Fly The White Flags

Surrender to the luxury of these rival 2-litre SUVs and yield to the demands of modern motoring in style.

- Dr Kong Yongyao

MY parents, for the first time in a long while, surprisingly greeted the shiny new four wheeled things I brought home with effusive praise. 

“Okay lah, nice cars,” they gushed, attention briefly transfixed with deadpan cursory regard. Their monotone voices positively fizzled with degrees of excitement greater than they have ever mustered for any one of the sports cars, supercars or bright orange thunder-machines I have disturbed their slumber with.

“Quite comfortable,” their relentless praise continued, as they stepped out upon arriving at my grandmother’s place. “What’s for dinner?” The avalanche of exhilaration finally slushed to breathless halt.

It warms this son’s heart to see his parents’ eyes sparkle with the verve he thought long lost to the ether, when they would regale him with tales of sensual Alfa Romeos, zippy Austins and regal Mercs that made up the automotive landscape of their youth.

It’s nice to hear them again fete with faintly disinterested praise two finely built, slightly tall appliances of transport.

What’s more, the market is full of these things now, and they are everywhere for us to admire. Like iPhones! What a time to be alive.

Anyway… Volvo XC60 and Lexus NX. Luxurious crossovers. Hot cakes in today’s automotive marketplace. Tall, tippy things of leather, steel and CPUs. If the format is familiar though, the shapes themselves tell tales of each company’s recent rapid evolution.

Lexus, previously head prefect of the anonymous beige-box club, suddenly had an epileptic fit and emerged with its designers brandishing spiked hair and serrated knives.