This is it. The car that melds your muscle-car fantasies with your practicality needs. The 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT is expensive, but with performance that keeps up with all sorts of overpriced German SUVs, it’s a relative bargain.
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!
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.
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!
The last time we got behind the wheel of a Dodge Challenger SRT8 was back in early 2011, driving a 2010 version with the 6.1-litre Hemi and standard bouncy suspension. Even then, it left a mark on our minds, more so than its two other rivals, as the best iteration of a true muscle-car that harks back to the hey-days of the 1960s. And then the 392 version came out in late 2011, with a host of upgrades, including a 6.4-litre Hemi and adaptive suspension. But this is the first time we got to try it out.
Cadillac has had many “rebirths” over the past two decades. The STS back in the day heralded a new kind of Cadillac. Now it’s gone. Then there was the first CTS. A great car, and incidentally, the first official test car we ever got, but that final bit of refinement was missing. Now we have the ATS. And this is as close to nailing it as they’ve ever come, if not doing so already.
Full-size sedans take a back seat to midsizers and compacts in the UAE, but they’re big business in Saudi Arabia, the largest automotive market in the GCC. And the Americans are especially good at building big sedans. The 2014 Chevrolet Impala is a very important car for General Motors, and the importance they gave it is apparent from the first time you lay your eyes on one.
A few of our car-enthusiast friends, all of whom we’d met via the legendary DriveArabia meets, asked us if we wanted to join them in a trip down to the ubiquitous Rainbow Sheikh’s car museum in Abu Dhabi, an hour-and-a-half drive from the better side of downtown Dubai. We’re generally averse to long drives, but figured we’d join them if we didn’t have to do all the driving. I also dropped Chrysler an email in the off-chance that they could provide a Dodge Durango R/T for the trip, and they confirmed a ride for us within 5 minutes. When the weekend came,
We pick up our first Audi for a test-drive after a nearly decade-long hiatus. And it’s a good one too, for our re-introduction to the brand. The facelifted A5 Sportback, with the supercharged V6, is quite a car.
It’s cool to drive a car before it’s properly hit the streets. It becomes easier to gauge public reaction to a new model, and the Maserati Ghibli truly qualifies as a new new model.