K’s Honest car Reviews Part… Something, anyway they’re back after a long time

One of the few pleasures of living in South Delhi is that every once in a while you can drive like a man possessed – or basically like the folks in West Delhi when they come to the South. The problem is that the once in a while moments usually are too few and far between. After much careful analysis the reason behind the decline of driving is not Sheila Aunty’s hare-brained BRT Corridor, I swear I will kill the next Leftie who says ‘But it works in Bogota!’ Rush jobs in public transport are screwing traffic flows across the city, anyway even though a easy-fix to the BRT problem would be to ban auto-rickshaws and commercial vehicles, but I don’t want to get too far involved in a rant that someone will say is directed against public transport.
I just hate stupidly planned schemes, but then again, doesn’t everyone. But more than the BRT, I should direct my ire at Bajaj Chetak drivers. The child-molesters who drive the worst piece of Indian automotive engineering after the Reva drive with no care for anything else on the road. I don’t dislike Hero Honda drivers, nor do I hate cyclists or the dimwits who weave around in their Pulsar’s. No, the Bajaj Chetak is the single most horrible thing on the roads. The guys will try and force their way virtually everywhere, have no respect for whose paint their rusting footrest scrapes against.
Even though Rajiv Bajaj should be credited for creating a product that proves Darwin’s theory (the Pulsar – I’ve seen far too many accidents on Pulsar’s and pretty much every one is because of idiotic driving, but what would you expect from the average Pulsar driver) I’ve actually personally thanked him personally because he withdrew the Chetak from production. And he allowed Lintas-Lowe to create some pretty kinky new advertising – even though the Benecio Del Toro lookalike in their new advert is bit bizarre.
OK, I was supposed to be reviewing something and it is the Honda Jazz, which for the purpose of this review we will call the ‘Seven Lakh Small Car’ (SLSC) given that journalists are the latest victims of abbreviation-itis. OK, but then again as some comments can’t help but claim I’m a lazy pile of bull-turds, so since I’ve been dubbed a bad journalist I’ll stick to calling it the Jazz.
The reason there are almost four hundred words of filler text is that it is incredibly difficult to justify this car. The reason Honda has priced it at the price they have isn’t because it is incredibly well-engineered and loaded with goodies, which it undeniably is. Honestly, the interiors on this car are the best for any small car on Indian roads save the Fiat 500. The reason Honda has priced it so insanely high is because the financial crisis has hit them hard forcing them to slow down the start of their new plant. So the Jazz is essentially a car that pretty much completely imported from Thailand and put together by a bunch of robots in Greater Noida.
The one thing I fear that they have changed for India is the gearbox, which means that the car ends up with little perceptible power off the line. To get the best out of the engine you’ll need to keep revs well past 3000. There are two stretches of road in the capital, the first the Greater Noida Expressway is a straight line road, and is best enjoyed in something made in Germany or Italy. The second is a lovely twisty road, which unfortunately isn’t quite up to the mark anymore. The Jazz disappointed on both these roads. I’m not saying it was bad, but for the price you could definitely have a lot more fun.
I know this is a terribly stupid thing to do on public roads, especially on public roads where people don’t quite follow rules and random trucks suddenly decide to drive on the wrong side of the road, but occasionally I do throw a car into a turn. Not enough to lose traction, but enough to have a nice time. And the Jazz kept its bearings, but felt quite bored doing it - it isn't as if the car is wobbles through corners, it is assured but there is little feel to it. The car is extremely practical in most respects - interior space is brilliant and fuel economy is surprisingly good - despite my sometimes map-cap shifting and obsession with second and third year to get the car moving, it delivered an impressive 14 k's to a litre.
But it is a SLSC and for that much money it is horribly mediocre. Decent car, but absolutely not worth the price!

K's Honest Car Reviews Part 4 : Zen Estilo

When you get a free car, you learn that you should not crib, even if it is Pink! Now, while I am fairly confident about my sexuality, driving a Pink car (or using a Pink phone, for that matter) is a bit much. Pink is the new Blue, creative folks in advertising might argue (referring to Hutch, which might not remain Hutch for too much longer), but a Pink car is a bit too much even for me. Maruti countered, that it really isn’t pink, rather it’s a nice ‘Mauve’ or ‘Light Baingan’ (that’s what it is!) or as my friend Sam kindly put it, ‘Fushia’. I don’t care, any which way, it was Pink, not a glorious Baby Pink or a stunning Magenta, but still an affront to my masculinity. I think.But, that isn’t the point. The point is the new Zen Estilo. Honestly, can can dismiss the driving dynamics bit with the following words – ‘Remember the Alto 1.1?’ Because, underneath that it what this car is, the underpinnings of the Alto with Maruti’s 1063cc engine which is frugal, not terribly rev-happy, but it gets the job done, with a bit of harshness, but that could be put down to the fact that the car still hadn’t been broken in. On the whole, the old Zen was a far, far more involving car to drive.

