Step back 10 years in time to the 2003 Geneva Motor Show and you may remember the reveal of the 1st ever Lamborghini Gallardo, boasting 369kW from a normally aspirated 5-litre V10, relayed to the ground via a robotized manual gearbox and permanent all-wheel drive. Fast forward 10 years and 32 variations later and the final Gallardo, a Gallardo LP 570-4 Spyder Performante in Rosso Mars red, has rolled off the production line at Sant’Agata Bolognese.
In LA last week, Subaru revealed the next generation WRX, with more power, less displacement, a CVT gearbox, and what they promise to be far better dynamics.
There’s good news and there’s bad news for you. The bad news is Datsun is back and they aren’t producing another SSS, but the good news is that Nissan has just revealed these 2 concepts in Tokyo, which could have a SSS badge slapped on them now and they would … Read more
Cheap vehicles – no one likes to say that they love them, no one dreams of having them for the most part, yet they survive. They live on and they sell, in great numbers at that. Perhaps the most interesting “cheap vehicle” of current times is the Renault Duster, or “dump truck” as my girlfriend decided to call it after its, erm, brown colour to rival the land mines left in your back yard by Spot, the dog.
For many years, big bang theorists and evolutionary believers have pondered and searched to find “the missing link”. Well for Opel, they’ve found it, or created it rather. It’s the Opel Astra sedan, back for the first time in nearly a decade! For a while, Opel were lulled into the European theme of hatchbacks, but South Africa felt neglected – after all, the Opel Astra Euro series sedans are some of the most popular old cars on our roads. But Opel has triumphantly stepped back into the saloon game without missing a beat, almost as if they’d never been gone.
Off-road parks are a novel idea – you have off-road trails designed specifically to be conquered, within a short drive of the city, and you have experts to help you out along the way should something go wrong. But off-road parks are tried and tested; everyone knows they can be conquered. So what would happen when we deviated from the norm and decided to take on a construction zone and some naturally occurring terrain in an unlikely candidate, the Subaru Forester XT?
This comparison may be deemed to be unfair in many ways, but what the heck! We took a Subaru Forester XT, an SUV that makes no claims at being an off roader, and pitted it head to head against the Renault Duster 4×4, in diesel power format, to see whether they could deliver or not.