Abu Dhabi

The 2016 Middle East Car Of the Year (MECOTY) awards ceremony was held last week with the results being announced during the reborn 2016 Abu Dhabi Motor Show and Custom Show Emirates that are running concurrently in Abu Dhabi. The final winners were decided by totalling the scores of a jury panel from 12 different publications around the Middle East, including DriveArabia.com’s tiny contribution. Individual awards were given to cars according to their categories, with the main 2016 Middle East Car Of The Year award going to the Volvo XC90, and the winner by public voting being the Audi Q7.

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Abu Dhabi Traffic Police recently announced a new design for their licence plates and it will be available for motorists at the Abu Dhabi Police Traffic and Licensing service centres from March 1st.

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All vehicles from the 2017 model-year entering the UAE will be rated according to their fuel-efficiency levels, according to the Emirates Standardisation and Metrology Authority (ESMA). All manufacturers and importers has already been informed about the new rating system.

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Here’s some good news for car owners in the UAE. The Supreme Committee for Consumer Protection at the Ministry of Economy has recommended that the warranty of vehicles shouldn’t be affected irrespective of where the vehicle is serviced. That means owners of new cars will soon be able to service their cars at any garage instead of getting ripped off by the dealer, without voiding the warranty.

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It’s been a busy month in the UAE as the Abu Dhabi Infiniti dealer opened a new showroom, the F1 in Schools programme had their finals, and the Dubai dealer for Nissan held a public launch for the new Maxima.

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The Cadillac CTS-V has been around for about a decade, but GM never quite figured out whether it was a compact or a midsize, and by their own chief engineer Tony Roma’s admission, couldn’t hack it as a rival to either the BMW M3 or the BMW M5, given its compromises to straddle the line. But things are much more focused this time around, with the latest CTS-V growing into a proper midsizer, leaving the compact super-sedan market to the ATS-V, which comes as a coupe too. We drove the company’s little new bruisers at Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi this week.

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The Honda NSX, or rather Acura NSX as it will be called in most markets, is a car that’s been painfully dragged on through the development process for almost a decade now. First announced in late 2007 as a concept, it was cancelled in 2008 due to the recession, then revived again as an actual Japanese SuperGT Championship race-car in 2010, then became a hybrid in 2011, and was finally unveiled in 2012 as a near-production concept, except that it was nowhere near production-ready yet. It’s still undergoing development, and the latest prototype is now doing the rounds of the UAE for hot-weather testing,

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The Ministry of Economy announced recently that all cars must be serviced at every 10,000 km, effectively banning the 5,000 km intervals that several Japanese-brand car dealers follow, something that consumers have effectively thought of as a rip-off all these years. The decision was made to “uphold consumer interests.”

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