First Drive Review
Having consulted our Dubai guidebook and determined that it had no Arabic translation for "May we use your 10 camels to pull out our Porsche?" we started digging.
Perhaps the sight of two palefaced westerners scooping sand with their bare hands from under a new 520-hp Porsche Cayenne Turbo S near a busy freeway is a common one in Dubai, because nobody stopped to help. They probably figured the shurta, the police, who until then had been as ubiquitous as camel droppings in their green-and-white Chevy Luminas — actually, rebadged Aussie Holden Commodores — would arrive soon. They never did.
There's a perverse pleasure in telling friends you're headed to the Persian Gulf for work. To many Americans, any destination between Bucharest and Bangkok is certain to have bomb-toting fundamentalists on every street corner. Stuck for something sage to say, some tidbit of hard-learned wisdom from their own forays into Third World hot spots such as Cancún, most people just grab your shoulder and whisper, "For God's sake, be careful!"
If they only knew. Visiting largely crime-free Dubai is less dangerous than visiting Dubuque, or even Miami Beach, a copy of which Dubai seems intent on making itself. Situated on the toe knuckles of the great mukluk boot that is the Arabian Peninsula, Dubai is the second largest and second richest of the seven semi-independent kingdoms that comprise the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dubai wasn't blessed with copious oil and gas deposits as was the wealthier and somewhat more conservative Abu Dhabi emirate to the southwest, so Dubai has to hustle for a buck.
Run by the Al Maktoum family since 1833 more or less as a privately held corporation (check out the clan's Web site at www.sheikhmohammed.co.ae), Dubai lives mostly on trade and tourism. A forest of high-rise luxury hotels and condos are ascending along Dubai's seashore where the two seasons are "hot" and "hotter." The former has temperatures of 80 to 90 degrees, the latter 105 to 115 degrees with humidity reaching 95 percent. The most ethereal of these new landmarks is the 1050-foot-high Burj Al Arab hotel, completed in 1999, shaped like a translucent catamaran sail and gilded with real gold inside. The smallest one-bedroom suite, even in the broiling summer off-season, is $1160 per.
But the Burj Al Arab seems quaintly modest compared with Dubai's latest fascination: artificial islands. Three date-palm-shaped islands — the biggest one is 8.7 miles long and 5.3 miles wide — are already being built from trucked-in rock and sand, and a $2 billion project called "The World" envisions an atoll of 250 to 300 "personal" islands that, from orbit, will look like a map of Planet Earth. Who will live in Dubai's new air-conditioned fantasy of the future? Jaguar drivers, according to one developer whose signs all over town advertise a free Jag with every new-condo purchase.
If it were a free Cayenne Turbo S, we might be tempted. When it's not hopelessly stuck in sand, the Turbo S is stupidly fast, with a belligerent roar from the twin-turbo 4.5-liter V-8. Larger intercoolers and new control software allow for boost turned up to 12.9 psi, or 4.3 psi higher than that of the base $91,015 Turbo. It's basically the same hardware as is currently offered in the Turbo's $19,900 engine-upgrade kit, but with 20 more horsepower, courtesy of the software. Torque is 530 pound-feet.