My mother had one till she upgraded to a City, this was one of the first Zen’s off the line with the then new MPFi engines and my god, that car rocked. The new car, while not sharing the unsteadiness of the WagonR at speed, is not as much ‘fun’, but ‘fun’ is a subjective term here. The old car rocketed off the line, push it hard off the line and you could go with tyre smoke and throw it into a sharp bend , or throw it into a handbrake turn, it gave you its all and there was no better small car at that than the old Zen. I loved that little car and I was sad to see the thing go when it did. The new car, as I said, gets the job done, it can go fast if you mash the gears, maybe even contemplate 150k’s on the speedo, but it doesn’t feel like fun, like the old one did
However, the monovolume shape, which imparts the car a part-Matiz/part-Innova/part-Honda City look, doesn’t do much for me from the outside, however, the insides is where this car scores. Big time. Even though I used the top-of-the-line four lakhs or somewhere around thereabouts VXi model (without optional ABS or the driver-side airbag) and even though this seems to have borrowed liberally from the WagonR parts bin, the two-tone brown-beige interiors, with a not-so-bad silver touch to the centre console and unbelievably good plastics (for a small car!) it felt nice. Honestly, there were times I really didn’t care that half the people at the Zakir Hussain Marg red light were staring at this guy wearing a button-down shirt and tie driving a pink car!
The problem with the Estilo, even though it shares the WagonR’s platform, is that while interior space is better – luggage space included (best in class, maybe, I don’t have figures though!), the tapered shoulder of the car means that there is no way you’ll fit three grown men at the back. Three grown people is a bit of a stretch in a WagonR, but this car, like the Alto is a four-seater, even though Maruti markets it as a fiver.
This car will not compete with the Alto (which is cheaper) or the WagonR and Santro (which pretend to be family cars) but maybe puts more pressure on GM (if bad aftersales and a bleeding bottomline wasn’t bad enough) to market the Spark, because this car suddenly killed that car’s value proposition. It has also given a decent alternative, thanks to its ‘interesting’ colour choices for those of us who have alternative choices in life. And if you’re single and you don’t want a boxy tall-boy, you got this ‘monovolume’, which isn’t a family car, it isn’t a fun car, but as a city runabout and maybe on the small off-days with someone (not the whole jing-band) this felt sensible even.
Just don’t buy it in Pink if you're a guy!

K’s Honest Car Reviews Part 3 : The WagonR Duo

I haven’t written a car review on the blog in a while, so I’ll post two in rapid succession. This will help in two things – first I admit I’m a ‘hit whore’ so, writing car reviews get in a lot of hits as I discover on Google Analytics (as do references to jiggly-wiggly objects on Mallika Sherawat’s chest). Secondly, my post count has taken a tumble recently, so two quick posts on matters completely unrelated to the media should help.

I have spent a considerable amount of time in the past three months driving the boxy WagonR. I’ve never been fond of the WagonR’s dubious aesthetics, even though the new redesign has made it a wee bit more appealing. But the reason I happily drove a car I don’t like for so long was because of the sheer economics of it. This was the WagonR Duo, which ran on LPG – cooking gas to you and me by another name.
Now, everytime someone does a story on LPG you hear the sob story of how much the oil marketing companies lose subsidising it. Nobody writes about how restaurant owners have milked the government by taking huge numbers of multiple connections, but that isn’t the point. Even without the subsidy and actually with a slight profit margin, LPG costs Rs 25.44 a litre in Delhi. Even with the new petrol price hovering at Rs 46.50-something, that is cheap. (LPG actually cost Rs 29.16 at the pump till a month and a half ago). Anyway, you do the math, the WagonR gives a maximum of 14km to a litre of petrol. On LPG, it gave me an average of 11.5km per litre. Factor in the Rs 20 discount on the price of the fuel, and you’ll work out just how cheap it is. The LPG fitted WagonR costs Rs 24,000 more – so if you drive 18,000km a year, you’ll be breaking even in around the same time.
The downside to this economy? Maruti has detuned the engine by around 10 per cent making the car feel very sluggish at times lower down the revs and you find yourself mashing about the gears a lot more than you expected to – so instead of notching back to third, you end up on second, and if you hit a flyover not carrying enough momentum, you’ll have to go back to first. But then again, inside a city you rarely get a chance to open up, when you do, the car does take some time to deliver the power – so there is no surge, but it can go fast if you really want it to.
So the car is cheaper to run and because this is a factory-fit it might cost more but you do not void warranties, the chances of blowing up on the DND are much less – many of the cars going up in smoke – all of them Maruti vehicles coincidentally were running on do-it-yourself CNG kits.
The only problem is that the car has next to no luggage space. Because the LPG tank sits in the space meant for the spare wheel, the spare wheel has gone above the floor and that means half the already meager luggage space vanishes. And the car continues to look just as ugly. So, buying this as the primary vehicle is not a terribly good idea – because fitting a roof rack to the vehicle is not the smartest thing to do since centre of gravity moves even higher. This is a great vehicle as a daily commuter car – but read on because it does have one major failing and that isn’t the fact that it looks butt ugly. That said, the interiors, though dull, aren’t bad – I liked the new look to the speedo, and the inbuilt system though a bit too dhin-chak for my liking, go the job done sufficiently well.
The other major problem is LPG pumps – even though I read a story in BS I think it was that the government might allow the private companies to sell LPG at the pump – because it is not subsidised and they actually make money on it – it is available at very few IOCL pumps across Delhi (and almost none outside the metros) and the small tank that Maruti have fitted has meant range on a full tank of LPG is around 180-200km. Though you can switch over to running on petrol at the flick of a switch, meaning total range is an impressive 700km, that isn’t the point really, but even the 5km detour I had to make at least twice a week to fill gas still makes sense when you look at the price of fuel. Therefore, the WagonR Duo makes sense only in large metropolitan areas where there are LPG pumps – however if you live near an LPG pump, or one is on the path of your daily commute this cars makes immense sense. The LPG kit only gets fitted in the LX and LXi versions, so the pic is a bit misleading.
End of the day, this isn’t a racer, it isn’t pretty (even the inclusion of pretty girls in the advertising can't help it), and because luggage space goes for a toss, practicality does too. But it is cheap to run, and that is what matters - inside the city and that is it. I really liked the car by the end of it, but since it was replaced by the new Zen Estilo, I didn't mind. I'll write about that in a few days.