We drove this new Honda CR-V just before heading out to Japan to drive, among other things, a Civic Type-R. While the two cars are miles apart, it is easy to forget that Honda has always been a clever engineering company, given that we don’t see the company’s most popular creations at showrooms here. However, the new CR-V actually has a lot of engineering poured into it, for the benefit of regular folks rather than just enthusiasts.
Ford is off-the-wall crazy at the moment, and credit goes to their just-replaced CEO for allowing it. We’re talking about their enthusiast line-up. For a mainstream carmaker, they’ve come with exciting cars as exotic as the Ford GT all the way to as humble as the Ford Fiesta ST (neither of which are on sale in the GCC at the moment). In between, there are the Taurus SHO, Fusion Sport, Explorer Sport, Ranger Wildtrak, all the Mustang variants, Focus ST and the Focus RS. And while there is some hype surrounding the upcoming Bronco, Ford already has a much madder offroader in its arsenal —
Arctic Trucks, the offroad-tuning company best known for building street-legal monster-truckish 4x4s in Iceland and made popular by Top Gear, has had a base in the UAE for the better part of a decade now, and most visible as Toyota’s locally-modified Xtreme range of 4x4s. Now there is a proper Arctic Trucks-branded Isuzu D-Max available, and we got to take one for a spin.
Lincoln is redoing their corporate face yet again, starting with the new Continental flagship sedan. The second model to get the brand’s new grille treatment is the MKZ midsizer. Tacked on as a facelift to the existing model, there are more changes than meets the eye.
Until the beginning of last year, McLaren’s bread-and-butter was the 650S, but it proved too impractical for many in the market for these cars. Then there was the 570S, which was meant to be softer-driving and more practical. Alongside it came the 540C, which was supposed to be even softer. And now there is the 570GT, which is supposed to be…even softer and more practical?
There is nothing more controversial than vehicles like the BMW X6. Dreamt up by Bavarian marketeers as a “four-door sport-activity coupe”, it has spawned a few imitators, including the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe. This here is the Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 S Coupe, one of the fastest SUVs on the planet right now. But is the performance enough to overcome its looks?
Let us get this straight — we didn’t intend to buy a Mercedes-Benz of any sort. Aside from a couple of AMG models, Mercedes-Benz is mostly the default choice of brand-biased individuals who grew up listening to their parents wax lyrical about how they aspire to own a car with a three-pointed star on the bonnet. It’s true, your parents were right in their infatuation — Mercedes-Benz actually was at the top of their game back in the day (and I personally owned one of those old ones), but they fell by the wayside long ago, starting to regain their mojo only recently,
The second generation of the “new” Volkswagen Beetle is a much more interesting car than the one before it, but it’s struggling to make headway in our GTI-loving market. So VW has been offering this R-Line kit for a while now, to spice things up.
It’s been about a year since the Nismo version of the Patrol took the UAE by storm. A sporty version of a legendary body-on-frame offroader? It was never done before. But it’s proven to be a successful concept, to the point where numerous non-Nismo Patrol owners took to the aftermarket to turn their regular versions into Nismo lookalikes. Oddly enough, we never got the chance to drive one for whatever reason, so finally asked for one. We were given the car that appeared in the TV ads, complete with non-standard shabab tint.
The previous GMC Acadia was an odd one. Essentially a minivan in functionality, but disguised as an SUV, the Acadia was actually more practical and spacious inside than the Yukon. The new Acadia is a smaller vehicle as it undergoes a full reboot.