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/ 2 November 2004
How do you find out which cars are the least trouble-free out there? Why, you go out and ask thousands of new vehicle owners to list the problems they’ve had with their purchases in the first few months of ownership. JD Power and Associates have been doing these studies for over two decades in the USA, and the results of their first South African survey have just been released. Some of their findings are very unexpected …
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/ 2 November 2004
German cartographer Karl Mauch would have approved. He was the man who first mapped the Sabie area in the 1860s, and nearly a century and a half later the German-built BMW R 1200 GS was put on the map in the same region. The R 1200 GS is lighter and consequently handles better than its predecessor over difficult terrain.
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/ 2 November 2004
If you did a search on Google and typed in the key words "guided missile", you’d come up with a multitude of products such as Exocet, optically tracked, laser-guided, wired-guided and nuclear. Page down and you’ll probably find "Renault Megane Sport" — hardly a product designed for warfare — hidden among the listings.
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/ 2 November 2004
There are countless cars out there that boast sequential gear shift, each with its own nomenclature. There’s SMG from BMW, Selespeed from Alfa, and M-MT from Toyota, to name a few. There’s tiptronic and multitronic too, just to confuse you. Each claim "almost seamless" changes, but few can match Audi’s latest trick, direct-shift gearbox (DSG).
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/ 2 November 2004
BMW’s foray into the hatch market has brought it under the spotlight, and credit must go to not only to the Bavarian auto-maker, but also to its controversial designer, Chris Bangle, who took some heat with the current 5- and 7-Series models. But the 645i Cabriolet and the new 1 Series have elevated him to the favourites list.
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/ 2 November 2004
Kia Motors has launched another new model in mid-sized four door sedan or five door hatch models. The Cerato’s aimed at giving the Toyota Corolla/RunX family and all their competitors severe headaches, and with the value-for-money it offers we think it’s likely to succeed.
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/ 2 November 2004
Racehorces are the traditional plaything for moneyed royals in the Middle East, but Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum al-Maktoum, the nephew of the crown prince of Dubai, prefers burning rubber. He plans to launch a rival to formula one (F1) grand prix racing.
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/ 2 November 2004
South Africa’s online publishers pulled in about 3,5-million unique users or readers and about 106-million page impressions in the month of August. The first statistics are out and reveal some remarkable trends. Matthew Buckland crunches the numbers.
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/ 2 November 2004
This editorial was supposed to be about the "public sphere". The intention was to link a number of the debates raised in the October issue. But in the middle of September the Audit Bureau of Circulations put out "ABC Alert No. 9", their response to Allan Greenblo’s article ("Circulation Conspiracy?") in the August 2004 edition of <i>The Media</i>, so the plan for this editorial had to change.