Ford Australia has had a hole in its product line-up since October 2016. A 4.89-metre hole to be exact, and it went by the name of Territory. There’s been the Everest, of course, but ute-based SUVs still don’t drive like a car-based SUV, and the Ranger-derived Everest is notably more expensive than the Territory was. A solution, however, has arrived from the US...
Seven-seat SUVs are fast becoming Australia’s must-have family utility tool. Station wagons are passé, and the flexibility to add two extra passengers at a moment’s notice is a lure too strong to ignore. To put some of the more urban-friendly family haulers to the test, we’ve assembled the Toyota Kluger and Mazda CX-9 and aimed them directly at the face of the recently introduced Holden Acadia – Holden's new family hero arriving via American subsidiary, GMC...
Mazda Australia clearly believes there’s big business in catering for large families. Having successfully lobbied in 2007 to grab a right-hand-drive version of the US-focused CX-9 seven-seater SUV, the company has now diverted the new CX-8 seven-seater from the Japanese brand’s domestic market...
Mid-2018 marked another milestone moment in Australian new-car sales. The mid-sized SUV displaced the small car as Australia’s favourite vehicle type in June. It happened again in August, September and October. It was perhaps only inevitable after SUVs started outselling passenger cars in 2017...
The medium-SUV segment is now, along with dual-cabs, the 'real Australia' battleground for buyers down under. A well-worn cliché, sure ('real Australia' I mean), but with the demise of the large sedan as the go-to vehicle of choice for Aussies, it's now medium SUVs that serve duty as family transport in suburbs across our wide brown land...
Could this be the family car battle of head versus heart? The Toyota Camry SL V6 and Mazda 6 GT turbo both stick to a well-worn medium sedan formula, although manage to avoid looking like carbon copies of each other – both aesthetically and mechanically...
People-movers are pretty passé, which explains the continual success of seven-seat crossover SUVs like the group tested here. We’ve assembled what we consider to be six of the best, with the added bonus that all are either new models or at least recently upgraded...
It’s fair to presume a couple of things when you consider that non-premium small cars are amongst the biggest-selling – make that the biggest-selling – passenger cars out there. And it’s also easy to presume that you don’t get much goodness for your modest spend...
I like the idea of new things, new technologies, and new possibilities. But when reality sinks in, I still tend to prefer the experience of old things. That’s not always true, of course. I’m much happier spreading store-bought butter on pre-baked bread than I am churning my own milk and kneading the dough myself. I have to draw the line somewhere...
MPV. SUV. LCV. Three acronyms. Three different styles of vehicle designed to shift large families. The Multi-Purpose Vehicle (MPV) camp is represented by the Kia Carnival that accounts for about half of all people-mover sales in Australia. Released in 2015 in third-generation form, the Korean eight-seater has been given an update for 2018...
Medium-sized passenger cars, like many other ‘traditional’ segments, are on the nose with Aussie buyers as SUVs continue to star in the sales charts. That makes buyers of cars like the Ford Mondeo and Mazda 6 real winners, with once humdrum medium sedans pushing into near-premium territory as a play to gain buyer attention...
