Try a road trip this summer! use technology to enhance your travel experience!
MG Comet is like ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, which is basically a story of a man who ages in reverse. It’s shaped unconventionally for the size and features it offers, it’s expensive, and finally, it’s an EV which is still not a conventional purchase. It’s a bold move by MG and makes a case for itself if you are looking for a daily urban city commuter with tight parking spaces. It also makes sense if you want to have your grown-up child or elders drive and limit them to a speed limit of 100kmph. Also, if you want your running cost to be abysmally low and you want an easy, hassle-free car. Remember the Maruti Omni van? It had literally no bonnet in front, but it was so easy to manoeuvre. The Comet feels slightly similar but without its practicality of sitting six folks. MG Comet’s success or failure will pave the way for other manufacturers to experiment with different shapes and sizes and will make our roads more entertaining. Honestly, aren’t we bored of all similarlooking sedans & SUVs?
I recently rode the 2023 Harley-Davidson Nightster in Bangkok. While everything about the bike is spot on, it misses out on a very important thing like inbuilt navigation. Considering its form and function, it should have been offered. Even an after-market phone or GPS holder will spoil its whole look and be a lot more cumbersome. Similarly, for the last five years, McLaren has been selling the 720S without Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. While driving it in Dubai, I had to place a 1000 bucks phone stand to help me navigate. Weird, isn’t it? Are these expensive sets of vehicles meant only to be driven on the track or on roads which have been fixated in your memory? I usually use maps even for daily commutes from home to the office if for nothing other than to see traffic and not to miss any turn.
Continuing our conversation on shapes of cars, one single shape has really raked in huge revenues. We are talking about Urus from Lamborghini, which just recently recorded global deliveries of 2,623 cars and revenue up by 23% to 728 million euros in just the first three months of 2023. Urus is definitely taking the lion’s share of growth. Not only that, almost most supercar manufacturers except McLaren have an SUV shape. Ferrari calls it an FUV for the Purosangue is another story. The demand and lust for Purosangue are so much that billionaires are on the waiting list, and the terms laid by Ferrari is to have four other Ferraris before the Ferrari Utility Vehicle (FUV) is allotted to the owner. Even billionaires are made to feel poor. It is a prime example of what the shape of a car can do for its brand, and with iconic carmakers like Ferrari experimenting with body styles, the shape of things coming in future looks even more exciting.
