Wheels meet Heels

 Wheels meet Heels, Sandton City

- 29 September 2012 -

A friend of mine (Norwin Lederer) whose wife works for Sandton City and arrange the mall events, messaged me on the 26 October and sent me the a poster of an event taking place at the mall, that features a bunch of cars, from cheap ones to expensive ones .... real expensive. I thought well I like cars so why not go check out the event.

I thought I would go to the mall really early to avoid all the people. It being a week-end and one of the most popular malls in the country I can expect the place to be crawling with people. I packed my gear and headed over at 7:00am. The place wasn't really busy at that time but there were some people floating around. I took the opportunity to try some photographic techniques, I thought I try out a panorama on my DSLR and take all the photo on exposure delay to wash out the floaters. The exposure delay worked out fine the panorama not so much.

My first photo wasn't of the most interesting cars, actually it was of the Nissan and Mahindra stand. Recently I was having a discussion this an indian guy I work with, which is on contract in South Africa from Pune, India. When I mentioned that we have Mahindra in South Africa, he was a little shocked to see one of their popular indian brands in South Africa. I have found with many people I meet from different countries, they general only think they going to find a handful of cars here. In actual fact walking through the mall I was reminded on exactly just how many different brands of car we have here. The list is extensive, my feeling is that just about every brand you can find somewhere in the world you can find here in South Africa.

Before I arrived, I was excited as I thought they were going to have sexy woman wrapped all over the cars, you can understand my expectation when reading the brochure that was sent to me "Wheels meet Heels", but to my dissatisfaction there was only a handful of attractive sales ladies sponsored by the the car companies. I did catch one  man oblivious to my presence that appeared to be more interested in the sales ladies than in the car itself. I guess that's expected when you hire attractive woman to do the selling.

I spent a fair amount of time around the Subaru stand, but specifically inside the new Subaru BRZ, its a beautiful car, but was disappointed when I enquired about the performance and even though it is excellently priced, it didn't make up for the fact that it isn't very fast even though it looks as if it should be

So I moved on. I didn't take photos of all the stand, that would be boring and some cars are actually ugly....

I did meet up with Norwin that morning and we browsed the car together for a while, but eventually Norwin had to get back to his wife and kid and after about 3 hours I decided to head toward an exit for a smoke break. When I found a corner to smoke in I also found a white dove which was really lazy or sick because he just didn't want to move. Ideal though for me to take a photo.

When outside I realised just how many people had arrived since I had arrived, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the expensive exotic car where arrange around the Nelson Mandela Square.

The my interest shifted to the people around me. 

Back to the cars, the Rolls Royce was definitely a key attraction, I was quite surprise to see such little interest in the supercars as compared to the luxury saloon, however this is Sandton, one of the most upmarket suburbs in Johannesburg and you do often enough find a Ferrari or Aston Martin on the road, what you don't see is very often is a Rolls Royce.

Done with the exotic car in the square it was 2 hours later and I still need some more cars, so I headed back inside in search of a something that I felt was missing, but I found a Noble stand instead. 

I did eventually find the missing car stand, the one that would finish my 6 hour day off. Fiat, but more specifically the Fiat 500 or Fiat Abarth. I recently bought myself a Fiat 500 convertible branded by Diesel. When I decided to purchase it the Abarth was not out yet and I wasn't sure if it would be coming to South Africa and if it was coming, I still wasn't sure when, so I went for the Diesel branded one. I love the car, I just have one complaint. It is branded by Diesel, so it has "Diesel" labelled all over the car, and this being South Africa where someone else fills the car with fuel, it can be quite nerve wrecking for me and the fuel attendant. For me, because I have to constantly watch that he doesn't get some urge to fill my car with diesel. For the fuel attendant, because usually after he starts filling up, he then only realises it says "Diesel", he starts panicking, once that starts it's normally an extended discussion to convince him that the car does actually use petrol unleaded fuel.