Title : Promises not kept
Review : I bought my Eterno on Jan 22, 2004 . This was our wedding aniversary. A gift to ourselves.
I was using a Bajaj Chetak earlier. The extensive advertisement by Honda suggested that Eterno gives the best mileage . 60 Kmpl in average road conditions. The notice board at the Dealer show room indicated several units had fuel average of 73 kmpl. I was impressed and bought one.
It has been now over 14 months. I have never achieved the promised mileage. Over the year I have got max 48 kmpl that too with premium grade petrol. I used to mention this to the dealer ( Innovative Honda, Ahmedabad ) whenever I turned in my Eterno for regular service.
Every time they used to claim that the mileage issue has been taken care of. This is something a user can not cross check at the time of taking the vehicle back after the servicing.
You will realise it only after one refill of tank. And you can not simply rush back to the dealer and have the vehicle retuned again.
Unfortunately, the only record which exists is the request entry of correcting average on the service job card. On the day of last service when I created a lot of noice about poor fuel average, the dealer offered me fuel average test.
I will like to briefly outline the same. They take you and the vehicle to a petrol pump and have the tank filled up to the bottom rim and note the reading on the vehicle meter.
Then you drive the vehicle for about 10 -1 2 kms . Then you go back to the petrol pump and have the tank filled up to the rim. This is to be checked only visually.
In my case we drove the vehicle a distance of 12.2 kms ( reading at the time of second fill = 5025.8 less initial reading = 5013.6 ). New fuel added was .13 ltrs or 130 ml. This gives a stunning average of 93.84 kmpl.
The dealer said that this is the best average they have seen and that my complaint of poor average is baseless. If I have further complaint, I should approach the manufacturer.
I wish to point out the fallacy in the method adopted by the dealer , and advocated by the Honda Company. First of all , the visual method of filling the tank up to one particular mark ( rim in this case ) is very error prone.
Also, as very small distance and small quantity of fuel are considered for mileage calculation a small error will be magnified considerably.
The dealer did not consider this arguement and was not prepared to consider ny readings based on ’ distance covered between one Reserve to subsequent reserve divided by the fuel filled up’.
Also, he was not willing to consider my argument that over a year any errors in this method will get averaged out.
It appears that Honda company itself is advocating this tanktop to tanktop method . Possibly, because more than one year has lapsed from date of my purchase, I will have to carry on with this bad piece.
But, I am writing this review to warn others to check their piece thoroughly before they commit themselves. On most of the other parameters, Honda Eterno has been OK with me.
Pros : Stable drive
Cons: Bad fuel average