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/ 16 October 2007
Give a dog a bad name … Gavin Foster looks at the car with the weirdest name in the world — the Nissan Qashqai. "In a year when there have been so many stunning new cars launched in South Africa, the Nissan with the funny name is, in my book, a shoo-in as a Car of the Year finalist."
The new Toyota Corolla appeals at a more primal level than pure logic dictates. It’s better looking by far than its predecessor, having lost that chunky styling, and it’s fun to drive. The car feels like a quality European offering, and even the base model is pretty well specced. Gavin Foster reports.
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/ 25 September 2007
Last week, at the Gauteng launch of its reborn Uno, Fiat kicked off proceedings by setting us loose on a section of the Carnival City casino off-road route. This seemed a little strange until we heard that the Italian company now includes a raised-body version of the Brazilian-built hatch in its line-up, intended to make it more suitable for those pesky African and South American dirt roads.
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/ 18 September 2007
Ford has introduced a new entry-level family sedan into the local market. Apart from the name, the new Ford Ikon shares little with its predecessor. It’s been almost two years since Ford dropped the Ikon from its South African line-up. At the time it was discontinued, the car came in six derivatives, using locally produced Rocam petrol engines of 1,3- and 1,6-litre capacities.
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/ 18 September 2007
Kawasaki’s brand-new 1400 GTR has arrived, and the bike’s as good as they get. Despite weighing in at a hefty 279kg dry — that’s 64 more than the ZX14 on which it is based — Team Green’s transcontinental hypercruiser feels surprisingly nimble once you’ve reached lift-off speed and retracted your undercarriage.
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/ 7 September 2007
The Mazda3 MPS looks frightfully civilised, but can let its hair down with a vengeance when the mood takes it. And there lies the rub. I suspect most people who buy a hooligan car would like it to have the odd body piercing, a tattoo here and there. The Mazda looks to my plebeian eye a little too highbrow and not enough Hillbrow, writes Gavin Foster.
Don’t you just hate it when they take something you love and change it for the worse? Henry Ford didn’t upgrade his Model T by reverting to a steam engine, and nobody tries to build wide-body jetliners with propeller engines any more, so why did Hyundai South Africa take that lovely six-speed manual gearbox out of its Tiburon 2,7 and replace it with an auto — a four-speed, on top of it all?
Four engines, three specification levels, two pronunciations and — no doubt — number-one seller in the C-class hatch sector. That’s the new Toyota Auris for you. At the launch preview in the United Kingdom a couple of months ago, we asked the Toyota UK representative handling the presentation how the name was pronounced, and he told us that it was "Owris".
Remember the Fiat Uno? The car everybody made jokes about — and then bought? Between 1990 and 2005, the little cars — then assembled by Nissan South Africa — became favourites with people who wanted a simple, reliable car that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to buy or to run.
Driving in the United Kingdom, I discovered, is not as entertaining as it is here, because there’s so much traffic that you rarely get a chance to speed — and when you do, Big Brother is watching. Signs light up and chant "You’re gonna go to the devil!" when you exceed the speed limit by two miles per hour, writes Gavin Foster.