Mashfique Hussain Chowdhury

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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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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There seems to be a tendency among “top” automotive journalists to go with the flow. They will all parrot the same things, like how class-leading the Audi A5 interior is, how easy to drift the Toyota 86 is, or how awesome the Range Rover Evoque drives. If you really knew how the media industry worked, you’d lose faith in the press forever. The latest story that’s going around is how the all-new 2014 Mazda 6 is the best midsize sedan ever made. For once, there is some truth to it, although only up to a point.

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Our 2009 Renault Safrane continues to chug along reliably thanks to its Nissan underpinnings, as we predicted back when we bought the car new in 2010. Well, reliably except for the power windows that is.

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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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The sub-compact market is a lucrative segment that’s dominated by a select few. With the Toyota Yaris and the Nissan Tiida laying waste to competition by everyone from Chevrolet to Volkswagen, the latest entrant to try their luck is Peugeot. They already had the little 208, but needed more of an edge in terms of space versus price. And so, we have the Peugeot 301, a car designed for “emerging markets” that concentrates on cabin space above all else.

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A never-mentioned fact about us is that, back in early 2005, a month or two after we started this website, the first test car we officially got offered was an Aston Martin DB9. What’s even worse is that, just as I sat in that car to drive off, we found out that none of us in the crew were eligible to drive it, since we were all under 25 at the time and insurance wouldn’t cover us. In the end, all I got to see was the fancy door handles and the cool interior with the button-operated gearbox, both giving a sense that the Aston was way ahead of its time.

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What you see here are “spy shots” of the upcoming new sports car by Mercedes-Benz, these posed photos being handed out by the German carmaker themselves.

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