Hot Hatches

When I first got my license, my first car was a '93 Honda Civic coupe. Suffice to say it's a nice car to rough up your elbows in. Eventually, I spent a lot of time in a Peugeout 206 which I still have parked outside the house even today. In this time, I managed to get my hands on both an older Peugeot 205 GTi and the newer 206 RC.

Suffice to say, this made me fall in love with hot hatches. There's nothing quite like driving a car with almost no bonnet. Have a look at how Best Motoring does it:

Gotta love hatches..

KTM X-Bow - An affordable supercar?

As reblogged from Left Lane News:

Austrian motorcycle builder KTM first revealed its new X-Bow (crossbow) roadster in 2007, but sales didn't begin until 2008. The 1500-pound car has a four-cylinder Audi engine offering 237 horsepower at 6000 rpm and 228 pound-feet of torque between 2200 and 4000 rpm. Audi reportedly considered selling a version of the X-Bow under its own brand, but later dropped the idea.

A choice of either a six-speed manual or DSG gearbox is offered. KTM says the X-Bow will hit 62 mph in 3.9 seconds. A top speed of 180 mph is said to be possible. You can also look into the KTM X-Bow R which belts out an extra 60bhp to top out at 300bhp.

The X-Bow has no windshield, and instead will come with specially designed helmets, intended to offer shelter from the elements rather than full crash protection. KTM originally intended to build 500 X-Bows annually but has already received orders for over 1,000 examples. Pricing starts around $55,000 in the United States.

Between the X-Bow and the Ariel Atom, it appears as though more companies are attempting to offer supercar performance at a more main-stream price. While the new entrants don't offer the luxury or prestige of more expensive sports car, they do rival their performance numbers.

Although it remains to be seen if the new breed of ultra-light and affordable sports cars can sustain their popularity, the news of KTM's expansion seems to be good news for the segment.

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Now surely, at $55,000 it is still a sweet chunk of fuloos. Sure, it's an Audi engine and it looks very much like a street legal go-kart with 6 gears, but is it still an, 'affordable sports car'? So I snooped around some. Paid a visit to the dealers for KTM, Al Shafar Group, and had a quick chat with them about the X-bow. As it stands they sell the super light for AED 460,000. Four Hundred and Sixty Thousand Dirhams. Now assuming you did not have that much to write off in a single cheque and decide to pay it off in installments for the next 5 years, you would be shelling out AED 9,200 per month. Fark.

So, long story short, for the same amount of pesos that I'd shell out for the X-bow, I could buy this and turn it into this and still have money left over for a nice long cruise in the Bahamas.

There's no argument that the X-bow is one hell of a vehicle. Unfortunately, the money that you would have to give for it in this country renders it ridiculously overpriced. Sure the X-bow can do wonders around a track, but at what cost?

Unfortunate.