Dubai

If you remember, our recently-purchased Jaguar XK went to the dealership straight after we were handed the keys by the previous owner, because it was throwing up “overheating” warnings. Thankfully it turned out to be just a thermostat. As soon as we picked it up from the service centre though, there was an intermittent whining noise coming from who-knows-where. Over a week, the noise became more and more common, to the point where it was even giving out the occasional whine while revved at standstill. We were expecting the worst. After all, Jaguar’s reputation precedes them.

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Four people were killed when their car rammed into a 4×4 parked in the middle of the road on Sheikh Zayed Highway after it got a flat tyre. Normally we don’t report on accidents caused by the ignorance of people, but we figured we’ll take a look at what you should really do when you get a tyre puncture on the highway.

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From Sunday onwards, all petrol pumps in Dubai will allow the use of credit cards again after six years. However customers will have to pay an extra Dhs 2 if they want to use this option.

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AW Rostamani Group, parent company for one of the Nissan dealers in the UAE, have started a campaign to highlight the dangers of heat-buildup for children left in parked cars. Called ‘Car Baked Cookies’, the campaign highlights the temperatures a car’s interior can reach when parked in direct sunlight, by cooking biscuits on the dashboard. They claim it can reach as high as 80° Celsius in there. Their tagline is ‘If it’s hot enough to bake, it’s hot enough to cause death’.

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We have to say we’re pretty disappointed at Honda’s cosmetic durability. Maybe they do it better for Accords and Civics for all we know, but the S2000 has obvious signs of cost-cutting, not least of which is the thin body panels and the even-thinner paint. We bought the car just 18 months ago in pristine always-garaged condition, and park it under the sun at our place. Since then, the paint is full of swirl marks, the body has easily-attained dings, the headlights have gone foggy, and the black roof has turned permanently brown, especially after a sandstorm a few months ago.

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The Ford Escape used to be the meanest-looking crossover around, ready to take on anything in its path. Not that it means much to be a mean-looking crossover, because it’s never going to leave the pavement. So we feel Ford made the right decision in making the Escape more “contemporary” in its styling, finally ready to take on the other pavement-pounding crossovers on equal terms.

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We drove the absolutely brand-spanking-new 2014 Lexus IS 350 F-Sport at the launch event in Dubai just two weeks ago. It was a great car, but we couldn’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed by it. Now we got the non-Sport version of the car for a few days, and we were keen to see if it’d be just as underwhelming. Ironically, we had more fun with it!

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As we reported earlier, Infiniti is changing all their model names so that they start with Q for cars and QX for SUVs. Long-running nameplates such as the G37 will disappear to make way for the Q50; and freshly-minted nameplates such as the JX35 will disappear just as quickly as they appeared, becoming QX60 in the process. We are told the GCC will be the first region in the world to receive these renamed model. The first of these will be the FX models, which will henceforth be known as the QX70 as soon as the 2014 model is launched.

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Land Rover, in association with Al Tayer Motors, launched the all-new 2013 Range Rover Sport, at an invite-only event at Meydan Hotel in Dubai earlier this month. We received a formal invitation directly from the dealer, and on hearing about this, the editor of this site asked us to write about our impressions as he didn’t want to attend the event himself to “avoid the crowds,” even as he got an invite himself for being a Range Rover customer.

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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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