Autos

We all know the oil-rich states of the Middle East love to splurge large amounts of cash on ridiculous luxury items because they simply can. One great example is the Armored Rolls Royce that had a price tag of $8 million and it ended up in that region.

And now Nissan has announced that they will be releasing a special edition of the GT-R supercar just for the Middle East and are calling it Nissan GT-R VVIP Edition. The car has a price tag of $266,000 and will be available in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other GCC nations.

John and Helen Taylor, most of us have never heard of these two people but they are well known in some circles. These two love birds actually hold over 90 world records related to fuel economy and vehicles. Their latest record is for driving an incredible 1,621.1 miles through nine states on a single tank of fuel (diesel).

The vehicle used for this journey is the all-new 2012 Volkswagen Passat TDI SE sedan with a six-speed manual gearbox. They beat their previous record of 1,526.6 miles in Europe by 99.5 miles which was achieved with the Volkswagen Passage 1.6 BlueMotion diesel. Of course these guys aren’t your average drivers and they have techniques for achieving maximum fuel economy.

Hyundai and sister company, Kia, have been on a roll the last couple of years and 2012 has probably been one of the best years for them in terms sales and award winning vehicles they’ve been pumping out such as the Hyundai Sonata and the Kia Optima.

Today, all the attention is on the 2013 Hyundai Veloster Turbo. Yep, you read correctly. A turbo Veloster! The cute little car has grown some balls and it means business. The 2013 Veloster Turbo made its initial debut at the Detroit Motor Show back in January and Hyundai has now announced the pricing for this little pocket rocket.

Although not identical to the Fiat 500, you don’t have to be a genius to connect the dots and see how similar the Opel Adam is to the 500, especially from the rear view. The Fiat has seen success in the European market and GM’s European brand is eager to get in on the action.

The Opel Adam is certainly more aggressive looking and features a pinch of retro style designing. The Fiat 500 is a bit bland looking in my opinion. To set itself apart from the competition, the Opel is allowing customers to ability to customize the Adam to their liking on the inside of the vehicle as well as the exterior. The Opel Adam is also the first model in the A-segment that will have the option of LED daytime running lights.

Hot on the heels of the fantastic looking BMW Zagato Coupe concept, BMW releases the Zagato Roadster Concept; in collaboration with Italian coachbuilder Zagato.

Like the Zagato Coupe, the Roadster is based on the BMW Z4 and was produced after the positive reception the coupe received.  The roadster is virtually identical to the coupe, minus the roof; keen eyed readers will notice the crease on the side of the rear bumper has been moved up a bit on the roadster.

I wrote about the Jaguar F-Type sports car about a year ago, back then it was called the Jaguar C-X16 and was a concept.  Now we find out Jaguar is actually going to produce this car and is bringing it to the Paris Auto Show; I had said in my previous post that the car looked production ready and I was expecting it to be part of Jaguar’s lineup.

There have been some leaked photos of the Jaguar F-Type floating around on the internet but today we get official photos and information from Jaguar.  Although the concept car was a coupe, Jaguar only released images and info on the soft-top convertible; I’m expecting a coupe version some time in the future.

We’ve featured German car tuners, Brabus, on a few occasions here at Unfinished Man but never like this; all our previous posts have been on high-performance Mercedes cars but this post explores the other end of the spectrum, the smart fortwo Brabus Xclusive presented by Brabus UK.

The smart fortwo was launched in 1998 and over 1.3 million vehicles have been sold since.  In 2002 Brabus and smart teamed up to create a new line of customized fortwo city cars, in the last decade, over 50,000 of these tuned city cars have been sold.