The name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but then again, most car names don’t nowadays. The Geely Emgrand X7 Sport is the latest player from China to take on the Middle East crossover market. And it’s probably the closest in terms of killing the Made-in-China stereotype.
The Skoda Octavia is long forgotten here as a viable contender in the compact segment, but when we finally took one for a spin, we found it to be a value-packed alternative to the venerable VW Golf.
We’ve been following the development of the Bentley Bentayga quite closely. We saw it up close in concept form, with that much-derided front-end. We saw it in its world debut at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, where we saw its famous Breitling dash-clock option that costs as much as the car. We even saw it in Dubai at the 2015 Dubai Motor Show where we interviewed one of the designers. Unfortunately we never got a chance to get behind the wheel since it hit the roads in 2016, but we were finally given this blue one to try out for a couple of days.
The American-built VW Passat got a minor facelift last year, having been on the market since 2012. We thought it’d have a bigger impact on the midsize sedan scene, given that it easily has the most cabin space in this segment, but key features were missing that may have caused it to become an also-ran. Several of those issues have now been addressed.
Honda has been busy trying new things lately, and while we may never see the fruits of their labour when it comes to the NSX or the Type-R, we are now getting a base version of the latest Honda Civic with a 1.6-litre engine. Spec it up for a few bucks though, and it’s hard to tell it apart from the 2.0-litre version.
The Audi Q5 has been around externally unchanged since late 2008. That’s an eternity in car years, but the German carmaker has been keeping the line-up fresh with new engine options and trim levels. One of those is the SQ5, which is the quickest version of the Q5 you can currently get. It’s a little late in the year to test an outgoing model, considering our more “prominent journalists” have already driven the all-new Q5 model in Europe recently, but this is actually our first time behind the wheel of any Q5.
Mazda has been on a roll lately, with their latest models appealing to everyone from commuters to enthusiasts, which no one else has been able to replicate. But there was one sore spot in their line-up which, oddly enough, is their flagship model — the midsize CX-9 crossover. It was a fairly competent vehicle, but it had been left unchanged for almost a decade. So we were really looking forward to driving their all-new 2017 CX-9.
It’s amazing that the previous-generation Renault Koleos ran for almost a decade with only minor changes. In the fast-paced crossover segment, that’s an eternity. However, it looks like the new model was worth the wait, as the Koleos seems to be reaching for the stars in the entry-level luxury segment now.
The Honda Accord got a major frontal facelift for 2016 in America, and it took a year to come here as a 2017 model. Now that they’re here, we took a spin in both the V6 and I4 versions to see if the changes are more than skin-deep.
The Lexus LX 570 is nearing the end of its lifecycle. If previous generations are anything to go by, there should be an all-new LX every 10 years, so the next-generation model is theoretically due by 2018. So it was a surprise that Toyota gave both the Land Cruiser and the LX 570 a major makeover for 2016, after a couple of minor facelifts since the current generation’s 2008 debut.