Renault chose to hold the GCC unveiling of the all-new 2011 Renault Safrane at the 2010 Riyadh Motor Show. As we had been speculating for ages, the new model is a simple rebadge of the car that debuted earlier this year in Europe as the Renault Latitude and in Korea as the Nissan-Samsung SM5.
McLaren Automotive unveiled the MP4-12C in Bahrain and the UAE this month. After the McLaren F1 and the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR, this is only the first product to come out the company that has associations with Formula 1.
After revealing the so-called “concept” version of the near-production 2012 6-Series coupe, BMW has gone ahead and released full details on the actual 2012 650i Convertible, which is set to go on sale in the first half of 2011.
No one cares about Opel in the UAE, or even knows whether their cars are still on sale or not. It would seem Opel really is alive and well, and had been offering the Opel Antara small crossover for the past couple of years in their line-up. The model has received a facelift for 2011.
Most of you people aren’t even interested in Volvo. Neither were we. The only Volvo we drove previously was the XC60, which was technically advanced but dynamically underwhelming. Then we drove the all-new S60 2.0T recently. Stuck behind a slow Gulf News journalist on a track convoy, we didn’t get much out of that event. Now we got the S60 T6 for five days. And the car is phenomenal, hot damnit.
The 2012 Audi A6 has made an early debut in pictures, and is supposedly a fully redesigned model. Good luck spotting the new model when it hits GCC streets in a year though, because it looks like designers spent about 2 seconds photoshopping bits of the 2010 A4 and the 2011 A8 onto the existing A6 to come up with this design.
Car enthusiasts may know of the only Audi to make an impression back in the early 1980s. That car was the 1983 Audi Sport Quattro, a severely shortened version of the boring Audi Quattro Coupe, done so to better compete in the gruelling Group B rallies of the day. A “civilian” version of the rally car was required as per homologation rules. In an ironic twist, the designer of the Audi Sport Quattro has described the car as “bloody ugly”.
The last time we drove an Audi A3, back in 2006, our review fumed the German firm’s Middle East office so much that they stopped all contact with us since then, choosing to ignore the brown guys with the cute little website. While the joke is on them now, it doesn’t change the fact that the A3 is a dynamically-challenged car. After years of sitting on the market, Audi finally sees it fit to release an RS 3 version of the hatchback.
When the Skoda dealer rep dropped off the 2011 Superb 3.6 at our doorstep and gave me a briefing, he chose to swiftly mention one little feature, called Park Assist, which we thought was just a parking sensor system. Later we were digging through the instruction manual to figure out where the USB port was (there isn’t one), and we found the section that told us how to operate the automatic parallel parking feature!
It’s the season of remakes, and the legendary video game Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit has been relaunched with shiny new graphics and gameplay. To promote the game, the game’s makers seem to be going all out, releasing this promo video of a real life car chase between a Pagani Zonda and a Lamborghini Murcielago police car. If only games looks that good.