Audi has revealed the third-generation Q7, and it is not arriving quietly. The new luxury SUV brings sharper styling, a more premium cabin, clever lighting technology and a choice of five, six or seven seats, depending on the market. That is all important, but the bigger story is what sits beneath the new bodywork.

At a time when almost every major carmaker is talking loudly about electric futures, Audi has given its biggest family SUV another dose of combustion confidence. The new Q7 is not trying to become a silent electric lounge. It is still a large, powerful, long-distance luxury SUV built around space, comfort and proper road presence.

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The Q7 has always been one of Audi's more practical status symbols. It is big enough for families, polished enough for executive use and capable enough to carry the quattro badge without looking like it is trying too hard.

This new version pushes that formula further. The exterior is more muscular than before, with a larger Singleframe grille, stronger proportions and new digital lighting signatures.

Audi has also added clever lighting features, including Digital Matrix LED headlights in some markets and turn signals that can project onto the road at night to warn pedestrians and cyclists.

The cabin also moves closer to Audi's latest luxury playbook. There is more screen real estate, better materials, open-pore wood options, a panoramic sunroof with switchable transparency and improved seating flexibility. Buyers can choose a traditional seven-seat layout or, for the first time, a six-seat setup with individual second-row chairs.

That matters because the Q7 is no longer just fighting other family SUVs. It is fighting luxury vans, executive EVs and bigger premium SUVs that promise business-class comfort on wheels.

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The most revealing part is that Audi has not treated the Q7 like a vehicle waiting to be replaced by an EV.

In Europe, the new Q7 launches with a 3.0-litre V6 diesel using mild-hybrid technology, an electric-powered compressor and quattro all-wheel drive as standard. It can also run on hydrotreated vegetable oil, better known as HVO, where available.

In the US, the story gets even more muscular. The Q7 is set to use a twin-turbocharged 2.9-litre V6 producing 429HP, while the SQ7 steps up to a twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8 with 591HP. Audi says the SQ7 can run from 0 to 60mph in 3.7 seconds, which is deeply unnecessary and exactly why people will pay attention.

Both the Q7 and SQ7 can tow up to 7,700 pounds when properly equipped, giving the car the sort of real-world usefulness that still matters to buyers in this part of the market.

Audi is not simply updating an old nameplate. It is reminding buyers that the big luxury SUV still has a place, even as the industry gets louder about electrification.

The Q7 now has the screens, the lights, the comfort and the digital tricks expected of a modern premium car. But it also has the size, power and long-distance confidence that made large SUVs so popular in the first place.

Audi's electric future may be coming, but the new Q7 establishes that the brand is not ready to let combustion-powered luxury disappear without a fight.

Read the full article Audi’s New Q7 Confirms Big Luxury SUVs Are Not Going Electric Quietly on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Airlines do not discount 1.4 million seats because they are feeling generous.

Qantas has launched one of its biggest domestic sales in recent memory, putting 1.4 million economy seats on sale across more than 190 routes and almost 60 destinations. Fares start from $105 one way, with travel dates stretching from July through to May next year.

On the surface, it looks like a straightforward winter travel promotion. The fact is, it is another sign that Australia's airline market is becoming increasingly competitive.

Domestic travellers have more options than they have had in years. Virgin Australia continues to push aggressively for market share, Jetstar is expanding its presence, and airlines are competing for Australians who remain eager to travel but are also paying closer attention to their spending.

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The timing is no coincidence. The sale covers some of the busiest travel periods on the calendar, including spring and summer school holidays, Christmas and Easter. Those are exactly the dates airlines want locked in as early as possible.

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Qantas says the sale includes more than 190 routes across Australia, with destinations ranging from major capital cities to regional centres. Some of the cheapest fares include Sydney to Byron Bay from $105, Melbourne to Adelaide from $129 and Sydney to the Gold Coast from $129.

The airline is also promoting new routes connected to Western Sydney International Airport, with Jetstar fares starting from $59 and Qantas fares from $99 on selected routes.

The sale gives passengers a chance to lock in cheaper trips months ahead, while helping Qantas secure future demand in a market where customers are comparing prices more carefully before choosing an airline.

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What makes this sale noteworthy is not simply the number of seats available.

Australia's major airlines are once again fighting hard for domestic passengers, and that usually leads to better deals for consumers. Airlines want planes flying full, particularly during peak travel periods, and competitive pricing remains one of the fastest ways to make that happen.

The sale runs until June 16 unless seats sell out earlier, with discounted fares available across nearly 60 destinations around the country.

There is no guarantee these prices will last. Airline sales tend to come and go quickly, especially when they cover popular holiday periods.

The bigger takeaway is that competition is doing exactly what travellers hope it will do. As airlines battle for customers, Australians are finding themselves with more choice and cheaper fares than they have seen for some time.

Read the full article Qantas Is Fighting For Domestic Travellers With 1.4 Million Discounted Seats on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Levi's is going back to court over one of the smallest details in fashion.

The denim giant has filed legal action against Melbourne-based Globe and its S-Double brand, accusing them of copying the pocket tab that has appeared on Levi's products since 1936.

To most people, it is a tiny strip of fabric. To Levi's, it is one of the most valuable pieces of brand identity in the clothing business.

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The lawsuit, filed in California, alleges trademark infringement, trade dress infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. Levi's claims S-Double used pocket tabs that were too close to its own famous design, including red rectangular tabs on pants and white tabs on shirts.

This is not a first-time dispute. Levi's sued S-Double over a similar issue about 15 years ago, with the earlier case ending in a settlement.

According to the latest filing, S-Double had agreed not to sell garments with a label or tab-like device attached to the vertical seam of a rear pocket.

Levi's now claims the Australian brand broke that agreement.

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The red tab was introduced in 1936 to help customers spot genuine Levi's jeans at a glance. Over time, that small marker became one of the brand's most recognisable trademarks.

That is why Levi's treats it as more than decoration. The company argues the tab signals authenticity, quality and brand origin, even when the Levi's name is not clearly visible. It also uses different colours and even blank tabs to protect the shape itself, not just the wording.

Levi's wants the court to stop S-Double from selling the disputed products and is also seeking profits, damages, interest and legal costs.

The case may look like a fight over a tiny piece of fabric, but the stakes are much bigger. In fashion, a small detail can carry decades of recognition, and Levi's clearly believes this one is worth defending.

Read the full article Levi’s Takes Australian Brand To Court Over A Tiny Red Tab on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Idris Elba has spent almost two decades as the internet's favourite answer to one of Hollywood's most overworked questions.

Who should play James Bond next?

The British actor's name has been attached to the role so often that it began to feel less like a rumour and more like an annual tradition. Every time Daniel Craig looked close to leaving, Elba returned to the conversation. Every time the franchise needed a fresh direction, fans put his name back near the top of the list.

Now, Elba has made his position fairly clear. The conversation was never as real as people thought.

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Speaking to British GQ while promoting Masters of the Universe, Elba said the idea of him playing 007 was "never legit" and "always just a rumour". He added that he saw the attention as a compliment, but never treated the role as a realistic possibility.

The speculation dates back to the late 2000s, when Daniel Craig publicly suggested the idea of a Black Bond after Barack Obama's election. From there, Elba became the fan-cast candidate who never quite left the room.

Elba's latest comments arrive just as Bond prepares for its next era. Amazon MGM is preparing a reboot, with Denis Villeneuve set to direct, Steven Knight writing the script and casting director Nina Gold involved in the search for the next 007. Names including Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi and Henry Cavill have all been floated.

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The more revealing part of Elba's interview was not his dismissal of the rumours. It was his view of what Bond should represent.

Elba suggested that some international audiences would struggle to accept a Black actor playing Bond, arguing that the character carries different expectations across different cultures and markets. He also pushed back against the idea of reshaping the character to satisfy every modern trend or cultural debate.

The actor argued that Bond works because it offers audiences an escape from reality rather than a reflection of it. In his view, the franchise should remain faithful to what made the character successful instead of trying to reinvent him for every generation.

"Don't try and make it woke," Elba said. "Just be Bond."

The comment is likely to generate as much discussion as his remarks about casting. Bond has evolved with every actor who has taken on the role, but the franchise has generally avoided changing the core formula. Craig's version made the spy more bruised, emotional and vulnerable than previous eras, while still keeping the tuxedo, the danger and the fantasy intact.

Elba's point is simpler. Change the actor, change the tone, change the world around him if needed. But do not turn Bond into a lecture.

After years of speculation, the man many fans wanted most has stepped out of the race completely. If there is one thing Elba seems certain about, it is that Bond does not need to be reinvented every time the world changes. It simply needs to remain Bond.

Read the full article Idris Elba Says James Bond Should Stay Bond, Not Go Woke on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

BYD's rapid rise in Australia has reached another milestone. The Chinese car giant has confirmed it is developing a model specifically for Australian buyers, a move that says just as much about the market as it does about the car itself.

While the Europe-focused Dolphin G plug-in hybrid will not be coming here for now, BYD executives have revealed that something tailored for local customers is on the way later this year.

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Most carmakers adapt global products for Australia. Far fewer create vehicles with Australian buyers in mind from the beginning. That is why BYD's announcement stands out.

The company has quickly become one of the country's biggest automotive success stories. Between January and May 2026, BYD sold over 33,450 vehicles in Australia, more than double the figure recorded during the same period last year.

In May alone, the brand delivered 8,211 vehicles, securing second place behind Toyota and ahead of several long-established rivals.

Growth has been so strong that BYD recently brought almost 5,000 vehicles to Australia aboard its own carrier ship as part of a broader plan to deliver 30,000 BYD and Denza vehicles across May and June.

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The mystery model remains under wraps, with BYD executives declining to reveal details about its design, size or powertrain. What matters right now is the signal it sends.

Australia is no longer simply another destination for BYD exports. It has become important enough for the company to rethink its product strategy and develop something specifically for local tastes and driving conditions. That is a big shift for a brand that only arrived in Australia a few years ago.

The new model could help BYD strengthen its position against market leaders such as Toyota and Ford while giving Australian buyers another reason to consider the rapidly growing Chinese brand. More importantly, it shows just how valuable the Australian market has become in BYD's global plans.

The car itself is still a mystery. The bigger story is that BYD now views Australia as a market worth building a car around.

Read the full article BYD Thinks Australia Is Important Enough To Get Its Own Car on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

The Airbus A380 was supposed to change aviation forever. For Qantas, it certainly changed long-haul travel. The double-decker giant became the flagship of the airline's international fleet, carrying passengers between Australia and destinations including London, Dallas and Singapore while helping define an era of big aircraft and even bigger ambitions.

That era is now approaching its final chapter. Qantas is preparing for life after the A380, with plans taking shape to replace its fleet of 10 superjumbos during the early 2030s.

The challenge is that the airline's next move comes at a time when aircraft shortages, delivery delays and rising demand are making every fleet decision more expensive and more complicated.

RELATED: Qantas Is About To Find Out If Passengers Really Want A 22 Hour Flight

The retirement of the A380 has never been a secret. Qantas has previously confirmed that the Airbus A350 will ultimately take over from the ageing superjumbo fleet, while additional Boeing 787s also remain part of the airline's long-term planning. The carrier is already in the middle of a record $15 billion AUD fleet renewal programme, replacing older aircraft across both its domestic and international networks.

The problem is timing. Global aircraft manufacturers are still battling supply chain bottlenecks that emerged during the pandemic, creating lengthy delivery queues for airlines around the world. Industry figures show aircraft order backlogs have continued to climb, with demand for new jets significantly outpacing deliveries.

That means airlines can no longer wait until the last minute to place major orders. A decision made today may not result in an aircraft arriving until the next decade.

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Qantas is not just replacing an aircraft. It is deciding what long-haul travel will look like after the superjumbo era.

The airline is increasingly focused on more efficient twin-engine aircraft such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787, both of which consume less fuel than the four-engine A380 while offering the range needed for ultra-long-haul routes. Chief executive Vanessa Hudson has already signalled the airline's preference for newer, more efficient aircraft as fuel costs remain a major consideration.

The shift also ties directly into Project Sunrise, Qantas' plan to operate non-stop flights from Australia's east coast to destinations including London and New York. Those routes will rely on specially configured Airbus A350s capable of flying farther than any aircraft currently in the airline's fleet.

The A380 may still have years of service ahead of it, but its successor needs to be chosen long before the final superjumbo leaves the runway.

That is what makes this decision so significant. Qantas is not merely replacing its biggest aircraft. It is making a multi-billion dollar bet on the future of international travel.

