and it’s hard to tell it apart from the 2.0-litre version.
At the end of every year we do a rundown of how we’re doing and what were the highlights of the past year. Admittedly, 2016 has been tough on many people, with the downturn in the economy leading to job losses and a 30% decrease in car sales. This was reflected in our traffic statistics, which has always been a window into the local car market. However, we still managed to eke out a 5% increase in revenue, and still remain the most profitable automotive portal in the region (despite increased costs in “fees” and unfavourable rules) thanks to our genuine readers,