[extract]One good reason to drive up north and into Kuala Lumpur is the SMART tunnel. It is presumably the longest stormwater drainage system in South East Asia and has a 4km long tolled motorway tunnel built into it. The tunnel is limited to light vehicles and if you were to drive up and into it (at a cost of RM2.00), you
I attended the launch of the new 911 Turbo last week at Stuttgart Auto's Leng Kee Road showroom. Well...to be honest, I didn't even know there was a 'new' Turbo in the works. When they finally unveiled the Turbo, low and behold it looked exactly the same as the previous model. I seriously think the Porsche designers are getting lazier with every 'new' Porsche. I know Porsche calls it 'evolution' but it looks as if evolution has skipped over the latest Turbo.
Granted the new Turbo comes
Ever wondered why so many wealthy Singaporeans advocate paying full cash for car purchases? Ever wondered what makes your car loan so profitable that dealers add a 'loading fee' to 'push' buyers to take up loans of minimum tenures? The answer lies in the deceptively quoted interest rates.
Now for the non-Finance trained among you, let me go through some basics. The key difference that we are concerned with is that interest rates for car loans (or strictly speaking hire-purchase) are quoted
The Peugeot SR1 hybrid 2+1 seater roadster concept that will be displayed for the first time at the upcoming 2010 Geneva Salon in March marks the stylistic design trends for the brand's future models.
This concept car showcases the firm's new design language that abandons the chunky shapes and the much criticized gaping-mouth grille of the current Peugeots in favor of more elegant and sharper looks that hark back to the Pininfarina-era Pugs. On a closer look, it bears a passing resembl
Last week Sentosa announced that with the opening of their Resorts World Sentosa, they'll be increasing charges for private vehicles entering into Sentosa. Currently it costs $2 per car with additional $2 per passenger. From January 18 onwards though it'll cost $6 to drive into Sentosa on weekdays between 7am and just before noon, and $7 per car on weekends, regardless of the number of people in the car.
Apparently management on the island are amending the costs of driving to the island to
[extract]
All this talk about cyclists and their rights to use the road has got me feeling slightly worried. It was not so long ago that legislators and lawmakers managed to convince car manufacturers to rethink and redesign cars to include energy absorbing bumpers, bonnets, windshields and A-pillars. According to various sources, up to 1 million people pedestrians worldwide are killed every year due to collisions with vehicles and this very bit of information had made legislators rise up to pr
It seems the Subaru Impreza WRX or the WRX STI Top Mount Intercooler scoop from the version 8 (applied model C to E in Subaru talk) is making headways in every vehicle out there. Check out the Toyota pickup above and you'd see the famous scoop looking its best. Modders are willing to put this scoop on any car they see fit. In Malaysia, I've seen the scoop on a Proton Wira, Proton Waja, the new Proton Saga, a couple of Perodua Kancils, a Perodua Myvi, Hyundai Accents and aside from the two pictur
[extract]
I recently met up with a few friends right after the Goodyear Formula Drift Malaysia. Some Malaysian bloke named Tengku Djan won the event in an 180sx with a S15 front end. It was during this conversation that one of us actually asked
[extract]
I was sitting in a chair at the reception area of a dance academy waiting for my daughter to finish her dance lesson when I realized why Volkswagen never rocked my boat, the GTI included. As I wrote elsewhere a few years ago, the reason I thought the GTI was not a fulfilling car to own was that the Mark5 Volkswagen looked too much like a mini MPV instead of a stonking hot hatch. When you parked it beside to its cousins the Audi A3 or the Skoda Octavia or even the larger sized A4, you
Ford Fiesta, VW Polo, Honda Jazz - Take a close look at the Chevrolet Aveo RS concept. It has caught my attention and you had better pay attention too!
Starting with the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, Chevy is out to change the Aveo's cheap and boring image into a product that we might actually desire. The process begins with the Aveo RS concept, which provides a preview of what to expect from the next-generation production Aveo when it arrives in showrooms sometime next year.
The Aveo R
Are you the kind who pokes fun at the male/female voice that comes with a GPS system, spewing mechanically accented directions at you on the way to a destination?
Well complain no more!! Garmin has now introduced a record-your-own-voice feature for their navigational instructions on their latest GPS systems!
Garmin says the PC-based application will take about 20 minutes to complete, but when you're done you can tell yourself when to turn instead of that computer generated voice that dom
Warning: This article is intentionally biased and opinionated. If you are too uptight to see the lighter side of things, please click the back button on your browser and select another post to read.
I am sure that there are many things that irritate, frustrate and tick us off when we drive on Singapore roads. Here is the top 5 list of motoring related things that get me just that little bit hot under the collar.
5. Leeches
Largely harmless but very irritating, leeches are non
The new Ghost is finally in town. Rolls Royce has unveiled the new "Baby Roller" as its affectionately known to the Singaporean public. It may be smaller than the Phantoms in Roll Royce's line, but the figures are not something to be laughed at. This is a Rolls Royce that you would actually want to drive rather than to be chauffeured in.