Read the full article Qantas Faces A Multi-Billion Dollar Call As The A380 Nears Retirement on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Football has always been good for beer. In 2026, beer may need football even more.

The next World Cup is shaping up as the most beer-friendly tournament the sport has ever staged. It will be bigger, longer and held across the US, Canada and Mexico, three markets where a cold drink and a big screen are already part of the matchday ritual. For brewers, that is about as close as the industry gets to a perfect setup.

Analysts expect fans to drink an extra one billion pints during the tournament, helped by the expanded 48-team format, 104 matches and a schedule that lands many games in prime drinking hours across Europe and the Americas. That is a lot of plastic cups, bar tabs and last-minute fridge runs.

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The contrast with Qatar could hardly be cleaner. Four years ago, Budweiser had one of the strangest sponsorship headaches in modern sport when stadium beer sales were banned shortly before kickoff. This time, the tournament is landing in markets where beer is not awkwardly hidden from the party.

That matters most for AB InBev, which owns Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois and has spent decades tying itself to the World Cup. It's 2026 push already includes a global Budweiser campaign fronted by Jürgen Klopp and Erling Haaland, while Michelob Ultra is being positioned heavily for the American market.

The tournament is not just about selling beer inside stadiums either. The real money will be in fan zones, bars, supermarkets, watch parties and millions of people deciding that a Tuesday group-stage match suddenly deserves snacks and drinks.

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The timing is doing the industry a favour. Beer companies are dealing with higher costs, weaker demand and a long-term shift in drinking habits as younger consumers move toward moderation, no-alcohol options and more premium choices.

That is why the World Cup bump matters. It gives brewers something they cannot manufacture easily anymore, a global shared occasion where beer still feels like part of the furniture.

There is risk too. Demand depends heavily on which teams survive. If a major football nation goes home early, brewers can be left with too much stock in the wrong place. If an underdog goes deep, the problem flips and the beer can run out where nobody expected it to.

For 39 days, though, Big Beer gets exactly what it wants. More games, more hosts, better timing and fans with a reason to gather.

The World Cup will not fix beer's long-term problems. But it may make the industry look alive again.

Read the full article The Biggest Drinking World Cup Ever Could Not Come At A Better Time For Beer on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Ferrari has already accepted the unthinkable once. It built an electric car. Now, Maranello is trying to convince everyone that there is still one modern trend it will not follow.

Fully self-driving Ferraris are off the table, at least according to CEO Benedetto Vigna, who says the brand will keep improving driver-assistance systems but will not hand the whole experience over to software.

That sounds obvious until you remember how quickly car companies redraw their own red lines. Ferrari once had leadership insisting an electric model would never happen. The Luce exists today, and the argument around it has been loud enough to remind everyone that Ferrari is not just selling transport. It is selling identity.

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Vigna’s position is simple. Ferrari customers should still be the ones driving. The company will continue developing features like adaptive cruise control and lane departure warning, but Level 3 autonomy and anything beyond it are not part of the plan.

His reasoning is hard to argue with. A self-driving Ferrari answers a question almost nobody asked. Buyers do not spend supercar money because they want to be carried around like airport luggage. They buy the car because the steering wheel, throttle, sound, balance and risk are all part of the theatre.

That is why this promise feels different from the usual anti-tech speech. Ferrari is not rejecting electronics completely. Modern Ferraris are already full of software, hybrid systems, stability controls and clever traction tricks. The line is not between old and new. The line is between assistance and replacement.

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The Luce makes the self-driving promise harder to ignore. Ferrari has shown it will change when the market, regulation and customer demand push hard enough. Electric power was once treated like a betrayal. Today, it sits inside a car with more than 1,000 horsepower and a price tag that makes the debate even louder.

But autonomy touches something deeper than the engine. An EV changes how a Ferrari makes speed. A fully self-driving Ferrari changes why someone buys one in the first place.

That is the real tension. Ferrari can survive hybrids. It may even survive electric silence if the performance and desire are strong enough. But a Ferrari that does all the driving itself starts to feel less like a Ferrari and more like a very expensive contradiction.

Maranello may be willing to rethink the powertrain. But it still knows the human behind the wheel is the part the computer chips cannot replace.

Read the full article Ferrari Says It Will Never Let The Computer Chips Have All The Action on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

The TAG Heuer Monaco has always looked like it belonged near a pit lane. The new Monaco Speed 12 looks like it swallowed the engine.

Unveiled around the Formula 1 Louis Vuitton Grand Prix de Monaco 2026, the Speed 12 is not another safe colour swap or heritage nod. It is a 50-piece, $87,000 (~$124,000 AUD) limited edition that takes the square Monaco case and turns it into a tiny mechanical theatre built around 12 moving piston-shaped hour markers. The interesting part is that it is not a chronograph.

For a watch so deeply tied to motorsport, that feels almost wrong at first. The Monaco made its name as one of the world's first automatic chronographs back in 1969, then became a racing icon through Steve McQueen and Le Mans. Yet TAG Heuer has gone in a stranger, more interesting direction here.

RELATED: TAG Heuer Rewired the Monaco From the Inside Out Then Built a Whole New Chronograph To Prove It

The Speed 12 uses the Spin Time concept developed by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, the high-horology workshop inside the LVMH group.

Instead of a normal hour hand, the watch uses 12 rotating piston-shaped indicators around the dial. As the minute hand completes each hour, one piston turns away and the next rotates 90 degrees to reveal the new hour. It is a jumping-hour complication dressed like a V12.

That is why the design works. The centre of the openworked dial looks like an engine cover, the skeletonised minute hand feels pulled from a racing dashboard, and the sapphire front and back make the whole movement look suspended inside the titanium case.

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The case is 40mm in Grade 5 titanium, with a sapphire crystal on both sides, black DLC-coated arches at the corners and a black rubber strap with red stitching. Inside is the TH84-00 calibre, developed with La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, offering a 45-hour power reserve.

None of this makes the Speed 12 a practical track companion. It will not time-lapse better than a proper chronograph, and most people will need a moment to read it. But that is also the point.

TAG Heuer already knows how to make a racing chronograph. The Speed 12 is about proving the Monaco can still surprise people after more than 50 years.

At $87,000 and only 50 pieces, this is not a watch for casual Monaco fans. It is for collectors who want the weird one. The Monaco that does not just remember motorsport history, but turns it into a moving engine under glass.

Read the full article TAG Heuer Turned The Monaco Into A 12 Cylinder Watch on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Raymond Weil has done something this week that it has never done in fifty years of making watches. The Geneva-based, family-run maison has released its first timepiece with an integrated bracelet, badged the A.R.T. collection, and the embargo lifted overnight. For a brand that has spent half a century watching everyone else play in this sandpit, it is a long time coming.

If you have paid any attention to watches over the past decade, you already know why this matters. The integrated bracelet sports watch is the single most fought-over shape in the business, and it is also the most punishing one to buy into. Raymond Weil has turned up to that party with fourteen references priced from AUD $2,600 to $4,995, which is a number that should make a few rivals shift in their seats.

The blueprint for this whole genre was drawn in 1972, when Gérald Genta sketched the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and convinced the world that a steel watch on a steel bracelet could cost more than gold. He did it again with the Patek Philippe Nautilus in 1976, the same year Raymond Weil was founded. Five decades later, those two watches and their many imitators sit behind waiting lists and resale premiums that bear no relationship to what they cost to build.

That is the context Raymond Weil has walked into. The A.R.T. is not pretending to be a Royal Oak, but it is wearing the same uniform: a sculpted bezel, polished bevels playing off satin-brushed surfaces, and an H-link bracelet that flows out of the case rather than bolting onto it. The chamfered centre links are a first for the brand, and on the wrist the whole thing reads as one continuous object, which is the entire point of the exercise.

The dial does the quiet heavy lifting. There is a sunray-brushed centre, an azuré minute track around the edge, and a recessed groove between the two that gives the face some depth instead of leaving it flat. Applied indexes, faceted hands, green Super-LumiNova, sapphire crystal with anti-reflective and anti-fingerprint coating. None of it is reinventing anything, but it is all done properly.

The range splits cleanly. The 38mm version (ref. 1000) runs a self-winding mechanical movement with a 41-hour power reserve, comes in five references, and measures a genuinely slim 9.95mm thick. Dials are sage grey, metallic blue or graphite, on steel or bicolour bracelets, starting at AUD $3,300 for steel.

The 30mm version (ref. 1250) is the quartz play, nine references deep, and an even thinner 7.5mm. This is where the variety lives: three all-steel models from AUD $2,600, four with bezels set in 48 lab-grown diamonds, and a couple finished in yellow gold PVD. Both sizes are water resistant to 100 metres and carry a solid case back you can engrave.

For most people reading this, the AUD $3,300 steel 38mm automatic is the watch that matters. A Swiss Made mechanical movement in an integrated steel sports case at that money is the part of the story Raymond Weil clearly wants you to fixate on, and it is hard to argue with.

Raymond Weil is not the cheapest way into this look, and pretending otherwise would be insulting. The Tissot PRX still owns the bottom of the market, and anyone shopping purely on price will start there. What Raymond Weil is offering is a step up in pedigree without the usual step up in pain: an independent, third-generation Geneva maison, now led by founder's grandson Elie Bernheim, releasing this in its 50th anniversary year.

That is the actual pitch. You are paying a few thousand dollars for a Swiss Made integrated bracelet watch from a family-owned house, rather than the five figures the establishment names ask for the same silhouette. The "A.R.T." name nods to the brand's long-running obsession with music and the arts, though the more interesting art here is the pricing.

The A.R.T. collection is not the most original watch of 2026, and it does not need to be. It is a properly finished, properly sized integrated bracelet watch from a real Geneva maison at a price that makes the whole genre feel slightly less like a members-only club. Get the 38mm steel automatic and ignore the noise.

Read the full article Raymond Weil Just Crashed Watchmaking’s Most Expensive Club For The Price Of A Long Weekend on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

When Audi killed the R8, it left behind a question that never really went away.

What does a modern Audi supercar look like? The answer, it turns out, looks surprisingly Italian.

The new Audi Nuvolari is the fastest and most powerful production model the four-ring brand has ever built. Packing a hybrid powertrain that combines a twin-turbo V8 with three electric motors, it produces 987HP and launches from 0-100km/h in just 2.6 seconds. Top speed is claimed to exceed 350km/h.

Yet the most revealing number is not the power output. It is how much Lamborghini sits beneath the bodywork.

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Audi may have designed the Nuvolari, but there is plenty of Lamborghini running through its veins.

The hybrid V8 powertrain is closely related to the setup used in the Lamborghini Temerario, pairing a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 with three electric motors and a compact battery pack. Audi has taken that formula and turned it into the foundation of its new halo car.

Information suggest the relationship goes deeper than just the engine. The Nuvolari is understood to share major components, chassis architecture and development work with Lamborghini's latest supercar programme.

Some reports even claim it is built alongside the Temerario in Sant'Agata. That might sound familiar to long-time Audi fans.

The original R8 shared plenty of DNA with the Gallardo and later the Huracán. The difference is that the Nuvolari appears to lean even further into the Lamborghini connection than its predecessor ever did.

RELATED: Audi May Have Found The One Car That Can Make Enthusiasts Care Again

The Nuvolari wears Audi's Formula 1 influence more openly than any road car before it.

The car features extensive carbon-fibre construction, active aerodynamics, a drag reduction system and a new predictive version of Audi's quattro all-wheel-drive technology. Audi says feedback from its Formula 1 drivers even helped shape elements of the aerodynamic package.

Only 499 examples will be built, making the Nuvolari considerably more exclusive than the R8 ever was. Since the R8 disappeared, Audi's supercar ambitions have felt increasingly distant. The Nuvolari suggests they were only on pause.

More importantly, it proves Audi has not abandoned the supercar game. It has simply returned with a faster, more powerful and far more ambitious answer than anyone expected.

Read the full article Audi’s Most Powerful Car Ever Is A Lamborghini In A Boss Suit on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Cruise ships have spent the past two decades getting bigger. The Freedom Ship wants to make them look small.

Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas can carry around 7,600 passengers and has enough restaurants, pools and attractions to make some holiday resorts look undercooked. Yet even that floating giant starts looking surprisingly small when you place it next to the latest plans for the Freedom Ship.

And that's because the Freedom Ship is not really trying to be a cruise ship at all. It wants to be a city.

The proposed vessel stretches almost a mile long, rises 30 decks above the water and would carry up to 80,000 people. That is roughly the population of a regional Australian city, except this one would spend its life slowly circling the globe.

