Mashfique Hussain Chowdhury

We are currently living in the age of the super-SUV, a crazy new market niche that’s populated by 4x4s that suck offroad, but can chase down sports cars in the straights and, with enough balls, even around corners. And the current poster-child of this unfathomable fad at the moment is none other than the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, the most affordable of this expensive lot that’s otherwise dominated by the Germans. We drove the 2014 iteration of the Jeep SRT8 at the launch of the updated Grand Cherokee range in Dubai recently. Apparently it’ll only go by “Grand Cherokee SRT”

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The 2014 Toyota Corolla is all-new from the ground up, and soon after the debut of the North American version, the European version has a photo debut as well.

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The latest iteration of the best-selling car in the world, the Toyota Corolla, has been revealed, at least in American-spec form.

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Well, not exactly prototypes. Ford invited us to hang with their engineering team who are responsible for testing whether upcoming models can handle the hot weather that we’re blessed with in the UAE. While all three of these cars — the 2013 Ford Fusion, the 2013 Lincoln MKZ and the 2013 Ford Ecosport — are already out in some other markets, the three cars that we drove are actually early pre-production models, and not cars that were just taken from a showroom in America or elsewhere. They’re being prepared for GCC release as 2014 models later this year.

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The 2014 Kia Carens has just been launched in the UAE. The small minivan-type people-carrier car thingy is the latest model to get the new corporate styling.

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The 2013 Chevrolet Malibu has been selling better than the previous version in the UAE, largely due to an extensive advertising campaign and cheap pricing here. But the GCC as a whole is a miniscule market compared to the United States, where the latest Malibu became a large-enough sales flop for General Motors to quickly go back to the drawing board and churn out a facelift within a year of its debut.

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One of the comments we keep hearing from the general public is how the Toyota Avalon should now be redundant, considering there is the Toyota Aurion on one end and the Lexus ES on the other end. We, for one, believe that it does have a spot in Toyota’s line-up, and that is to fit exactly between those two aforementioned cars, both in terms of price and size. It’s not rocket science to figure that out. Incidentally, Toyota shipped in their chief engineer for the Toyota Avalon to Dubai straight from the United States to talk to the press about the car.

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Nissan’s UAE dealer, Arabian Automobiles, reports that sales of the Nissan 370Z have increased by “750%” after its “repositioning” in the market this year in terms of price. That’s basically a roundabout way of admitting they had overpriced the car to Porsche Cayman levels for the past several years, and have now brought it down to realistic levels after following the Toyota 86’s lead.

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Alfa Romeo isn’t exactly a very popular brand in the GCC. But it should be, now that the Giulietta’s appeared in Fast & Furious 6 as the car that took down a cargo plane on the world’s longest runway. Incidentally, we took the car for a run just a week before the premiere of that movie in Dubai, which we attended courtesy of tickets from Chrysler-Fiat.

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