The air bag: UAE conditions make for testing times

No journalist in the whole region is in a position to test a car thoroughly. We don’t have the time, the space and, with one or two exceptions, the technical capability.

A Range Rover during hot-weather testing in Dubai. Newspress Ltd

I wear a few hats around here. I drive other people's cars quite a lot and manage to rack up the miles on my own. I've been around a while as well, and have been credited, erroneously as it transpires, with the invention of the rear-view mirror. I have never looked back since.

One of the things I’m regularly asked to do is to test a car – it goes with the territory of being a motoring journalist and event organiser. It’s relatively important that one knows what a car is capable – or in some cases incapable – of before letting customers, principals or even a walk-in from the street, loose in a new toy.

But there is a lot of nonsense talked about testing. Several manufacturers have engineering departments based in Dubai, which are comprehensively staffed and equipped to do proper testing. Their work is taken as a contribution to similar work carried out in the Arctic, Death Valley, the Australian Outback, the painfully starved air of the Andes and the permanent humidity of the Far East. Vast quantities of data are dissected in the most infinitesimal detail, and, finally, prepared as a blueprint for the car that you and I can collect from the showroom, in the expectation that it will work as it’s supposed to.

Which brings me to the point: no journalist here – not me or anyone else in the whole region – is in a position to test a car thoroughly. We don’t have the time, the space and, with one or two exceptions, we don’t have the technical capability. Above all, we don’t, and never will, have the weather conditions or the roads that will allow us to get close to the manufacturers’ stated performance figures for speed, acceleration, economy, stopping power or fundamental engine output. Every one of these things is calculated in optimum circumstances – none of which we have here.

Where does that leave us? Simply, it’s in a position of being able to give a subjective view, one which you will either agree or disagree with, based on experience and the privilege of being able to do this more often than most.

If I get into a car for the first time and don’t get a feel for, an impression of, or a message from the car in question within the first couple of hours, I’m not doing my job properly. If it doesn’t start to tell its story through my hands, my feet, my eyes and, yes, the seat of my pants, then there’s no story to tell, and all the numbers, equations and charts that manufacturers make readily available to us are pointless.

Driving is a privilege, not a right; a passion, not a chore. And it’s incumbent on us, as your source of opinion and subjective thought, to bring you the impressions a car makes on us. Is it as good as it should be? Does it do the job it was designed to do as well as others in its class? Are there any areas in which it could and should be better? Will it serve its purpose? Is it, in the final analysis, as good as it claims to be? Those are the questions that need answering.

If you want figures, acceleration times and top speeds, look them up in one of the anorak websites that specialise in all that stuff; no matter how hard any of us try, we’re not going to match them.

And does it really matter in the grand scheme of things if you think you can shave a bazillionth of a second off a zero-to-100kph time, in a car which has an inaccurate speedo, the wrong tyre pressures, ­substandard fuel, a relatively inexperienced driver and is running at 20 degrees above its optimum ­temperature?

I think not. What you really need to know is: “What was it like?” And that’s something that you’ll always find out in these pages.

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