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The vision has existed since the 1990s, but the project has resurfaced again with fresh backing, new leadership and renewed confidence that the world's most ambitious floating community might finally move beyond glossy renderings and impossible-sounding promises.

On paper, the numbers are staggering.

The Freedom Ship would house 50,000 permanent residents, accommodate another 10,000 tourists and visitors, and require around 20,000 crew members to keep everything running. It would feature schools, colleges, banks, retail precincts, hotels, a research hospital, museums, a convention centre, a symphony hall, a casino and a two-storey food hall large enough to make your local shopping centre food court feel quaint.

There is even a proposed 15,000-seat sports stadium, water park and an aquarium where residents could go diving without ever leaving the ship.

Arriving visitors would move around via an internal tram system connecting different districts, while ferries and helipads would provide access to the outside world. The ship itself would remain offshore in international waters, too large to dock at conventional ports.

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That all sounds impressive. It also raises the obvious question. If the concept is so compelling, why hasn't anybody built it already?

The answer is the same reason many floating city projects have struggled for decades. Money.

The Freedom Ship's estimated construction cost sits around $16 billion (~$22 billion AUD). Financing something larger than any passenger vessel ever attempted is not exactly a task for a few enthusiastic investors and a PowerPoint presentation.

That challenge has defeated countless floating city concepts before it. From seasteading communities in French Polynesia to futuristic ocean developments in South Korea and the Maldives, many projects have generated headlines, architectural renderings and bold promises before running directly into the realities of funding, regulation and construction.

Which is why the most interesting thing about the Freedom Ship is not the water park, the stadium or even the idea of living permanently at sea. It is that people are still trying.

Thirty years after the concept first appeared, somebody still looks at a mile-long floating city carrying 80,000 people around the planet and thinks it is achievable.

Whether that makes them visionaries or optimists depends on who you ask. But if it ever leaves the drawing board, every cruise ship currently sailing the oceans will suddenly start looking very, very small.

Read the full article The Floating City That Wants To Put 80,000 People At Sea on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Rolex does not usually have second thoughts. The brand's biggest hits tend to stay remarkably consistent from one generation to the next, while the less successful ideas quietly disappear from the catalogue. That is what makes the return of the Yacht-Master II so surprising.

When the original arrived in 2007, it looked unlike almost anything else Rolex was making. It was large, colourful and built around a highly specialised regatta timer that most owners would never need. Some collectors appreciated the engineering. Others struggled to understand where it fit within the broader Rolex lineup.

Nearly two decades later, Rolex has decided the Yacht-Master II is worth another look.

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The biggest improvements are not immediately visible. The original Yacht-Master II relied on Rolex's Ring Command system, which used the bezel as part of the programming process for its countdown timer. It was technically impressive, but hardly the most intuitive watch Rolex had ever produced.

The new version simplifies that experience considerably. Programming functions are now handled through the pushers, reducing complexity while preserving the unusual regatta countdown that defines the watch.

The countdown remains programmable and can still be synchronised during a race. The difference is that you no longer need a manual and a spare afternoon to figure it out.

Rolex has also cleaned up the dial layout. The display is easier to read, less crowded and noticeably more balanced, while still retaining the bright blue bezel and red accents that have always given the Yacht-Master II its distinctive character.

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What Rolex has not done is turn the Yacht-Master II into a Daytona.

At 44mm, it remains one of the largest watches in the company's catalogue. The bright colour scheme is still there. The sailing-focused complication remains highly specialised. This is not a watch designed to blend quietly into the background.

That is precisely why its return feels interesting.

Most Rolex sports watches sell themselves in a sentence. The Yacht-Master II never had that luxury. It remains a large, highly specialised watch built around a complication most owners will never genuinely need. That is also part of its appeal.

The difference is that Rolex has finally made it easier to appreciate.

The original Yacht-Master II was packed with clever engineering, but living with it often required more patience than many collectors were willing to give. Rolex has now kept the technical ambition while removing much of the effort.

That may not turn it into Rolex's next Daytona. But it does make it far easier to understand why the brand decided it was worth bringing back.

Read the full article Rolex Just Gave Its Most Divisive Sports Watch A Cleaner Second Act on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

After seven decades in Hollywood, Clint Eastwood appears to have quietly called time on one of cinema's greatest careers.

Clint Eastwood built a career on saying less than everyone around him. So perhaps it makes sense that his Hollywood ending has arrived quietly, through a passing comment from his son.

There was no farewell press conference. No retirement announcement. No emotional final interview reflecting on seven decades in the business. Instead, confirmation appears to have come from Kyle Eastwood, who referred to his father as retired while discussing their years working together on films.

If that turns out to be the final word on Eastwood's career, it would be a remarkably understated ending for one of Hollywood's most enduring figures.

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Most actors spend decades trying to stay relevant. Eastwood somehow managed to stay productive.

His career stretches back to the 1950s, but it was the 1960s that transformed him into a star through Rawhide and Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy. From there came Dirty Harry, a run of box office successes and, eventually, a second act that would prove just as impressive as the first.

Eastwood the actor was famous. Eastwood the director became something else entirely.

Over the following decades he directed films including Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Gran Torino, American Sniper and Sully. He collected Academy Awards, critical acclaim and a reputation for making films quickly, efficiently and often under budget.

What made Eastwood unusual was not just the longevity. It was the consistency. Even well into his nineties, he continued doing something most people stop doing decades earlier. He kept showing up for work.

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That is why the latest reports feel slightly surreal. Eastwood has spent years suggesting he had little interest in retirement.

In previous interviews, he spoke openly about his love of filmmaking and his desire to keep working for as long as possible. Even when rumours surfaced that a project might be his last, another one often followed.

His most recent film as a director was 2024's Juror No. 2, a courtroom thriller that many observers suspected could mark the end of an extraordinary run. At the time, nobody knew for certain.

Now, with no future directing projects currently attached to his name and his son referring to him as retired, the picture looks clearer. There is something fitting about that.

Eastwood never seemed interested in turning himself into a Hollywood institution, even as he became one. He simply kept making films, year after year, long after many of his contemporaries had stepped away.

If this is indeed the end, Hollywood is losing one of the last filmmakers whose career spans the era of studio westerns, New Hollywood, the blockbuster age and modern streaming.

And true to form, Clint Eastwood appears to be leaving the stage without making a fuss about it.

Read the full article Clint Eastwood’s 70 Year Hollywood Run Has Quietly Reached Its Final Scene on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Nobody has ever owned a sport the way Ralph Lauren owns polo, and the funny thing is he did it by loving the picture of it more than anyone who actually plays. The white trousers, the long Sunday, the easy grace of the whole scene.

He fell for all of it decades ago and then spent the next sixty years making that picture available to the rest of us. That's not borrowing the game. That's giving it a second, bigger life.

Last Thursday, the brand brought that fantasy to Richmond Lowlands, out past the western edge of Sydney, where the paddocks run on forever, for something it called the Ralph Lauren Polo Cup.

It was tied to the Spring 2026 Sporting Life campaign, shot by David Sims with film direction from Jacob Sutton, split across three chapters (A World of Speed, By the Sea, and On the Green). Motorsport, sailing, and the green stuff. The full Ralph Lauren mood board, basically.

The guest list read like a casting call for a Sunday matinee. Olympic mogul skier Jakara Anthony, who has a genuine gold medal and presumably knows more about gradients than grass. Actors Josh Heuston and Lincoln Younes, both in Purple Label, which is the good stuff.

Jessica Gomes in Polo Ralph Lauren, Kylah Day in Ralph Lauren Collection, James Majoos and Carlos Sanson rounding it out, every one of them turned out like they'd wandered off the set of a campaign that hadn't been shot yet.

And here's the part that gets me. None of it needed a single chukka of real polo to land.

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Think about it for a second. The little embroidered horseman has been stitched onto more chests than any working polo player has ever met. Most people wearing it couldn't tell you what a chukka is (about seven minutes of play, you're welcome) and that has never once mattered.

Ralph Lauren took the most exclusive, faintly absurd rich-bloke sport going and turned its silhouette into a knit shirt a teenager could buy. That isn't nothing. That's one of the great pieces of cultural sleight of hand of the last century.

Plenty of labels have tried the same move since. There's a whole field of them leaning on the equestrian crest and the my-family-has-a-stable energy, and they all feel like they're cosplaying something.

Ralph Lauren feels like it invented the thing it's borrowing from, which it more or less did, because the version of polo most of us carry around in our heads (white trousers, a marquee, a cold drink, a horse somewhere in the background) is closer to a Ralph Lauren campaign than to any actual match at the Ralph Lauren Polo Club.

The Richmond Lowlands setting does help, mind you. Australia has a real and slightly underrated polo scene, and that countryside does the heavy lifting better than any studio could. But the brand wasn't just selling the sport out there. It was selling a Sunday.

A particular kind of unhurried, well-dressed, just-out-of-reach Sunday that you can apparently buy your way into one shirt at a time.

The smart bit, the bit nobody else copies well, is that Ralph Lauren never pretends the clothes are actually sportswear. You're not meant to play polo in a Purple Label blazer. You're meant to look like the sort of person who might, on a whim, after lunch. It's aspiration about leisure rather than performance, which is a far harder thing to bottle, and they've been bottling it since 1967.

So no, nobody does polo like Ralph Lauren. Not because they're best at the sport, they don't play it, but because they worked out decades before everyone else that the sport was never the point. The point was the picture. White on green, a marquee, somewhere to be on a Sunday, and a little horseman on your chest doing all the talking.

C'mon, that's something. Annoyingly so. The kind of thing you can only really sit back and admire.

Read the full article Nobody Does Polo Like Ralph Lauren on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Lapland already has Santa, reindeer and the Northern Lights. Now Finland is adding something even more persuasive for summer tourists. Actual gold.

The Finnish resort town of Levi has launched a summer-long treasure hunt that sends visitors searching across its trails, landmarks and fell landscapes for a hidden gold prize worth around €20,000 (~$33,000 AUD). It is called the Midnight Sun Hunt, which sounds like something pulled from a children's adventure book but is very much a real tourism campaign.

The idea is simple. Visitors register at the Levi Visitor Centre, collect their first clue and then follow a series of hints released across the summer.

Each clue leads hunters through the resort's local trails and attractions, with the final clue due on August 22 if nobody finds the prize earlier. Organisers say the gold could be discovered after any clue, so the game gets easier the longer summer rolls on.

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Levi is already one of Finland's best-known winter destinations, famous for skiing, snowy forests and Northern Lights trips. The problem is that many travellers still think of Lapland as a cold-weather fantasy and forget it has another season entirely.

Summer above the Arctic Circle is a different kind of strange. The sun barely leaves, the landscape opens up, and the same place that sells snow in winter suddenly has hiking, biking, river adventures and long golden evenings that never properly end. Levi is betting that a real treasure hunt gives tourists a reason to notice.

That is what makes the gold bar clever. This is not just a gimmick for people who like maps and dramatic walking shoes. It is a way of turning a quieter travel season into a story people can actually imagine joining.

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There is one important rule. Nobody is being invited to tear up the Arctic landscape like a badly behaved pirate. Organisers have made clear the hunt does not require digging or disturbing the terrain, and participants are being told to stay in permitted areas and respect the environment.

That is probably wise. A hidden gold prize is fun. A crowd of overexcited tourists attacking the tundra with garden tools is less charming.

Still, the pitch works because it gives Lapland a new summer identity. Instead of waiting for snow, visitors can chase clues under a sun that refuses to set, wandering through one of Europe's most unusual landscapes with the small possibility of leaving richer than they arrived.

It is part treasure hunt, part hiking campaign and part reminder that Lapland does not stop being magical just because the snow melts.

Read the full article Santa’s Hometown Is Luring Summer Tourists With A $33,000 Gold Hunt on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Qantas' 22-hour flight dream has finally taken to the skies. The airline's first custom-built Airbus A350-1000ULR has completed its maiden test flight over France, moving Project Sunrise out of aviation fantasy and into the very real business of testing, certification and passenger endurance.

The aircraft flew for three hours and 43 minutes over France and the French Atlantic coast, reaching just above 41,000 feet. It now begins a testing campaign of around 80 hours, with Airbus and Qantas working through the systems that make this aircraft different from a normal A350.

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The A350-1000ULR has an extra 20,000-litre rear centre fuel tank, giving it about 1,000 nautical miles of extra range. Airbus says the aircraft will be capable of flying almost 10,000 nautical miles, opening the door to nonstop Sydney to London and Sydney to New York flights of up to 22 hours.

