2007/01/17

Diversity

In yesterday's story about the WWF report, one Emirati was quoted as saying "we are a multicultural country with 180 nationalities", which is really diverse. But I think that the real diversity here is the vehicles.

Of course you have the usual suspects that you see on American roads, German, Japanese, American, French, Swedish, Korean, etc. But I have seen cars brands here that I had never heard of back home. Tata trucks and buses, Skoda cars, Seat, even Chinese pickup trucks. Bss took this pic of a Chinese Gonow pickup in our neighborhood because it looks like the truck is saying "go now".



I read a story about a year ago about the Great Wall pickups and the problems that they have had with trying to pass European and American safety standards, but I can't find it now. I assume that is why I had never heard about them before.

Then, just when I thought I had seen it all, on the way home from work today I was passed by a bright pink pickup with "CHRISTIAN Dior" (including the all caps on Christian) painted on the tailgate.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hehehe,

I recall riding in a taxi once. A GMC pickup went by us and the taxi driver looked at it, gave he his thumbs-up, and said "GMC (i.e. jims) good!" He didn't say G-M-C he pronounced it as if it were a word.

A Pakistani friend of mine was asking about the video standard used in the states. I said "Oh N-T-S-C" and then asked me to spell it, I said "N-T-S-C" and he then said "No, you have said it, now spell it!' I then explained to him it was an acronym and went into that.

Al Ain Taxi said...

How dumb is this: I had no idea that Great Wall was a brand of Pick Up. Every time I saw one I thought it was delivering take out food from a restaurant called 'Great Wall'. Durrrr.

Brn said...

aat,

It took me quite a while to figure out that they were the brand name for the truck. My first thought was that it was some sort of reinforced tailgate. I think that I only learned that Great Wall was the name of the company when I saw that they all have "Deer" on the side and Googled deer and pickup.

Anonymous said...

The Chinese are not doing too badly with automotive exports to our region. Great Wall seems the best known among puck-ups, with the "Deer", which is a sort of identical twin to the Toyota Hilux (atleast, on the outside).

Then of course there's GONOW, wich I think really is meant to be "Go, now".

There's also Jin Bei, which produces an amazing twin brother of the Toyota Coaster 14-seater minibus.

Then again there's Wu Ling (seen it both in Al Ain and Dubai) with a tiny delivery van quite closely modelled on a similar one by Daihatsu.

In addition to all this, I saw yet another pick up whose front end was based on the new Prado, but unfortunately I didn't get the name.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I meant *pick-ups*...you do understand, don't you.