You’ve got about $80,000 to spend on a mid-sized luxury SUV, but is it best to go the traditional German route or take the alternative Swedish path?
If you're anything like me, you think SUVs are purpose-built to define drivers as kid-ferrying lemmings. Why can't you have the ability to haul kids, but the practicality of style and occasional off-road ability. That's what the people at Volvo and Mercedes-Benz thought when they created the Volvo V90 Cross Country and the Mercedes-Benz E-Class All Terrain...
The new-all Volvo S90 and next-generation Mercedes-Benz E-Class take on Audi's A6 to see which is the king of European plus-sized diesel sedan. It turns out that there's much more to play for in this segment beyond big legroom and low fuel bills...
For around $100k there's a huge choice of plus-sized premium SUVs on offer. We take eight of the finest on a three-day trek to decide which is the finest luxury family hauler decent money can buy...
Two giant releases on the large-SUV radar this year, the Audi Q7 and Volvo XC90, seem intent on reshaping the seven-seater landscape with aligned vision and purpose. Surprising, perhaps, given how differently the Swedish and German brands have been traditionally perceived, but also how different this Big Boy pair are by all appearances viewed from 50 paces...
Considering luxury SUVs are big business, the Lexus NX can’t be accused of being rushed to market. It’s more than a decade since Toyota’s luxury division introduced its last new SUV, the GX that is a spruced-up Prado and never sold in Australia. You then have to go back into the 1990s for the (LandCruiser-based) LX and (Highlander-based) RX...
The Mercedes-Benz C-Class was Australia’s favourite luxury car in 2013. Perhaps a more impressive fact, however, is that Stuttgart’s mid-sized model outsold every mainstream medium car except the Camry and Mazda 6. It’s fair, then, to call this a significant volume car – as is its decades-old arch enemy, the BMW 3 Series, which matched that last feat...
The Audi A4, BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class accounted for three-quarters of their segment’s sales in 2013, though that still meant one in four buyers looking for a mid-sized luxury car priced above $60,000 wanted something non-German. We had this factoid in mind when we decided to do something a bit different with our plan to compare the new-generation C-Class just released...
Performance sedans come in various degrees of hardcore, and the Audi S4 and Volvo S60 Polestar aim to play in a middle ground sweet spot. They are more premium than our home-grown FPV and HSV sports sedans, yet aren’t quite as focused as the German trio of BMW M3, Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG and Audi’s own RS5 Sportback...
‘Premium’ is perhaps the word most difficult to define in the automotive lexicon. To some, it may be about delivering an image above the mainstream and the connotations of a badge; to others it may be about the tangibles of a product and the engineering behind the façade...