That is the clean aviation story. Australia's east coast gets closer to Europe and America without the usual stopover. No Dubai. No Singapore. No walking through an airport at 2am wondering why your body has lost all faith in time.

But the main question is not whether the aircraft can survive the trip. It is whether passengers can.

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Qantas knows this, which is why Project Sunrise is being sold as a comfort experiment as much as a route map. The A350 will have a four-class layout, with more than 40 per cent of seats in premium cabins, plus custom lighting designed around circadian rhythm science to help reduce jet lag.

The most talked-about feature is the Wellbeing Zone, a space available to all passengers where travellers can stretch, follow guided movement prompts on screens and access self-serve refreshments. It sits between Premium Economy and Economy, which is exactly where the real endurance test will probably happen.

That is what makes Project Sunrise so interesting. Qantas is not just trying to remove a stopover. It is trying to convince people that one very long flight is better than two shorter ones with a break in the middle.

The first aircraft is now expected to arrive in April 2027 after supply chain delays, with Qantas needing at least three A350-1000ULRs before starting commercial services. The first route and timing are expected to be announced soon.

Project Sunrise is no longer just a bold airline idea. It is becoming a real passenger test.

Convenience may win. But after 22 hours in the same aircraft, even the best seat in the sky has a point to prove.

Read the full article Qantas Is About To Find Out If Passengers Really Want A 22 Hour Flight on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

I gave house music a proper go. Six years of it. I'd write a track in the studio, then jump in the car and drive home to hear whether the mix actually held up. That was the real test. If it survived the commute, it was finished. If it fell apart somewhere on the drive, back to the desk.

So I know what I'm chasing when I get into a car and press play. I also know the familiar disappointment that usually follows.

Then I spent four days with the Cadillac VISTIQ in Melbourne.

Hand on heart, I have never heard anything quite like it. I kept nudging the volume up, waiting for the moment something behind a door card would start to buzz and rattle like my 1981 BMW 318, the way every car stereo eventually betrays itself. By the time I was sitting on eight I'd stopped listening to the music and started interrogating the car.

So when Cadillac flew the two men responsible into Sydney for the OPTIQ and VISTIQ media day, I cornered them both and made them explain it to me.

Spencer Scott is the Acoustic Systems Engineering Manager at AKG, the Harman audio brand, based in Warren, Michigan. He didn't strategise the VISTIQ's sound from a boardroom. He built it. "From the AKG side, I did directly work on those projects," he told me. "We were in it from the beginning, where to place the speakers, how to integrate them into the vehicle, all the way through tuning, creating the sound experience they want, and getting sign-off from everyone that it's the sound we want."

Dr Mike Mason is Director of Entertainment Technology for the Music Ecosystem at Dolby, where he's spent over a decade. He sits a little further back from the soldering iron. "I'm more on the technology side, the business technology strategy of Dolby Atmos Music and the entire ecosystem," he said. "I work from studios all the way through to all of our OEMs." A little further from the tech, then. "Further, but still the technology and the science behind the sound."

Spencer puts 23 speakers into a Cadillac. Mike makes sure the thing the artist heard in the studio is the thing that comes out of them.

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Of course, my 1981 BMW 318 inspired the first question so I led with the buzzing because it's the thing that brakes my brain. Spencer explained.

It starts with where each speaker physically lives. "We make sure when we design it and place it in the vehicle, it's optimal for the listener," he said. Then comes the part you never see. "On top of that we add signal processing to correct for the fact the driver isn't sitting exactly centred in the vehicle. So we correct for that balance, and try to make it enjoyable for the whole cabin." That's the job the 23 speakers (19 in the OPTIQ) are actually doing. Not volume. Balance.

The rattle question, though, comes down to something called dynamics control. On most systems, as I'd discovered the hard way over six years, you have to crank the thing to really feel the bass, and somewhere around the top of the dial the whole spectrum goes strange.

"It's even throughout the whole volume range," Spencer explained. "When you're listening at low volumes and at high volumes, it's the same spectral response, so you're not getting this difference of weirdness." Which is the technically correct term for the thing I'd been clumsily describing as the graph going weird between six and eight. "Usually on traditional older systems you have to turn it up to really feel that bass. In this scenario, you don't have to."

Quietly, we had been waiting for the car to fail. It had simply been engineered not to.

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When someone says Dolby Atmos, we think of the Village cinema, the promo that comes on before the film and physically shoves you back into the seat. we do not think of music. The leap from one to the other is the part I genuinely couldn't get my head around.

Mike says the underlying engine is the same. The point of difference is what you do with it. "The idea is you want to give a creator the ability to put sounds where they want them," he said. "From a music point of view, that's a whole new set of creative tools for artists who were used to a stereo mix. Now you're not just choosing left or right. You can place anything anywhere."

What changes is the priority. "In cinema, dialogue is important, narration is important, the big special effects are the showstoppers," he said. "In music, it's detail and location and clarity and this naturalness and balance."

And this is where the car turns out to be the perfect stage. Most people experiencing Atmos music right now are doing it on headphones, off their phone, which is great, but it isn't speakers. "All Atmos music is mixed speakers-first," Mike said. "In a car, you get the actual speaker experience." The thing the mixer signed off on, played back the way they meant it.

Spencer's job is to honour that intent down to the individual frequency. Not every speaker can produce every sound, so the system quietly adjusts things. "We have bass management that brings the bass to the speakers that can reproduce it, the closest local source," he said. "If you're getting a vocal or a bass note in a speaker that can't produce it, we bring it to where it can, as close as possible."

A channel, he was at pains to point out, isn't one speaker. It's a collection of them, working as one. So when a track has a sound swirling around the cabin, it's a whole choreographed group of drivers handing the sound off to each other.

Spencer and AKG are in from the very first proto vehicle, but the tuning that matters happens on the real thing. "We always do a production final tuning with a real vehicle that's off the line, a saleable vehicle," he said. "We know anything we do is going to be accurate to how it's perceived by the end user." Leather, grilles, materials, all of it. Anything that touches the acoustics, AKG has an opinion on.

Which means there's a negotiation. A polite war over car real estate with the engineers who also want that space for, you know, the car. I asked if it was a constructive battle. "Yes, of course," Spencer said, laughing. "We have specific locations we'd prefer to be.

Brand targets from AKG, requirements on where things need to be, how many speakers we need, and the centre channel. We want full spectrum response, 20 to 20k. We want to provide that full experience."

I asked Mike the cynical question. Does Cadillac have to pay Dolby for the privilege? "It's a licensing business," he said. Not for the badge, for the technology. "Dolby is a company that invents things. This is a format that didn't exist. We've got neuroscientists who understand perception. It's a true invention, an R&D approach."

I told him I liked the neuroscience angle, because it's hot right now. He laughed, because Dolby has quietly been doing it for over sixty years. "You start with understanding how people hear, then use that knowledge to process the audio so it does the thing you want it to do." Which is? "Gives you the feels you want."

Every Dolby story, Mike says, begins in a studio with the creators. The tools have spread accordingly. Atmos now lives inside Logic and Pro Tools, with over 1,350 certified studios worldwide on top of every bedroom producer who's had it switched on in Logic Pro.

The proof, for me, was a detail Spencer dropped almost as an aside. They flew the remixing engineer of a track to Detroit to sit in the car. "He said it was by far the closest representation he'd heard."

Even as a very average former "music producer," I know that's a good thing.

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I asked them both for the must-listen. Mike, a confessed Pink Floyd man, pointed to the remastered The Wall, and to Rocketman, which he says is used as a starting point for a reason. Solid, safe, audiophile-approved answers.

But I'll give you mine, because it's the reason I geeked out so hard I forgot to be professional. I jumped in, pressed play on Running in the Night by FM-84 and Ollie Wride, a synthwave cut I'd never heard before, and I cranked it. Full 80s synth, no expectations, no reference point. The pads came from above, the bass stayed planted, the vocals sat dead centre, and it got me square in the feels.

It's by some producer most people have never heard of, which is the whole point. As Mike put it, Atmos is quietly minting a new wave of producers breaking away from the stereo names who've owned the scene for decades.

If you only play one thing in this car, make it that one. I've never been more glad I quit making music, because I'd only have spent another six years chasing what this Cadillac does sitting in a Toorak driveway.

Read the full article Cadillac Built A Car Stereo So Good That Mixing Engineers Now Use As A Reference on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Full-size American pickups used to be a curiosity in Australia. A thing you'd see parked outside a Bunnings in Penrith and wonder who ordered it. That was five years ago. Today, the Chevrolet Silverado is the best-selling full-size pickup in Australia, with sales continuing to grow through GMSV's national dealer network of around 60 locations. This is no longer a fringe vehicle. It is the category leader, and it got there for a reason.

Silverado is part of the landscape now, from the beach to the mountains. Whether towing an oversized trailer boat to Noosa or horsepower of the equine variety to a High Country meet, Silverado has earned a growing following of Aussies who value its unrivalled capability, whether it’s driven for work or play.

And now, with GMSV's End of Financial Year offer, getting into one has never made more sense.

Until the end of June 2026, GMSV is offering three years of free scheduled servicing on the Silverado 1500 Range -LTZ Premium and ZR2,  and the GMC Yukon Denali. That's every routine service for three years, covered, gone, not your problem.

Based on independent estimates, that saving alone sits around $2,000. That's a lot of standard kit before you even get to the EOFY sweetener. And it makes the competition look expensive for what you actually get. In comparable Laramie Sport trim, the Ram 1500 is north of $150,000 and still only offers a three-year, 100,000 km warranty - Chevrolet Silverado offers a 5-year, unlimited km warranty.

This is the part that gets overlooked. Forget the grey-import vibe that American imports once had. GMSV is a fully factory-backed General Motors company with a nationwide dealer network, locally Walkinshaw-remanufactured right-hand-drive, and a five-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty on every Chevrolet Silverado. Parts, service, warranty claims, and roadside assist. It all runs through the same system.

In a world where tariffs are shifting, supply chains are unpredictable, and everyone from BYD to Zeekr is trying to establish a foothold in Australia, there is something to be said for buying from a brand that has already done the hard work. That peace of mind is worth more than most people give it credit for.

GMSV sells three Silverado variants here. Along with the GMC Yukon Denali, they are all remanufactured to right-hand drive by Walkinshaw Automotive Group in Melbourne.

The Silverado 1500 LTZ Premium is the entry point at $134,500 before on-roads. It runs the 6.2-litre petrol V8 making 313 kW and 624 Nm through a 10-speed auto with full-time four-wheel drive. Towing tops out at 4500 kg braked.

Standard kit includes leather-appointed heated and cooled front seats, a 13.4-inch infotainment screen, a 12.3-inch digital cluster, a 360-degree camera, a power tailgate, a spray-in tub liner, and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It is a lot of truck for the money.

The Silverado 1500 ZR2 is the off-road weapon at $144,900. Same V8, same 10-speed, but with Multimatic DSSV dampers, more clearance, front and rear electronic locking differentials, a wider track, 33-inch tyres and underbody skid plates.

With the Ram 1500 TRX gone from the Australian market, the ZR2 is about as brash and capable as a full-size off-road pickup gets.

The Silverado 2500 HD LTZ Premium is the heavy-duty workhorse at $168,000. It swaps the petrol  for a 6.6-litre Duramax turbo-diesel V8 making 350 kW and a staggering 1322 Nm, paired with a 10-speed Allison auto. Towing capacity sits at 4500 kg braked on a 70 mm ball. Fourteen camera views. Trailer-aware adaptive cruise control.

This is the one for the bloke with a 30-foot caravan and zero interest in compromise. The 2500 HD is blacked-out with gloss 20-inch wheels and red recovery hooks, and it looks properly menacing.

And if the want leans to a premium SUV, the GMC Yukon Denali comes with seating for 8 people and a 3.6 tonne towing  at $174,990 before on-roads. Same 6.2-litre V8 petrol engine, 10-speed auto, Active Response 4x4 drivetrain as the Chevrolet Silverado 1500. 

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The standard kit also includes Air Ride suspension with Magnetic Ride Control (the magnetorheological damper tech Ferrari uses), 24-inch wheels, a 16.8-inch touchscreen, dual 12.6-inch rear screens, 14-speaker BOSE, and towing capability that puts LandCruiser and Range Rover in the shade.

Aussie big rig fans are voting with their wallets – and their ABNs.

Tradies are powering up with Chevrolet diesel muscle. And the LTZ Premium remains one of the best-value propositions in the full-size segment, full stop. Add three years of free scheduled servicing and the EOFY timing is hard to argue with. 