Its wheelbase measures 3,295mm which is 300mm shorter than the Phantom's, but when you look at it, it still is undeniably huge. The Ghost will haunt o
The Volkswagen Passat EcoFuel has recently edged out the Toyota Prius for the title of "greenest car in Europe." The International Automobile Federation (FIA) sanctioned the Eco Test that evaluated a number of cars. The winning Passat is powered by a 1.4-liter TSI inline-four fueled by natural gas. VW's TSI engines are turbocharged and direct injected.
Both the Passat and Prius scored 92 out of 100 on the test, but the less expensive natural gas fuel system gave the VW the edge. The test ev
It was a Thursday evening and I was on my way home, sitting on a bus along Eunos Link. I was looking out at the traffic with a tired mind after a long day at work and suddenly, this uncle cyclist caught my attention.
Initially, he was at the front of a traffic junction with the rest of the drivers and motorcyclists. When the traffic lights turned green, he cycled as fast as he could to keep up with the petrol powerplants beside him. The traffic is always quite busy on a weekday evening alon
The fairer sex won't be too happy about this, but a German study has shown that men are better at parking than women. The results of this study may potentially cause some outrage, but its really not as bad as it seems for women.
The results of the study show that female drivers take 20 seconds longer than their male counterparts to park a car, and even if they do get their cars parked, they are more likely to be crooked than a car parked by males, Telegraph reported. The experiment was con
[extract]
The "F" in F1 could stand for "First Aid" now.
In a surprise turn of events, Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone and partner Genii Capital emerged as a rival to Dutch super-car maker Spyker Cars NV in making last-ditch efforts to buy General Motors Co.
Its like a grandma walking up a flight of stairs in a 'liftless and escalatorless' office building during rush hour. She doesn't take up the entire space, but her walking stick does and no one can get past from the side. People are held up, late for work and no one's happy. This is the same for the motoring community when it comes to cyclists here. The roads are far too narrow to accommodate cyclists especially at peak hours and if there is a bunch of them, chances are the whole left lane will b
Following its world premiere at last year's Geneva Salon, Tata brought its oddly named Pr1ma concept car back home for the New Delhi motor show. Designed and built by famous Italian coachbuilder Pininfarina, the Pr1ma is suppose to offer an indication of how the next generation of Tata saloons could be stylistically interpreted.
The compact-size four-door saloon is based on the platform of the first Indian sedan, the Tata Indigo, featuring a wheelbase of 2.700 mm. Neither Tata or Pininfarin
I don't mean to sound pompous but perhaps someone at LTA actually read my entry 3 weeks ago and decided to get their act together. They've finally announced a date for when the new OPC scheme will be implemented.
From 25th January 2010 onwards, OPC car owners will be able to fully utilise their cars on Saturdays. Which pretty much means your car is now available the entire weekend without having to wait till after 3pm on Saturdays before it moves. It's seriously great news considering the a
Ah, the 166, 164, 155, 75, 159, 147, 33..... All of these are numbers that actually relate to models of Alfa Romeo. I love Alfas, in one form or the other they stir something deep down in me. No, not my loins but a certain flutter in the heart, my knees go weak and my head goes light. The feeling is somewhat similar to being in love I suppose, or the feeling you would have if either Eva Longoria or Mila Jovovich just passed you by and flirted at you. But somehow these were cars that were designa
On 3 Jan 2010, there was a special section on The Straits Times featuring cars that will arrive in Singapore during 2010. I was abit disappointed not to see the Alfa Romeo 159 1750 TBi.
The 159 1750 TBi made its debut at the Geneva Motorshow in 2009. The 1750 TBi engine is actually a 1742 cc turbocharged gasoline engine, which replaces both the 1.9 and 2.2 JTS naturally aspirated engines. Alfa revived the legendary "1750" label for this engine, hoping it to get recognition from its fans. Th
General Motors' UK arm, Vauxhall and consequently Opel, has just pulled the covers off the all-new Meriva. The new mini-MPV is the first Opel to feature GM's FlexDoor technology, showcased on the 2008 Meriva concept model.
FlexDoors is a concept whereby the rear-hinged back doors swing open towards the back of the car at an angle of nearly 90 degree. Even though the Meriva still uses a central B-pillar, the company said that the Flexdoors vastly improve the ease with which occupants enter a
LTA first implemented the Electronic Road Pricing system back in September of 1998 as a means of curbing increasing traffic in the city area. Ok, if I pretended to be a little naive, I could almost believe that they were genuinely implementing the system to aid in traffic flow. The revenue generating aspect of the system was just a fringe benefit.
That was 12 years ago. Some how I get the feeling that the ERP has slowly shifted into its primary purpose over the years. These days, it's more
What in the world?! Stumbled upon it while surfing a popular car site recently...
It's a chainlinked (as stated in the video title) 4x4 exhibition of nothing I've ever seen before! The wheels not only work independently of each other, but go a step further to exceed the articulation limits of a otherwise hardcore off-road vehicle. Controlling all of that movement is a Rube Goldberg gear network: 5.38 gears and centrally-mounted ARB air locker, chain gears at the swingarm pivots, and chains i
