We usually don’t care when a car dealer holds an event to open a new service centre. In fact, we’ve never bothered attending any before. So when Al Futtaim Motors invited us to a Toyota service-centre inauguration, in the evening no less, we had half a mind not to go. But we did go. And damn can they throw a party.
The 2013 Toyota RAV4 was unveiled at the Los Angeles International Auto Show. The fourth generation RAV4 has been completely redesigned with a new engine under the hood.
When the Toyota 86 was launch earlier this year, Al Futtaim Motors had also announced their sponsorship of the Emirates Drifting Team, a UAE-based outfit that takes part in regional drifting events. While their main driver, Ahmed Al Amri, was using a Toyota Soarer earlier, he is now switching to this Toyota 86 now, although there isn’t much left of the original car any more.
Toyota’s UAE dealer says that a government-owned Toyota Land Cruiser Pick-up has clocked nearly 1 million kilometres.
So if you thought that the crazy automobile recall saga had ended, you were wrong. Since our last post on the recalls earlier this year, there were an insane amount of recalls that followed, from almost every car manufacturer in the world you can ever think of, almost all of them being issued following instructions from the U.S.-based NHTSA agency. And we could not bother to post each recall issue as a separate story, the task being as equally tedious as the reader-response to these. Here are all the recalls that could potentially be relevant to our region since April 2012.
This one was a long time coming. Sure, everybody else is busy comparing the Toyota 86 to everything from the VW Scirocco to the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. But aside from the Mazda MX-5, there was only one other car that’s similar to the 86 in recent history, and it’s the Honda S2000. It ceased production only 3 years ago, so it is still possible to buy one on the used market. And whadaya know, we actually own one in our fleet. And our car also happens to be one of the lowest-mileage S2000s in the world. This was going to be interesting.
When we were driving the top-spec automatic version of the Toyota 86 recently, one of our contributors happened to be testing the base manual version at the same time. So I and George here were in the unique position to check out the differences between the two cars, considering there is a sizeable difference in price between the two.
Yes, we’ve driven this car already. But that was the basic manual version. This is the top-spec automatic version.
The Toyota Yaris Trend is set to be unveiled at the 2012 Paris Motor Show. The Trend is designed to rope in younger customers by adding some bits and pieces to the exterior, and some changes have been done to the interior as well, to give it a more premium feel.
We were aware already that Dubai Police was trying out new patrol cars from various manufacturers, but it looks like they’re getting serious about it. They’ve released a photo, showing the 2012 Dodge Charger in a variation of the Dubai Police livery. In the background, we can spot a BMW 5-Series, a Toyota Prado and a Ford Explorer. Further photos show a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Durango in police markings as well.