For ABN holders, the calendar matters almost as much as the spec sheet. Take delivery before 30 June and the purchase falls into this financial year, depreciation kicks in now, GST goes on this year's BAS, and the EOFY perks stack on top of all of it. Talk to your accountant about the details, but the window is real and it shuts on 30 June. 

Find your nearest GMSV dealer at gmspecialtyvehicles.com, book a test drive, and let the  Silverado do the rest.

GMSV's EOFY offer runs until June 30, 2026. Available on the Silverado 1500 LTZ Premium, Silverado 1500 ZR2 and GMC Yukon Denali through participating GMSV dealers.

Read the full article Australia’s #1 Full-Size Ute And Biggest Luxury SUV Got an EOFY Deal That is Hard To Walk Past on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Audemars Piguet has clearly decided subtlety can take the summer off.

After the Royal Pop drop reminded everyone that serious watchmaking does not always need to dress like a boardroom, AP is now pushing the same colour-first energy into the Royal Oak Offshore. That matters because the Offshore has never been the polite member of the family.

Since 1993, when it arrived as the oversized, rubber-trimmed troublemaker nicknamed The Beast, it has always been the Royal Oak for people who like their luxury with more shoulder.

Now it gets the summer treatment. The new release brings six Royal Oak Offshore Chronographs across 42mm and 37mm sizes, with turquoise, pink, orange, yellow and light blue doing most of the talking. On paper, that sounds like AP chasing the easy colour trend. In practice, it feels more deliberate. The brand is using colour to soften the Offshore without sanding away the attitude that made it interesting in the first place.

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The 42mm models keep the familiar Offshore muscle, with steel and titanium cases, 15.3mm thickness, Méga Tapisserie dials and the in-house Calibre 4404 flyback chronograph movement with 70 hours of power reserve.

The updates are mostly visual, but they land with confidence. Black with pink accents, silver with orange, and dark grey with yellow and turquoise all give the Offshore a more playful edge without pretending it has suddenly become quiet.

The more interesting shift is happening at 37mm. AP has introduced three smaller Offshore Chronographs in turquoise, pink and light blue, including titanium versions and diamond-set options. These are not just shrunken fashion pieces.

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They debut the new in-house Calibre 6401, a movement developed for smaller chronograph cases, with a 55-hour power reserve and a slimmer 5.7mm profile. That helps bring the total case thickness down to 11.5mm, which is a big deal for a watch line not exactly famous for restraint.

It has been timed smartly. Smaller watches are back in the conversation, women are becoming a bigger priority for major watchmakers, and collectors are clearly more open to colour than they were a decade ago.

AP knows this. The new 37mm models feel like a direct answer to a market that wants serious mechanics without the old assumption that luxury has to arrive in black, steel or navy.

Audemars Piguet is not just throwing summer colours at a famous case. It is trying to make one of its loudest watches feel more wearable, more inclusive and more current. The Offshore is still The Beast. It just found a brighter wardrobe.

Read the full article Audemars Piguet Doubles Down On Colour After The Royal Pop Frenzy on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

For most of its life, the Toyota Corolla has been the car you bought when you wanted no drama. Reliable, sensible, easy to recommend and about as rebellious as a tax return filed early. The new GRMN Corolla is not that Corolla.

Toyota has revealed its most extreme production Corolla yet, and Australia is getting it in limited numbers in 2027. It is a two-seat, manual-only, Nürburgring-honed hot hatch with carbon fibre panels, wider tyres, retuned suspension and enough motorsport seriousness to make the regular GR Corolla look almost sensible.

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The GRMN badge stands for Gazoo Racing tuned by the Meister of Nürburgring, which is Toyota’s way of saying this is not just a dealer sticker pack with angry wheels. The car was extensively tested at the Nürburgring, with aero and suspension work also shaped by Toyota’s Super Taikyu racing program in Japan.

The result is a GR Corolla that has been stripped and sharpened rather than simply given more power. The rear seats are gone, replaced by a strut brace. Carbon fibre is used for the bonnet, front wheel arches, side spoilers and rear wing. The tyres are Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s, 10mm wider than before, and the suspension now uses retuned monotube shock absorbers.

Toyota has also recalibrated the steering and all-wheel-drive system, added an intercooler spray function and fitted a five-position adjustable rear spoiler. This is not subtle. It is Toyota letting the engineers stay late with no adult supervision.

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The engine remains the familiar 1.6-litre turbocharged three-cylinder, still making 221kW, but torque rises to 408Nm. The weight drops by 40kg to around 1450kg, helped by the missing rear bench and carbon bits.

The best part is that the GRMN Corolla is expected to be six-speed manual only. In a world where performance cars keep getting quicker, heavier and more automated, Toyota has built the hardcore version around the one thing enthusiasts still treat like sacred ground.

It will not be cheap. With the regular GR Corolla GTS already near $68,000 before on-road costs, early expectations put the GRMN somewhere around or above $80,000.

That is serious money for a Corolla, but this is also the least ordinary Corolla Toyota has ever put near a showroom. The rear seats are gone, the manual stays, the carbon fibre is real and the whole thing has been shaped for people who still want a hot hatch to feel slightly inconvenient in the best possible way.

Toyota built its empire on sensible cars. The GRMN Corolla is what happens when the sensible company lets the racing department win the argument.

Read the full article Toyota’s Most Unhinged Corolla Yet Is Coming To Australia on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

There was a time when 912hp belonged to bedroom posters, pit lanes and cars with prices that made accountants reach for a chair. Zeekr has now put it in a Chinese electric liftback for roughly US $54,000 (~$75,000). Even stranger, horsepower may not be the most ridiculous number here.

The Zeekr 001 Fifth Anniversary Edition has gone back on limited sale in China after its first run sold out shortly after launch. That matters because this is not just a birthday-badge special with red stitching and a marketing department feeling sentimental. It is a 900-volt, dual-motor, all-wheel-drive EV with 680kW, a 0-100km/h time of 2.91 seconds and a top speed of 280km/h.

RELATED: This Zeekr People Mover Just Landed in Australia And It’s More Luxurious Than Most Private Jets

The real punch is the price. At $75,000 AUD, the Zeekr 001 is playing in territory where many global brands would normally sell you a warm family SUV, not something with more power than a Ferrari SF90 Stradale.

Then comes the charging. The 001 uses a 103kWh CATL Qilin battery with 6C ultra-fast charging, allowing a 10 to 80 per cent charge in about 10 minutes under ideal conditions. That is the sort of figure that makes old EV excuses sound suddenly tired.

Zeekr has not stopped at straight-line numbers either. The Fifth Anniversary Edition gets KW coilover suspension, Brembo six-piston brakes, carbon-fibre aero parts, 22-inch forged wheels and Pirelli P Zero tyres. It adds red Alcantara inside, a 39.3-inch augmented reality head-up display, a Snapdragon-powered cockpit and software tricks borrowed from the harder-core Zeekr 001 FR, including racing mode and intelligent drift assistance.

RELATED: Why China Suddenly Can’t Get Enough Of Wagons

This is where the story gets bigger than one limited edition. China’s EV market is already brutal on price, but Zeekr is trying to protect its premium position by making performance feel like value. That is a very different kind of pressure for legacy brands.

Zeekr delivered a record 31,787 vehicles in April, while its average transaction price remains close to 350,000 yuan. In other words, it is not just throwing discounts at the wall. It is using huge numbers, fast charging and track-day theatre to make the brand feel expensive while still undercutting the old performance hierarchy.

That is what makes the 001 Fifth Anniversary Edition so interesting. It is not only fast. Plenty of EVs are fast now. It is fast, aggressively priced and technically loaded in a way that makes traditional performance cars look like they are charging extra for nostalgia.

China is no longer just making EVs cheaper. It is making expensive performance look harder to justify.

Read the full article Zeekr’s 912hp EV Makes Supercar Performance Look Outrageously Overpriced on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Qantas has revealed its newest Airbus A321XLR, and for once the most interesting thing about a narrow-body jet is not the legroom argument waiting to happen.

The aircraft, named Coral Sea, has rolled out of Airbus’ paint shop in Hamburg wearing a bright Great Barrier Reef-inspired livery across both sides of its 44-metre fuselage.

Sea turtles, clownfish and coral now sit below the Qantas wordmark, turning the airline’s seventh A321XLR into something closer to a flying tourism campaign than a standard fleet update.

That is not a bad thing. Airlines spend plenty of money trying to make aircraft feel less anonymous, and Qantas has picked the easiest emotional shortcut in Australia. Put the reef on the side of a plane and suddenly even an aircraft delivery feels like a postcard.

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The design celebrates Qantas’ long-running partnership with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which began in 2009. It is also tied to the airline’s Reef Restoration Fund, a 10-year, $10 million commitment supporting scientists, Traditional Owners and local tourism operators working on coral restoration across Australian reefs.

The timing is useful. The Great Barrier Reef remains one of Australia’s biggest tourism drawcards, attracting more than 2.3 million visitors last year. Queensland visitor spending also topped $44 billion, which explains why Qantas is happy to put the state’s most famous natural asset on its newest metal.

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The livery will get the attention, but the aircraft itself matters more for travellers. Qantas has 48 A321XLRs on order, and the type can fly more than 3,000 kilometres further than the Boeing 737s it replaces. Coral Sea is expected to fly home to Australia in June.

Qantas has already started using the A321XLR between Brisbane and Perth, while its first international service with the aircraft is scheduled for October between Brisbane and Manila. Add in new Queensland routes from Qantas and Jetstar, and the reef livery starts to look less like decoration and more like strategy.

Qantas is not just painting the Great Barrier Reef on a plane. It is reminding travellers where it wants them to go.

Read the full article Qantas Just Turned Its Newest Jet Into A Flying Great Barrier Reef Postcard on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Adrian Portelli made giveaways feel like entertainment. Canberra now looks ready to treat them like gambling.

The billionaire businessman behind LMCT+ has built one of Australia’s loudest modern prize machines, mixing luxury cars, million-dollar homes, cash giveaways and social media theatre into a subscription-based rewards club.

For his 1.3 million Instagram followers, it has long looked like the dream version of a raffle. Pay in, watch the hype, maybe walk away with something ridiculous parked in the driveway. But now the federal government seems far less charmed.

Labour’s proposed gambling reforms are expected to target lotteries operating “under the guise of” subscription-based rewards clubs. The idea is to separate genuine loyalty programs from businesses where recurring memberships and high-value prize draws appear to be the main attraction. Under the proposed changes, companies like LMCT+ could be treated as interactive gambling services and banned.

RELATED: Aussie Billionaire Adrian Portelli’s New $3 Million Car Makes His McLaren Crane Stunt Look Tame

That is the uncomfortable bit. LMCT+ does offer member discounts across thousands of businesses, including major retail names. But the public face of the brand has always been the giveaways. Supercars, luxury homes and huge cash prizes are what made the business viral, not a discount code for swimwear.

Portelli’s side argues that the reforms need to be careful. His lawyer has said LMCT+ supports removing bad operators from the industry, but warned the government not to paint every business with the same brush. The argument is simple enough. If members receive real value and promotions are transparent, the business should not automatically be treated like a dodgy lottery.

The government sees it differently. Communications Minister Anika Wells has said Labour wants to ban “dodgy lotteries” and close the loophole that allows so-called lotteries to masquerade as trade promotions. The Australian Lottery and Newsagents Association has also welcomed the move, arguing traditional lotteries operate under far tighter rules around prize pools, ticket numbers and consumer transparency.

RELATED: Belgium’s Bentley-on-a-Rooftop Stunt: A Poor Man’s Adrian Portelli Flex Or Gastronomy Glory?

This was probably always coming. Portelli’s brand became too big, too loud and too closely tied to enormous prizes to avoid attention forever.

LMCT+ has already faced scrutiny in South Australia, where parent company Xclusive Tech was found guilty on ten counts of running unlawful lotteries and fined $40,000. Portelli himself was cleared of the nine charges against him personally, and he wasted no time gloating about it, posting 'thank you very much' and pointing out the state would have made more money just issuing the permits in the first place.

The bigger question is not whether Portelli can survive another round of headlines. He probably can. The real question is whether Australia’s giveaway economy can keep pretending it is mostly about member perks when everyone knows the prize is the thing people are really buying into.

That is why this crackdown feels bigger than one flashy businessman with expensive cars and better Instagram reach than most politicians.

Canberra is asking a very simple question. When the discount is the side dish and the dream house is the main course, is it still a rewards club?

