Mashfique Hussain Chowdhury

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’.

Read More …

Read More …

Read More …

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.

Read More …

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.

Read More …

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.

Read More …

We drove the redesigned VW Golf recently and found it to be a pretty good car. Of course, around here, nobody cares about the regular Golf. With a huge chunk of Golf sales, up to 50% by some sources, in our region accounted for by just the pricier GTI, it’s obvious from the start that the latest GTI was a hotly-anticipated car this summer.

Read More …

Read More …

Our first test car for Ramadan is the Mazda CX-9, a car that is seemingly loved unconditionally by its owners, but one we haven’t driven before. The 2013 iteration of the CX-9 is a facelifted version with carryover mechanicals and some interior enhancements. Is the forgotten Japanese contender in the hotly-contested midsize segment as good as we hope it is?

Read More …

Read More …