long-term update

So how’s our much-maligned Range Rover doing? Perfectly fine, actually. It’s become our daily driver, used even for the occasional trip to Abu Dhabi. This kind of reliability is more than we ever could’ve hoped for. But the 282 hp 4.4-litre V8 engine is nine years old now, with around 107,000 km on the clock. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if it has lost any performance over the years, as is supposedly the case with all engines?

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The Honda S2000 is one of the greatest cars ever built, and it’s funny that we say this, because we never took it seriously when it was actually still in showrooms. Honda never seemed to have a media test car, and we figured it wouldn’t be much of a runner anyway, based on its measly horsepower and torque specs. We did shop for one back in 2008, among other options, but couldn’t afford even a used one due to sky-high resale values. Eventually, we did buy one last year of course, paying a premium for a good example, not because we were specifically looking for one,

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Our Jaguar XK has been running fine since we bought it in early summer. Which makes its minor non-mechanical issues rather annoying. The fact that we’ve covered only 800 km so far makes it doubly so.

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This is old news for those in the know, but our 2010 Mitsubishi Pajero has bid us goodbye, going back to the same used car dealership we bought it from.

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As we’ve been harping about for a year now, the Honda S2000 is tough to maintain cosmetically. Even after we got it detailed a couple of months ago, it was going to be a major task keeping the car looking clean. The aluminium bonnet had a pebble-sized ding on it for half a year now. We don’t know where it came from, but it was time to do something about it.

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Our fleet swap-over for this year is finally complete with the sale of our 2009 Renault Safrane V6 to a friend. My father had left it behind when he retired earlier this year and got shipped back to the homeland, and so the car wasn’t really getting driven much any more, once we bought more interesting machinery. Still, it’s a fine car that we’ll recommend to anybody looking for cheap transportation. We’d even go as far as to say that it’s a more “honest” car than the new Safrane that replaced it, and an even better deal now that it’s out of warranty and you could get it maintained elsewhere instead the dealer.

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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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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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Back in the early 1990s, you could get a car key duplicated at any regular key-cutting shop for Dhs 10 and be happy in the knowledge that you’ll always have an unlimited supply of cheap keys for your car. Then the late 90s brought with it the new-fangled transponder-chip anti-theft technologies that could not be duplicated, and the only place to get copies was from the dealer, after a month-long wait to get it shipped from the factory and after going into debt to pay for it. Then we recently heard that half the key-cutting shops in Dubai can now duplicate any key in half an hour.

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We wanted to fill our personal fleet up with cool cars. That means our trusty Renault Safrane will eventually move on to a good home by the end of the summer. The replacement had to cleanly fall between our Honda S2000 and our Range Rover in terms of size, drive and cargo-carrying practicality. We thought of all sorts of cars, including Minis, Chargers, Alfas, Evoques, 3-Series, GTIs and what not. Then I woke up last week and had a sudden urge to buy a Jaguar XK. So I did.

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