Read the full article Adrian Portelli’s Giveaway Empire Just Ran Into A Very Australian Crackdown on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

For the first time since 2006, the World Cup is happening without a watch brand's name on the fourth official's board. Hublot has walked.

After 16 years and four straight tournaments, the Swiss house confirmed in mid-December it would not renew its deal as FIFA's official timekeeper. That leaves the United States, Canada and Mexico hosting a World Cup this June with the luxury timekeeper slot sitting completely empty for the first time in over two decades.

It's a strange thing to lose. Most people watching a match have never once thought about who keeps the time, which is exactly why Hublot paid to be there. The Big Bang-shaped substitution board, the logo on the LED, the referee strapped into a Hublot smartwatch wired to VAR. That was the whole pitch.

The man who pulled the pin is Julien Tornare, who took over as Hublot CEO in September 2024 and clearly looked at the FIFA invoice with fresh eyes. Speaking to the Swiss outlet Finews, he framed it as a cost-benefit analysis, with the money being redirected toward UEFA competitions, Latin American football, and a push into art and music.

No dollar figure was put on what FIFA cost the brand. You don't need one. When a CEO starts using the phrase "rebalancing spend," he is telling you the bill stopped making sense.

Here's where it gets a little embarrassing for football's biggest event. FIFA has not named another luxury timekeeper. What it has done is invent a brand-new tier called "official licensed timepiece" and hand it to a New York-based, Swiss-made microbrand called Axia Time.

If you haven't heard of Axia, that's the point. This is the first time watches have ever been part of FIFA's official licensed products program, sitting alongside the jerseys and the keyrings rather than the sideline boards.

The collection itself is actually charming. Run by founder John Kanaras, Axia has built 14 country designs, each with three models, in tiny production runs of 80 to 400 pieces, anchored by a dive watch called the Argos, which runs an ETA 2824 movement. Seven of the designs honour past winners, and if you buy your nation's watch and they go on to lift the trophy, Axia upgrades you to a Champions edition for free.

It is also a completely different business from keeping official time for a tournament that three and a half billion people watch. How does the biggest sporting event on the planet not have a watch partner? LV? TAG? Anyone?

The honest read is that the maths broke. Sponsoring a World Cup is one of the most expensive things a watch brand can do, and the people most likely to buy a Hublot are not deciding to do so because of a logo behind the goal.

Tornare's pivot says the quiet part out loud. Football clubs, leagues and individual stars deliver targeted reach. A global tournament delivers a number so big it stops meaning anything. Hublot would rather pay Kylian Mbappé directly, and it is, having dropped a 200-piece Reloaded Mbappé at Watches and Wonders in April for just under 25,000 Swiss francs.

Those ambassador deals were always separate from the FIFA contract, which is why Mbappé keeps wearing Hublot at France matches regardless. The brand kept the parts that move watches and binned the part that just looked good on television.

For anyone who has wandered the halls at Watches and Wonders, this is the same story playing out everywhere. The big, broad, expensive sponsorships are being quietly swapped for sharper, smaller, more measurable plays.

So the World Cup will run on time this summer, same as always. It just won't be anybody's time in particular. And the watch world, the one place you'd expect to mourn that, has barely looked up.

Read the full article The World Cup Has Lost Its Hublot, And Now The Biggest Event In Sport Can’t Tell The Time on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Formula One used to be where luxury brands bought hospitality suites, dressed a few drivers and enjoyed being close to the noise. Gucci has decided that it is no longer enough.

From 2027, Alpine will become Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team, with the French outfit replacing its current BWT identity with Gucci's black, gold, red and green world. It is the first time a luxury fashion house has taken title partnership of an F1 team, which tells you exactly where the sport now sits in the global luxury food chain.

This is not just a logo on a car. Gucci is launching a wider Gucci Racing platform around the deal, covering content, product, high-end client experiences and exclusive events. In other words, the grid is becoming a shop window, a runway, a members' club and a media machine all at once.

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Formula One is no longer just a Sunday sport for petrolheads and people who understand tyre degradation. It has become a global entertainment product with fashion weeks, celebrity grids, Netflix fans, watch brands, champagne, luxury luggage and enough paddock photography to keep Instagram alive for another decade.

That is exactly why Gucci wants in properly. F1 reaches more than 1.5 billion people each season and has become younger, more international and increasingly female. For a luxury house trying to stay culturally hot, that kind of repeated global attention is hard to buy anywhere else.

Gucci also needs moments. The brand has been working to rebuild momentum, and a normal campaign only lasts so long. Formula One gives it 24 race weekends, drivers, celebrities, VIP rooms, limited product drops and a moving billboard that turns up in Monaco, Miami, Singapore and Las Vegas.

RELATED: DMARGE Motorsport Icons Merch Drop Channels Formula 1’s Wildest Era

Alpine gets something just as useful. The team has history, but it has not always had cultural pull. A Gucci title deal instantly makes it more visible, more fashionable and far easier to talk about beyond lap times.

It also arrives at a better moment on track. Alpine had a miserable 2025 but has started 2026 strongly, sitting fifth in the constructors' standings after five rounds and already beating last year's points total. Add Gucci to that recovery story and suddenly the team looks less like a midfield project and more like a brand with a plan.

The bigger message is simple. Luxury brands no longer want to sit near Formula One. They want to be part of the show. Gucci has just made that shift impossible to ignore.

Read the full article Gucci Just Made Formula One Luxury’s Most Expensive Runway on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Ferrari has just shared the first proper look at the hull of its 30-metre Hypersail racing yacht, and it already looks like one of the strangest things Maranello has ever put its name on.

The carbon-heavy foiling monohull has now been removed from its mould in Pisa after more than a year of curing, lamination and internal structure work. That gives the world its first real look at the scale and shape of a project that sounds less like a yacht and more like Ferrari throwing its entire performance brain at the ocean.

This is not a superyacht vanity exercise. Hypersail is being built as a serious offshore racing machine, designed to run without a combustion engine and generate its own energy from wind, solar and motion. The brand famous for screaming V12s and petrol theatre is now trying to build one of the most advanced renewable-powered boats on the planet.

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That is what makes Hypersail more interesting than another rich-person toy with a famous badge on the sail. Ferrari wants this thing to fly.

The 30-metre yacht is designed as a foiling monohull, meaning it will lift itself above the water on foils to reduce drag and maintain extreme speed across long ocean passages. In the right conditions, Ferrari believes it could cover more than 1,000 nautical miles in 24 hours, which moves the project into proper record-chasing territory.

The goal is not just a headline speed run either. Hypersail has been linked to the Jules Verne Trophy, the brutal non-stop around-the-world sailing record currently dominated by giant multihulls. Ferrari trying to challenge the world with a monohull is not exactly the modest approach.

There is no combustion engine on board. Every system needed to control the foils, keel, rudder, onboard computers and instruments has to be powered autonomously while under sail.

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That means solar panels integrated into the deck and hull, kinetic energy recovery, wind power and a lot of software doing the kind of work Ferrari usually applies to keeping very expensive cars stable at very high speed. The company is treating Hypersail as a rolling, or rather flying, research lab for energy control, aerodynamics and performance systems.

Even the design keeps one foot in Maranello. The silhouette borrows inspiration from the Ferrari Monza SP1 and SP2, while the coachroof nods to the 499P Hypercar that took Ferrari back to Le Mans glory. The yellow detailing is not random either. Ferrari calls it part of the brand's "second soul", tied to Modena and old Ferrari racing history rather than the obvious red everyone expected.

The result is a deeply strange Ferrari. No wheels. No engine roar. No road. Just carbon fibre, foils, renewable energy and a very expensive attempt to prove that the company's obsession with speed can survive outside the engine bay.

Ferrari may be moving into electric cars, hybrids and now ocean racing, but Hypersail makes one thing clear. Maranello is still chasing the same old feeling. It has just found a much stranger place to do it.

Read the full article Ferrari’s Wildest New Machine Has Finally Taken Shape And It Does Not Have Wheels on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Luxury brands love sport, but Rolex has always understood something others often miss. The best sponsorships do not feel like sponsorships at all. They feel like part of the furniture.

That is why Rolex and tennis still make so much sense. The Swiss watchmaker giant has been tied to the sport for almost half a century, starting with Wimbledon in 1978 before expanding across the wider tennis calendar. Rolex is today associated with all four Grand Slams, the ATP and the WTA, and some of the sport's most recognisable champions. It is not chasing attention. It is sitting exactly where attention already costs a lot.

Roland-Garros is the perfect example. Rolex has been the French Open's premium partner and official timekeeper since 2019, and the timing of this year's tournament could hardly be better. The 125th edition arrives with tennis still enjoying a generational handover, with Coco Gauff, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka turning Grand Slam finals into proper theatre again.

RELATED: Rolex’s Secret Business Ownership Structure Behind Every Watch Ever Sold

The French Open has always felt different from the other majors. Wimbledon has ritual. The US Open has noise. Melbourne has summer energy. Roland-Garros has clay, patience and suffering, which is exactly why it suits Rolex so neatly.

Clay does not reward easy dominance. It stretches points, exposes weaknesses and asks players to keep rebuilding themselves between rallies. That is why last year's finals landed so heavily. Carlos Alcaraz came from two sets down to beat Jannik Sinner in the longest men's final in Roland-Garros history. Coco Gauff also came from behind to beat Aryna Sabalenka, becoming the first American woman to win the title in a decade.

Those are the kinds of moments Rolex wants to be near. Not because a watch changes the result, obviously, but because the brand has spent decades attaching itself to endurance, control and the strange elegance of people staying calm while everything around them is falling apart.

Gauff said the tournament demands more tenacity than any other Grand Slam, and she is right. Roland-Garros is not just about power. It is about problem-solving under pressure. For a watch brand built on precision, that is a cleaner fit than any billboard could ever be.

RELATED: Rolex’s Strategy Shift Puts The Watch Aftermarket On Notice

The bigger story is that tennis gives luxury something few sports can. It has global reach without losing polish. It has younger stars without feeling desperate. It has fashion, travel, private boxes, old money, new money and enough silence between points for the watches to be noticed.

In 2026, it has become even more valuable. Luxury brands are fighting harder for cultural relevance, and tennis gives them something rare. Global reach, polished crowds, younger stars and a stage that still feels expensive without trying too hard.

Rolex does not need to shout from the baseline. It has already built the association most brands are still trying to buy. At Roland-Garros, time is measured in rallies, pressure points and careers that can turn in one afternoon. Rolex just happens to own the clock.

Read the full article Rolex Knows Tennis Is Still Luxury’s Most Elegant Power Move on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

The internet reacted to 007 First Light like Bond himself had just stepped out of a DB5, martini in hand, ready to save cinema. In reality, it's a video game. A very good one, by most accounts. IO Interactive's origin story launched this week to strong reviews and early Metacritic scores that could make it the studio's highest-rated game yet. But it's still a video game. Not a film title announcement. Not a casting announcement. Not the cultural reset everyone is pretending it is.

But the reaction tells you something important. Brands are desperate for Bond to come back.

It's been six years since No Time To Die. And that film, for all its moments, never really landed. It felt less like a triumphant finale and more like a tired goodbye stretched across nearly three hours. Daniel Craig's last outing had flashes of brilliance, sure. But it never carried that swagger that made Bond feel untouchable. Since then? Nothing. Just years of speculation, corporate reshuffling, and Amazon eventually swallowing MGM whole.

Then a video game drops, and suddenly everyone's acting like Bondmania never left.

Coca-Cola launches limited edition tie-ins. Omega drops a special "First Light" release. Everybody wants a piece of 007 again, and that makes perfect sense, because Bond has always been bigger than cinema. It's one of the most commercially valuable branding ecosystems in entertainment history.

Aston Martin doesn't just place cars in Bond films. Bond helps define the entire brand image. Omega has built decades of luxury marketing around what's on Bond's wrist. Bollinger has used the franchise to cement itself as the champagne of suave masculinity. Tom Ford, Heineken, Globe-Trotter, Land Rover, Sony. The list keeps going.

Bond sells aspiration better than almost any fictional character ever created. That's not an exaggeration. Name another IP where a wristwatch placement moves units for 30 years running.

And that's exactly why the hype around First Light feels less about gaming and more about brands clinging to the faintest sign of life from a franchise that's been sitting dormant for way too long. Omega has no movie to leverage. None of them do. The franchise has been dark for six years with no release date, no lead actor and no script anyone's seen.

