You may have seen or heard of the city Dubai for its flashy supercars, weird car makeovers and extreme drifting events. But despite being provided with top notch infrastructure, they also like big and bulky SUV's. Maybe because they are surrounded by desert, or petrol is cheap there, or they simply have the money and do not know what to do with it.

Regardless being a city surrounded by sand, Dubai is an ideal place for hot weather vehicle tests and the sandy dunes would be ideal for all-wheel drive testing as well. Bearing this in mind, Jaguar Land Rover further enhanced its Middle East test programme by opening a new engineering test centre in Dubai to conduct extreme hot weather vehicle research, development and testing.

Temperatures in the desert typically reaching up to 50 degrees Celsius in the summer months. According to Google, its 34 degrees Celsius in Singapore today and I nearly died trying to cross the road after lunch.

The new 11,120 sq. ft. facility in the Al Barsha area of Dubai, replaces an existing smaller facility, and will offer a comprehensive range of tests including durability, calibration and hot weather testing for heat and humidity. The engineering team at the new centre will also test powertrains, chassis and heat and ventilation systems, as well as the off-road and sand driving capability of Land Rover's unique Terrain Response system.

Including Dubai, Jaguar Land Rover has a network of five global test facilities at Nurburgring in Germany, Arjeplog in Sweden, Phoenix and International Falls in the U.S.A.

Jaguar Land Rover Director of Engineering Technical Services Martyn Hollingsworth said, "Jaguar Land Rover has ambitious plans for growth, and since 2008 we have been investing to enhance our engineering capability to help us deliver an unprecedented number of new and refreshed Jaguar and Land Rover models."

He continued, "Our new facility in Dubai is four times the size of the previous test centre and will enable us to enhance our testing of future products and technologies. The engineering team is focused on the quality and durability of our products and an important part of this is rigorous environmental testing of our vehicles to ensure they can withstand even the harshest conditions."

Robin Colgan, Managing Director Jaguar Land Rover MENA (Middle East and North Africa) added, "Dubai offers some unique and very challenging environmental conditions, so if a vehicle passes our tests here we know it will perform in any hot weather environment. The new facility will be crucial to the company's continued success as every model for the European and MENA markets will be certified here in Dubai following thorough testing before going into global production."

Dubai is one of the seven emirates that makes up the UAE and has the largest population and second largest land mass after the capital city of Abu Dhabi. It has the tallest building in the world – the Burj Al-Khalifa - where Tom Cruise was dangling out of in Mission Impossible: Ghost

Protocol.