Dubai

One of our readers caught this body-kitted 2014 Nissan Tiida at the Dubai showroom of Arabian Automobiles. The kit is now an optional extra, in case you are into that sort of thing.

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The other day I had the misfortune of coming across a self-aggrandising comics-worshipping nincompoop who ran his own video-game blog that no one ever heard of, jabbering about which cars are good and which aren’t, because of his vast experience with Playstation racing games and taking “selfies” with other people’s cars. I generally walk away from pointless arguments with “progressive” hipsters nowadays, but if I had told this armchair-racing expert that the Bentley Continental GT V8 S is better than the much pricier GT Speed model, he’d have a hissy fit!

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If you remember, we took a 2015 Mazda 3 hatchback for a spin a couple of weeks ago, and found it to be promising. This week, we got the sedan version, essentially the same car with a boot, and got to dig deeper into what we were expecting to be the best compact car ever, given how good the Mazda 6 is.

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The last time we drove a Toyota FJ Cruiser, it was 2007 and the recession hadn’t hit yet. Fast-forward to 2014, and that recession has become a footnote in history, but the FJ Cruiser is still around, not looking any different than when it first started out. Now, depending on which rumours you believe, the FJ is on its last legs, and the UAE dealer has created some special models to keep interest alive. One of those models is the FJ Street, a pre-pimped offroader that’s intentionally more about style than about offroading.

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This GTS here is the V8 version of the Maserati Quattroporte. And they’ve tacked on a turbocharger as well. When we drove the Quattroporte S before, with a turbo V6, we felt it was all the car you’d ever need, even in terms of power. And we were right. Because this here GTS, it is absolutely mental!

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Luxgen, Taiwan’s own automotive brand, has finally arrived in the UAE. Better known for building Toyota Corollas in Taiwan on a contract basis, we last encountered Luxgen here in 2010 when we had a chat with the CEO about their Middle East plans. The brand already set up dealerships in Oman and Saudi Arabia in the past few years.

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Clearly, Infiniti is still in the start-up phase. Despite having started right after Lexus a quarter of a century ago, they’re still doing things a start-up would, such as continually changing the plan to keep going. They started off back then with nameplates like the Q45 and the J35, none of which survived beyond the early 2000s. Their flagship switched from a full-size sedan to a Nissan-based full-size SUV, the QX56. And most recently, they decided to dump all their old nameplates that were just beginning to gain traction, such as the G37 and the FX50, in favour of a Q-based naming convention that no one has quite figured out yet.

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Mazda’s been on a roll for the past year, launching all-new models that use an all-new design language that basically adds luxury-car styling cues that go well with their sporty handling. Their latest introduction is the redesigned Mazda 3, a car we expected to hit above its weight. And from what we could tell from our briefer-than-brief encounter, it didn’t disappoint.

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Al Futtaim Motors, the UAE dealer for Toyota, has created their own special-edition model at the lower end of the Toyota Camry range, dubbed the S Plus edition.

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Depending on your views, Porsche either keeps launching a lot of new models, or they rarely launch new models. That’s based on whether you think every single variant of the 911 debuting like clockwork every few months is a new model, or whether you consider an entirely new vehicle line to be a new model. We are in the latter camp, and we were interested to see what Porsche had cooked up for the compact crossover segment, with the all-new Macan.

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