It feels like the Lexus IS 300 has been around for ages. To breathe new life into the nameplate, Lexus has now created the IS 300 C, a hard-top convertible that aims to kill two markets with one stone. We got this car for this Eid-Al-Adha, a brand new one with only 20 km on the odo.
There is only so many ways that we can make a Toyota Yaris review interesting. The hottest new car of this year that will sell in droves no matter what we say, we were given the option to pick a colour, and we picked red. You know, like a Ferrari.
We’d been asking for a round with the new BMW 5-Series ever since it was launched last year. We weren’t invited to two launch events for the car. We asked for this specific car only five times since we saw it on the cover of the now-defunct CAR Middle East in October 2010, and many other feeble magazines since then. Even a relatively-new website called Crank & Piston got a round with it for a month. We’ve been told before that we “don’t fit the criteria” for interacting with certain European luxury brands, but this is ridiculous. However, now with 30,000 km on the clock,
It’s funny that we’ve been testing a string of VWs for the past two months, but delayed driving till now the one VW that everyone’s been requesting us to test. This here is the Volkswagen Golf GTI.
Continuing our series on Volkswagen (hey, they’re offering us car after car, so why not), this week we have the 2011 Volkswagen Touareg, a 4×4 that shares its platform with the pricier Porsche Cayenne. Considering we drove a Porsche Cayenne V6 just a few weeks ago, it felt a whole lot similar, yet different.
You might be wondering why we’re driving the new Ford Explorer again. Aside from still trying to figure out whether it is officially a 2011 or a 2012, we had some issues with our previous grey test vehicle due to earlier abuse. So Ford has now offered us a fresh new vehicle to play with.
The Renault Safrane has a bit of an awkward history. It is essentially a rebadged Samsung SM5 built in Korea and based on a Nissan Altima platform. It was first offered in the GCC around 2008 and was on sale in that older form right until earlier this year as a 2011 model. And then it was replaced by this all-new version, while still labelled as a 2011 model. Interestingly, we recommended the older version as a value-packed family commuter, even went ahead and purchased one for our long-term fleet, and whether anyone admits it or not, helped sell a whole bunch of them thanks to our endorsement,
The Porsche Cayman R does not need to exist. It is merely a stripped-down Cayman S with 10 extra horses and tighter suspension. Maybe we need to correct ourselves — the Cayman R does not need to exist as a car that the general public can buy. What Porsche should do is slap on some stickers and sell it only as a professional track race-car.
Our run with Volkswagens continues, this time with the VW Scirocco 2.0TSI. After driving the VW Golf R, we didn’t expect much from this one, but our time with the car has been pleasantly surprising.
This is the first time we’ve ever driven the Porsche Cayenne outside of a racetrack. Memories of chasing 911s in the Cayenne Turbo at the Porsche Roadshow are still fresh in our minds, but the streets are a different thing altogether. And even if it was for only a day, we still got a decent look at the most overlooked of Cayennes – the base V6 version.