So when IO Interactive delivers an origin story starring Patrick Gibson as a 26-year-old James Bond earning his 007 designation, every brand partner in the ecosystem reaches for their chequebook. The fact that the game is actually good almost doesn't matter. They would have activated regardless.

Younger audiences don't care about Bond the way previous generations did. Marvel dominated the last decade of blockbuster culture, streaming fractured attention spans completely and TikTok rewired entertainment into 15-second bursts.

Bond's slow-burn sophistication, the tuxedos, the one-liners, the three-act seductions, suddenly feels old-fashioned in a world fuelled by chaos, speed and algorithms. Let's not mention the Gen Xification around casting rumours.

The franchise desperately needs reinvention but the brands attached to it don't want reinvention. They want stability. They want tuxedos, watches, champagne and car chases because Bond remains one of the last entertainment properties on earth capable of making luxury feel universally cool. Not niche, not exclusive, but cool to a 22-year-old in Brisbane and a 55-year-old in Belgravia at the same time.

First Light gives partners something to activate around while Amazon figures out how to turn Bond into a modern content machine without destroying everything that made it special in the first place.

That's the real tension at the heart of all this, because Amazon needs Bond to evolve but the brand partners need him to stay exactly the same. A video game, even a good one built by the studio behind Hitman, is the only thing right now that keeps both sides happy without forcing anyone to make a real decision about where the franchise actually goes next.

So let's stop pretending this is some triumphant return of 007. It's a holding pattern dressed up as a comeback, and the loudest cheers aren't coming from audiences. They're coming from marketing departments.

Read the full article James Bond’s Biggest Moment In Years Has Sponsors More Excited Than Audiences on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Audi does not need another sensible performance car. It needs something people talk about when they are not shopping for one.

That is why the latest R8 chatter feels bigger than a normal product rumour. The TT is gone. The R8 is gone. Audi still builds fast things, but fast SUVs and polished performance sedans do not quite hit the same nerve as a proper low-slung halo car with bad intentions and a reason to exist beyond the spreadsheet.

Now Audi boss Gernot Döllner has made that door look very much open. Asked about the possibility of a third-generation R8, he praised the Lamborghini Temerario’s V8, calling it an outstanding engine and pointing to its 10,000 rpm character.

He also talked up the benefit of being inside the Volkswagen Group, where Audi can borrow the right technical pieces and still turn them into something that feels clearly Audi. Then he laughed and called the idea “good.”

That is not a confirmation. It is also not how executives usually talk when they want a rumour buried.

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The old R8 already proved this formula can work. Audi and Lamborghini shared bones before, and nobody with a functioning right foot came away thinking the R8 was just a discounted Gallardo or Huracán in a German suit. It had its own character. Less flamboyant, more precise, more everyday usable, but still properly special.

The Temerario gives Audi a similar opening. Lamborghini’s new setup uses a twin-turbo V8 with hybrid assistance, producing serious numbers and keeping the combustion drama alive in a world trying very hard to file it under history. The V8 alone is already wild, and the full hybrid system pushes the total output beyond 900hp.

For Audi, that could be exactly the sweet spot. A new R8 does not need to pretend the V10 era can be repeated. It needs to prove Audi still knows how to build a car that feels emotional, expensive and slightly unnecessary in the best possible way.

RELATED: Can Formula 1 Pump Up Audi’s Car Sales?

The Audi brand has spent years becoming cleaner, quieter and more rational. The cars are good, but good is not always enough. Enthusiasts remember the original R8 because it made Audi feel brave. It took the brand out of the executive car park and put it in the supercar conversation.

A third-generation R8 would do the same thing at a time when Audi could use the noise. Reports have already suggested a possible late 2027 arrival, and Audi Sport has previously admitted the business case would need to make sense. Fair enough. Supercars are not charity work.

But if Audi can build a Lamborghini-linked, hybrid V8 R8 that feels like its own car, the case almost makes itself. Not because it will sell in huge numbers, but because it gives the brand a pulse again.

Audi may not be ready to say the R8 is coming back. But after Döllner’s little laugh, it is getting harder to believe the idea is sitting in a drawer.

Read the full article Audi May Have Found The One Car That Can Make Enthusiasts Care Again on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Ferrari did not just launch an electric car. It launched a question with four motors, five seats and a US $640,000 ($~894,000 AUD) price tag.

The new Ferrari Luce is quick, glass-heavy, Jony Ive-designed and unlike almost anything Maranello has built before. It can hit 60mph in around 2.5 seconds, run to more than 190mph and carry five people, which already makes it strange territory for a brand built on low-slung drama, two-seat fantasy and the kind of engine note that makes grown adults behave badly in tunnels.

The numbers are not the issue. Ferrari knows how to make things fast. The harder problem is emotional. For nearly 80 years, Ferrari has sold more than performance. It has sold sound, heat, vibration, theatre and the slightly ridiculous feeling that a machine is alive before you even move.

RELATED: Ferrari 296 Speciale Brings 868 Horsepower and Hybrid Tech to Track-Focused Bloodline

The Luce does try to solve the noise problem. Ferrari has developed an amplification system that captures the natural sound of the electric axles and sends it outside the car, with the option to bring it into the cabin in performance mode.

The company compares the idea to an electric guitar, which is clever, but also shows how difficult this moment is. When Ferrari has to explain the sound, you know the old rules have changed.

The design is already splitting people. The Luce has a large glass upper section, polished aluminium, four doors, a roomy interior and a shape that even Ferrari’s chairman admitted does not look like what people imagine a sports car to be.

Online reaction has gone exactly as expected, with some calling it a design masterstroke and others treating it like Maranello just parked a very expensive identity crisis on the lawn.

RELATED: Ferrari’s Secret Move Teases The Next Generation Of Italian Supercars

The timing makes it even more interesting. Lamborghini has cooled on fully electric cars, Porsche has scaled back parts of its EV push, and the luxury electric market is not exactly roaring. Ferrari is walking into that uncertainty with one of the most expensive non-limited cars it has ever made.

That may be exactly why the Luce matters. Ferrari is not trying to build the longest-range EV or the most sensible one. Its range sits around 329 miles, which is not class-leading, but this was never meant to be a commuter appliance with a prancing horse badge. It is a test of whether Ferrari can translate emotion into a new language without sounding like everyone else.

The Luce may be brilliant. It may also annoy exactly the people Ferrari needs to impress. But that is what makes it the most interesting car the brand has launched in years.

Because the real question is not whether Ferrari can build an electric car. Of course it can. The real question is whether an electric car can still make people feel Ferrari.

Read the full article Ferrari’s First EV Will Test Whether The Brand Can Survive Without The Sound on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

The luxury car world has long spoken in a few familiar accents. British if you wanted old money. German if you wanted executive power. Italian if you wanted theatre. Chinese buyers knew the script as well as anyone, which is why BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Porsche and Rolls-Royce became shorthand for having made it.

The Maextro S800 suggests that the script is starting to change.

The 18-foot Chinese luxury sedan, built by JAC Motors with Huawei technology, has been framed as China’s answer to Rolls-Royce and Maybach. It has the soft leather, two-tone presence and chauffeur-friendly rear cabin expected of a flagship limo, but its real trick is not old-world craftsmanship. It is gadget overload.

The S800 can park itself, open its doors with gesture controls, darken its window shade with a swipe, recline its rear seats like business class and entertain passengers through a 40-inch screen and roughly 40 speakers.

RELATED: Why China Suddenly Can’t Get Enough Of Wagons

This is where the shift gets interesting. China is not just building cheaper versions of European luxury anymore. It is building luxury around a different set of instincts. Rolls-Royce sells silence, heritage and hand-built ceremony. Maextro sells software, screens, automation and the feeling that your car is also your phone, cinema, driver and private lounge.

That matters because China is not just building cheaper versions of European luxury anymore. It is building luxury around a different set of instincts. Rolls-Royce sells silence, heritage and hand-built ceremony. Maextro sells software, screens, automation and the feeling that your car is also your phone, cinema, driver and private lounge.

The pricing sharpens the point. A fully loaded Maextro S800 costs around $173,000 (~$241,000 AUD) while a lower-spec version starts at about $104,000 (~$145,000). Nobody is calling that cheap, but next to a Maybach or Rolls-Royce, it starts to look almost tactical. For Chinese executives and entrepreneurs, the pitch is obvious: more technology, more cabin theatre and more local relevance for less than the old European badges.

RELATED: China’s 4×4 Off-Road Australian Invasion Has Only Just Begun

The bigger story is not only the car. It is what the car represents. Chinese luxury buyers are increasingly backing domestic names across cars, jewellery, handbags and hotels.

The Maextro has rapidly become one of China’s best-selling luxury cars, while Huawei is already preparing an even pricier model starting around US $220,000. At the same time, local luxury players such as Laopu Gold and Songmont are gaining ground as Western names struggle to hold the same cultural pull.

This is what should worry European luxury brands. China is no longer just buying their status symbols. It is building its own, and buyers are starting to believe in them.

The Maextro S800 may not have Rolls-Royce heritage. It may not have Maybach smoothness. But it has something the old luxury guard should notice. It feels smarter, newer and built for the buyers Europe can no longer take for granted.

Read the full article The Maextro S800 Is What Happens When China Stops Chasing European Luxury And Starts Replacing It on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

The VISTIQ landed on me in Melbourne for four days of mostly perfect autumn weather, which is exactly the kind of conditions you want to road-test something this big. Five point two metres of American three-row EV, captain's chairs, a stereo that rearranges your understanding of what a car can do, and a price tag that genuinely doesn't make sense when you put it next to its rivals.

That last bit is the real story here. The VISTIQ lands in Australia at $116,000 before on-roads. It's offered exclusively in top-spec Platinum trim with adaptive air suspension and a six-seat layout with second-row captain's chairs. It undercuts every comparable European three-row luxury EV on sale here, in some cases by tens of thousands of dollars.

We drove a fully charged battery dry for a week, mostly through Toorak, Brighton, Glen Iris, and Malvern, where the VISTIQ feels properly at home aesthetically.

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There is genuinely nothing in this segment getting close to what Cadillac is doing on value, and I've been driving press cars long enough to spot when a brand is buying market share. This isn't that.

This is a fully loaded, properly engineered three-row luxury EV that happens to cost less than the supposedly cheaper options you'd compare it against. The equivalent top-spec VISTIQ in the US starts from around $98,000 USD, which converts to roughly $138,000 AUD. We're getting it for $116,000. Win.

Standard kit includes air-ride adaptive suspension with chassis damping control, active rear steering, Brembo front brakes, and Driver Attention Assist with full lane-keep assist. You also get quad-zone climate, heated and ventilated front seats with massage, a dual-pane panoramic sunroof, the 23-speaker AKG Studio system, and the 33-inch curved display with Google built in.

This is luxury without the obscene $249,000 price tag some German manufacturers are slapping on their flagship EVs. It's just insane to think they do that. You'd struggle to spec a German equivalent of the VISTIQ to this level without crossing $180,000, and that's before you start optioning anything.

It isn't just me saying it either. When I dropped the car back at Cadillac, the bloke picking up his brand new LYRIQ stopped me in the car park to have a look inside the VISTIQ and just kept saying, " Wow, this is amazing".

My mate Luke, who runs Motorbiz Prestige Cars in Moorabbin and has had every supercar you can name through his showroom, jumped in the passenger seat and within ten minutes was running his hand over the leather and saying it feels like a lot of car for the money. When a bloke who sells Italian supercars for a living tells you a $116,000 Cadillac feels like a lot of car, you write that down.

The OPTIQ and LYRIQ are both nice in their own way and uniquely Cadillac, but the VISTIQ has the right stature for what the brand is trying to do here. It's the flag model. It's the one that's going to get people into the brand.

Parked, it drops onto its air suspension and goes from imposing to genuinely menacing. The Platinum wears 22-inch Reverse Rim wheels with a Satin Graphite finish on 295/40R22 self-sealing tyres, and the choreographed welcome lighting is one of those touches that should feel naff but lands when it's pitch dark and you're walking back to it after dinner.

The VISTIQ doesn't try too hard. The ambient lighting is cool, but it's not the point. The exterior aesthetic is right, and it doesn't need to shout about itself, which, after a year of Chinese EVs trying to one-up each other on chrome, screens and theatrical opening doors, is genuinely refreshing.

Cadillac's done the work elsewhere, too. Word is the Australian Grand Prix Corporation rated Cadillac's experience at this year's Australian GP as the best on-track activation of the lot, which, given how many brands were swinging for the fences with their F1 hospitality, is a serious thing to be said.

