I bought the Santro Xing - Dynasty Red in June 2007 in Chennai. We took a lot of time comparing Santro with Indica, Swift, WagonR, Palio etc but chose the Santro mainly because it is stylish, sturdy and already proven well in the market for several years. The Xing certainly looks much better than the earlier versions of Santro.
Being a family of 3 it suits us well and besides use within Chennai we have taken it on 3 outstation trips also. We don’t have a driver and the Santro is ideal for self-use. Even after a drive for about 300+ Km from Chennai to a palce south of Chidambaram with just a lunch stop in between, I found it quite fine to drive even on bad roads. The a/c works o.k - although not very chill it is sufficient.
We compared offers from 3 dealerships and chose DSC which gave us a upfront cash discount instead of offering unnecessary add-on products which we did not need.
SERVICE PROBLEM: We faced a major problem with our dealer(DSC Hyundai) when we gave the car for first free service. We took delivery of the car after the service and it started raining. When we turned on the wipers, they did not work! To our horror, our delaer had not even closed the backdoor properly and we kept hearing some noise from the backside. We stopped the car in the rain and locked the dicky and called the dealer. By then, their service engineers had left since their office hours were over. With great difficulty we drove back to the dealership fuming( the rain was too heavy and the traffic was bad - we had to drive extremely cautiously to avoid hitting others). Fortunately there was one engineer who sorted out the problem very quickly. Then to our horror, the remote locks did not work! The car cld not be locked and no one there cld figure it out since the remote lock( keyless entry) had to be set right by its supplier and the dealer cld not so anything about it. We later found that when they washed the car, the boys had wreaked havoc with the wires of the remote lock circuit and left them disconnected at 2 or 3 places. By then it was 6.45 pm and after heated arguments the service manager came on the scene and gave us a simple tip to deactivate the remote lock circuit and us the manual key. He was quite helpful and apologied sincerely and accosted the customer care executive for delivering the car without checking properly.
The next day, the service person from Crosslink Wheels( the remote key co.) came to our house and repaired the circuit. Since then we have faced no problem.
When we left our car for the 2nd free service in DSC, we made it a point to insist that all these should be checked before delivery. This time there was no problem.