News round-up: Ferrari Racing Days, Porsche 918, Mclaren P1, Range Rover V6, Spyker & Chevrolet SS
Here’s the latest automotive news in brief from the Middle East and around the world.
Here’s the latest automotive news in brief from the Middle East and around the world.
The Porsche World Roadshow is an event held around the world almost every year by the German carmaker’s dealers, to showcase their latest models to potential customers in the comfort of, well, a racetrack. We’ve attended the UAE event in years past, but for whatever reason, we did not get an invite from Porsche this year. But then an invitation came in from the most unlikely of places — Emirates NBD Bank!
At the recently-concluded 2013 Qatar Motor Show, Porsche did three regional premieres, for the Cayenne Turbo S, new generation Cayman and 911 Carrera 4, and they showed off one of the first Panamera Platinum Edition models that arrived in the GCC market.
Gone are the days when you got what you paid for. Four luxury carmakers — BMW, Jaguar, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz — have issued recalls on various models, some more serious than others.
The new Porsche Cayman made its debut at the Los Angeles International Auto Show. Lower and longer than the previous generation, under the hood are no surprises as the Cayman shares the same engines as the Porsche Boxter.
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.
First the trend among German carmakers was to build “four-door coupes”. Now the trend seems to be “four-door coupe station-wagons”, or whatever the marketing people want to call them. Porsche has just unveiled a near-production concept of their upcoming Panamera Sport Turismo wagon.
Porsche personnel have confirmed that a wagon variant of the Panamera will be showcased at the 2012 Paris Motor Show.
The Porsche Macan was announced only a few months ago, in the latest idea by the former sportscar-maker to move downmarket in order to better compete with crossovers like the Audi Q5. Ironically, it was also recently announced that Volkswagen now completely owns Porsche, so essentially the competition for female (and female-like) buyers will be in-house. Here are some photos of the upcoming Macan, caught hot-weather testing in Dubai.
The latest 2012 Porsche 911 is the first all-new design for this long-running sports car since 1998, when it first went water-cooled. Every model before that was simply an update on the original design that debuted in 1963! With cars like the Nissan GT-R proving that the Germans can be beaten at their own game, engineering stagnation is something Porsche cannot take for granted any more, and with the new 911, they have moved their star model further upscale. The only job left now, as per tradition, is to churn out a million variants, the first of which is the 911 Cabriolet.