The interior is where Cadillac really pulls away from the pack. I've spent a fair chunk of this year inside Chinese EVs at the Beijing Auto Show and back home, and there's a specific kind of interior they keep producing. Lots of screens, lots of soft-touch surfaces in places you'll never touch, lots of pattern and ambient light, and almost nothing that feels properly considered.

The VISTIQ is the opposite. Cadillac has been making interiors for nearly a century, and you can feel it the moment you sit down. The captain's chairs in row two are the kind of things you notice.

The materials slap too. Open-pore wood, real metal accents, leather that smells like leather. After four days of getting in and out multiple times a day with bags, coffees, and groceries, nothing creaked, nothing squeaked, and nothing looked like it was going to wear out in two years.

This deserves its own section because I'm still thinking about it days later. The VISTIQ runs a 23-speaker AKG Studio system with Dolby Atmos, and it uses Harman's 1-amp architecture, mapping Atmos tracks to each individual speaker location, including headrest speakers and height speakers.

The technical detail matters because this isn't a lot of speakers shouting at you from the doors. It's actual three-dimensional audio engineering.

Tune of the trip was Running in the Night by FM-84 and Ollie Wride. Synthwave, layered to hell, the kind of track that on a normal car stereo turns into mush by the second chorus. In the VISTIQ it sat up around me like I was in the booth. The synth pads come from above, the bass line stays planted, Wride's vocals are dead centre, and the arpeggios float between the front and rear of the cabin like they're moving through the car.

The other thing worth saying is how good it sounds at low volume. Most premium car audio systems need to be cranked to come alive. The AKG setup is detailed at whisper-quiet volumes, which matters more in real life than the party-trick demos do.

If you're a real snob when it comes to in-car audio, I'll give the slight edge to the LYRIQ. Cadillac's partnership with Warner Music Australia is built around the LYRIQ's AKG sound system, with Warner artists putting their tracks through the ultimate "car test" in the LYRIQ cabin.

You can build a luxury car that's quiet and quick. What's harder is making something this big feel composed at speed and unbothered at low speed, and the VISTIQ does both.

The dual-motor AWD system delivers 459kW and 880Nm, and 0 to 100 km/h takes 4.2 seconds when you engage Velocity Max via the steering wheel button. The huzzah is the ride. Air Ride Adaptive Suspension with Chassis Damping Control comes standard along with active rear steering, and the result is a five point two metre SUV that turns into car parks like something a metre shorter and floats over Melbourne tram tracks like the surface isn't there.

The most important thing about driving this car, though, is how easy it is. Easy, easy, easy. That sounds like a small thing until you've spent time in big EVs that aren't, and then you realise it's the difference between a car you want to drive every day and one you don't. The VISTIQ is genuinely effortless to thread through Toorak Road traffic and just as relaxed on the freeway.

Range-wise, the Australian-spec car uses a 91kWh battery with a claimed 461km WLTP range and a max DC charge rate of 130kW. I used a full charge over four days of mixed Melbourne driving, which felt about right against the WLTP claim. The DC charging speed is the one place the value equation takes a slight hit, but for the kind of driving most people will do in this car, it's a non-issue.

The 33-inch curved display with Google built-in is perfection. The menus are logical, the response time is quick, and Cadillac has resisted the temptation to bury climate controls three menus deep. This is thanks to GM using the same UX across all its brands and models. Makes for better customer feedback and product evolution. Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, despite GM in the US having ditched them on its EVs.

The Cadillac VISTIQ is the most difficult car I've had to write about this year, because the conclusion sounds like marketing copy and it isn't. At $116,000 before on-road costs, this is the best-value luxury large SUV EV on sale in Australia.

The interior is genuine luxury, the sound system is on a level with the very best in the business, the ride matches anything coming out of Crewe or Goodwood at three times the money, and it does 0 to 100 in 4.2 seconds while seating six adults in proper comfort. 

The DC charging speed is the one knock, and if cross-country road trips are your main use case, that's worth knowing. Everything else feels like Cadillac quietly raising the bar on what a $116k luxury EV looks like in 2026.

Verdict: I'd buy one.

The VISTIQ is on sale now through Cadillac's experience centres in Sydney and Melbourne. 

Get yourself in front of one. If you're shopping anywhere near this price point in the luxury EV space, you owe it to yourself to drive this car before you sign anything else.

Read the full article Meet The Luxury SUV Delivering Looks, Comfort & Performance At A Stunning Price on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Tasman Drive was never trying to be famous. It was just a quiet residential street in Gerringong, south of Sydney, with a ureal view at the bottom of the hill and people living normal lives at the top of it.

Then the internet noticed the angle. The road falls towards the ocean. The green hills. The blue water. The sort of shot that makes a phone camera feel like it has discovered something sacred.

Over the past year, visitors have started arriving to recreate the same photo, some crawling past in cars with phones hanging out of windows, others setting up tripods in the road as if the street came with a content permit.

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It is easy to understand the appeal. Tasman Drive has the kind of coastal backdrop tourism boards would happily spend six figures trying to manufacture. Multimillion-dollar homes sit on one side, while the other opens towards grass, ocean and the bay below. Stand in the right place and the street seems to pour straight into the water.

That image has done what beautiful images now do. It travelled faster than the town could prepare for. One TikTok calling it Australia’s most beautiful street has pulled millions of views, and the road has since become a regular weekend gridlock, with hundreds of visitors turning up for photos and videos.

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The problem is that Tasman Drive is not a lookout with parking, toilets and a neat little sign telling people where to stand. It is a normal street, which means daily life now has to bend around everyone else’s photo.

Residents have dealt with traffic, blocked driveways, parking chaos, tourists crossing onto private property and visitors asking to use bathrooms and kitchens. Council discussions have even noted reports of people relieving themselves on lawns, which is a fairly efficient way to drain the magic out of a coastal view.

There is money in the attention, of course. Tourism spending in the area has reportedly jumped to around A$2.4 million a month, up more than 50 per cent from the previous six-month period. Local businesses have also said the extra visitors have helped during quieter stretches.

Still, the trade-off is not simple. Some residents are happy to share the view. Others are tired of trespassing, drones, noise, rubbish and tourists who take the photo but do not always spend much in town. A few have reportedly even used fertiliser on lawns to discourage people from treating private grass like a viewing platform.

The council is now looking at practical fixes, including parking restrictions, better signage, more bins and clearer directions to public bathrooms. That may help, but it does not change the bigger lesson.

In 2026, a quiet street does not need a hotel, a theme park or even a café to become a destination. It only needs the right view, the right algorithm and enough people willing to stand in the road for proof they were there.

Read the full article Australia’s Most Beautiful Street Is Paying The Price For Going Viral on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Europe is not the problem. The problem is that everyone is trying to have the same European summer in the same five places at the same time.

Paris will always be Paris. Rome will always win. Dubrovnik, Santorini and the Amalfi Coast are not suddenly going out of fashion because someone discovered Albania. But in 2026, the classic European summer now comes with a surcharge: higher prices, thicker crowds, hotter weather, airport friction and the quiet humiliation of paying premium money to queue for the same sunset as everyone else.

Travellers are not giving up on Europe. They are giving up on paying peak-season money to fight for space in the same overloaded places. Searches for smaller cities are rising globally, and the appetite is still there, but the map is changing. People still want the Europe feeling. They just want less squeeze for the privilege.

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The old Europe trip was a sprint. Three cities, two countries, one overpacked suitcase and a camera roll full of churches you could not name by the time you got home. That style is starting to feel tired.

The smarter version of Europe now looks slower, smaller and less obvious. Travellers are leaning towards local culture, cooler cities, greener transport, fewer transfers and places that do not punish you for wanting dinner near the old town.

Slovenia is the cleanest example. It gives travellers the Alpine lake fantasy, Ljubljana’s pretty old town, wine country, the Soča Valley and Lake Bohinj without Switzerland pricing or Lake Como crowds. Central four-star rooms can still sit around €120 to €160, while dinner for two is often closer to €50 to €70, which is exactly why the country feels clever rather than compromised.

Latvia is doing something similar for city breaks. Riga gives you old-town beauty, Art Nouveau architecture, cooler weather and Nordic-adjacent energy without Copenhagen or Oslo prices. Central four-star rooms can still land around €70 to €100, and the city comes in far cheaper than Berlin, Oslo and Dublin while still offering the kind of handsome, layered city break that feels increasingly useful in a hotter, more expensive Europe.#

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The Mediterranean is not dead. It is just expensive, sweaty and increasingly full. That is why the Balkan coast keeps getting more interesting.

Montenegro gives you Bay of Kotor drama, clear Adriatic water and a more polished setup than some of its neighbours. It is not bargain-basement Europe, but four-star stays around €100 to €140 and dinners for two around €40 to €60 still make it look sensible next to the more famous Adriatic hotspots.

Albania is the rougher, cheaper play, but that is part of the appeal. A typical night can come in around €89 compared with more than €200 in Croatia, while still offering sandy beaches, old towns, seafood, Roman ruins and that slow Mediterranean rhythm people usually pay much more to chase.

Bulgaria deserves a place in the conversation too. Obzor on the Black Sea has been pitched as a quieter, cheaper alternative to better-known Aegean and Mediterranean resorts, with a long beach, mountain backdrop and lower package-holiday prices than many classic summer spots. It is not the name people brag about at dinner, which is partly why it still works.

Bulgaria deserves a place in the conversation too. Obzor on the Black Sea has been pitched as a quieter, cheaper alternative to better-known Aegean and Mediterranean resorts, with long beaches, mountain views and package prices that still look refreshingly sane compared with the usual summer names.

Poland is another underrated move, especially if you want culture rather than coastline. Krakow, Gdańsk and Wrocław can still deliver handsome old towns, strong food, good hotels and proper history without the feeling that the city has been priced for tourists doing their once-in-a-decade Europe trip.

The point is not that Paris, Rome or Barcelona are suddenly bad ideas. They are classics for a reason. The point is that the smartest travellers are no longer confusing famous with best value.

Europe still works in 2026. You just have to stop treating it like a greatest-hits playlist and start travelling like someone who knows there are better songs on the album.

Read the full article Europe Still Slaps If You Stop Travelling Like A TikTok Tourist on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!

Tom Hardy was not just another name on the MobLand poster. He was the reason a lot of people pressed play.

The British crime drama had plenty going for it already. Guy Ritchie gave it swagger, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan brought heavyweight class, and the Harrigan family had enough dysfunction to keep the story moving.

But Hardy’s Harry Da Souza gave the show its centre. He was quiet, controlled, permanently unreadable and exactly the kind of fixer a crime drama needs when everyone else is trying to steal the room.

That is why the latest reports around his future are such a problem. Hardy has reportedly not been asked back for a potential third season after clashes during production on Season 2. The claims include tension over scripts, dialogue changes, late arrivals to set and frustration that a series first built around him had begun shifting into a broader cast showcase.

Season 2 has already wrapped and is still expected to arrive before the end of 2026, but the future beyond that now looks far less simple.

RELATED: Guy Ritchie Confirms MobLand Season 2 Will Drop Before The End Of 2026

On paper, MobLand can survive almost anything. Mirren, Brosnan, Paddy Considine, Joanne Froggatt and the rest of the cast are not exactly spare parts. Season 1 also proved there was a serious audience for this world, becoming one of Paramount+’s biggest original hits and quickly earning a second run.

The problem is chemistry, not talent. MobLand worked because Hardy gave the chaos a centre of gravity. Everyone around him could be louder, richer, nastier or more theatrical because Harry Da Souza sat in the middle with a face that said he had already solved the problem and nobody was going to like the answer.

Remove that, and the show does not simply lose a character. It loses part of its pulse.

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The obvious question now is what Paramount does with Harry. Recasting him would feel strange. Killing him off could work, but only if Season 2 gives the show enough runway to make that feel earned rather than convenient. Writing him out quietly would be worse, because MobLand has never been quiet about anything.

There is also the fan problem. Viewers have already made clear that Hardy was the face of the show for them, and the online reactions have been blunt enough to suggest Paramount may have fixed one behind-the-scenes issue while creating a much louder audience problem.

Maybe MobLand is strong enough to become a true ensemble. Maybe Mirren and Brosnan can carry the next phase. Maybe the Harrigans were always bigger than Harry Da Souza. But right now, Hardy’s reported exit feels less like a casting change and more like the show walking into Season 3 without the man who made its violence feel interesting.

Read the full article Tom Hardy’s MobLand Exit Leaves Paramount With A Bigger Problem on DMARGE. Don’t miss it!