first look

There was a time when BMW said they refuse to make an M version of the 7-Series because it would be too far away from the concept of the ‘M’ cars. They still believe that, so there is no M7. And then they went ahead and created the BMW X5 M. While the death of the original ‘M’ philosophy is lamented, the new ‘M’ philosophy opens the door to a whole new range of physics-defying vehicles that can finally take the fight to AMG, while butt-slapping Audi back to the hole they came out from.

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So we finally get our hands on the all-new BMW Z4, if only because we now have friends within BMW. We suspect our tester, with 12000 km on the clock already, is really a 2009 rental model, but for the purposes of this preview we’ll refer to it as a 2010, to avoid appearing outdated. Remarkably, the car looks to be in perfect shape, which can’t be said for most test vehicles we get from Infiniti. Maybe the German firm is now concentrating on durability more than the Japanese themselves?

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This is one vehicle that I wasn’t even aware it went on sale in the UAE. The 2010 Cadillac SRX, a distant cousin of the lowly Chevrolet Captiva, carries the torch for the outgoing SRX, which was actually a larger vehicle. We were actually supposed to drive it next week, but a GM man suddenly showed up at my doorstep with the crossover yesterday, and I was like “ehh, okay?”

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Almost a year after we drove the V8-powered 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS at a constrained launch event, we finally managed to get our hands on a Camaro again, if only for a couple of days. This time, it is the base V6 model, which is good, because we never tried it out before.

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The Honda CR-V, among the best-selling cars in the UAE, has received a facelift for the 2010 model year. Unfortunately, there is no upgraded engine for the GCC version, but from what we could see, that doesn’t really matter in a popular crossover like this. It can sell solely based on its other features.

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Having never personally driven a Jeep Wrangler, I was actually looking forward to picking up this one from the local dealer for two days. Imagine my surprise when they handed me the keys to a modified Unlimited, fitted with a factory-original lift kit and other accessories.

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After months of waiting while it did the rounds of art shows and what not, the Mini Cooper S Cabrio was finally delivered to our doorstep for three days, still in one piece and still bearing some stickers from its artsy experience.

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It just so happened that when we secured the new-for-2009 Honda Jazz for a test drive, we also got a call from BMW’s rep offering us a Mini Cooper S Cabrio. We kept both, if only for a novelty comparo article later on. However, unfortunately or fortunately, we only got to keep the 118 hp Jazz for a less than a day-and-a-half, while we had the 172 hp Mini for three whole days. So we parked the Cabrio and trundled around Dubai exclusively in the Jazz for a day.

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There was a time when General Motors poured all their resources into developing full-size 4x4s such as the Chevy Tahoe. The U.S. operation had pretty much sidelined the sedan market, churning out midsizers so embarrassingly bad that they turned to their Australian and Korean outfits when it came time to expand the GCC line-up. But as Americans started to give up their ever-hungry trucks for fuel-efficient cars, the General came up with the all-new “award-winning” Chevy Malibu.

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The 2010 Toyota “Land Cruiser” Prado is currently the most researched vehicle in the region. We got one for two days, and being the only one we’ve seen on the road so far, we would’ve thought that we’d be swarmed by middle-aged family men on the streets of Dubai, inquiring about this dream car. But we weren’t. We got a few people standing around staring at it here and there, but they were probably the intelligent ones. Because if you don’t concentrate hard enough, it is easy to dismiss it as the old model.

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