My first MS review, so has to be an honest one;). It’s been a month since I bought this car (LXi variant), my first purchase. The review has 3 parts - requirements, vehicle performance and conclusion. Here we go.
Requirements - on-road price around 3.5 lakh, fuel efficiency of 15 kmpl in city traffic, good air conditioning, driving and sitting comfort specially for people sitting in the back, good after-sales service, most importantly a reliable car for beginners that is easy to handle and maintain.
Both me and wife recently finished our driving school classes, you will appreciate beginners often do commit mistakes and the car should be robust enough to take a bit of abuse like jerky gear shifts, lower speeds at higher gears, drving even when the parking brake is engaged and so on. We took our drving classes on a Santro (just about a couple of months old),
Do we got a hang as how a new Santro would feel. Santro was an obvious choice. Alto was out of question, we wanted at least a one-litre engine. Spark was ignored due to poor service coverage. Indica, though a good car had the ’typical taxi’ appeal and hence rejected by wife.
Swift was out of budget. But then came a chance meeting with a friend who had been drving an Estilo for a year and half. He was visibly happy with the machine and recommended it to us. Next day, we had a test drive of Estilo, one of my experienced friends also accompanied and gave good grades to the car for its compactness, maneuverability, pick up, ac and in general driving comfort. So the choice was now between a Santro and an Estilo (I hate the ZEN prefix, there’s hardly anything ZEN-like in this car). We eventually went in for Estilo - If you notice Santro’s gas paddle (or accelerator) is perched up a little higher, making it a little difficult for people with smaller feet, specially ladies.
The grey dashboard of Santro looks rather dull. Estilo’s beige looks peppier. The technical specs are also comparable - cc, torque, braking system, kerb weight, etc. Engine-wise nothing separates the two cars significantly. However, Estilo’s looks (I’m kind of fed up of that decade-old look of Santro), beige dashboard, lowered gas paddle, Maruti’s extensive service network, lower cost of spares (though marginally) and convenience of disposal (if your friends are not interested in buying your used car, there’s the TrueValue dealer across the street) swayed the decision in Estilo’s favor. Though you never know, what luck (aka your new car) has in store for you.
Performace - Being new drivers, we really struggled initially to tame the power. The car has a good pick up. AC almost instantly cools the car. The large windshield is a boon for first timers, for wider view and shorter bonnet which means you are better aware of the distance between your car and whatever is in front of it. I never cheked the fuel efficiency accurately, but I guess we are getting something close to 15-16 in city traffic. Front and rear seats are comfortable if you adjust the inclination and head rest properly. Parking the car is never a hassle, you can smoothly move round the corners. Quite importantly, the car is good for ’settling-in’. You almost walk in to this car without troubling your knees to bend much.
You get a good view of outside once you are inside the car. There’s no inside-the-bucket kind of feel which you get in sedans or many of the smaller hatchbaks. We wanted to have a good view of the surroundings. We even avoided solar films on window glasses. The meter cluster is neat and easy to read. The annoying feature of this car is the gear shift lever. You always act like seeking your co-passenger’s blessings each time you throw the car in to first or second gear. You can hardly avoid touching the co-passenger’s thighs/knees if you are changing in to first or second gear.
The rod should have been a little shorter. Night driving too is quite smooth. I also did a rehearsal for changing tires, and did not face any problems. Even changing the head lamp bulb is not an ordeal. Best feature of the car is handling. No skill is required to steer this car, well almost. The engine seems to be absolutely blessed with the Buddha’s message of peace and harmony. If at all I accept the prefix ZEN before Estilo, it would be because of this feature - Zero Engine Noise. Your fellow passengers may contemplate meditation even when the engine is running. My sample size is small but somehow I feel Estilo has better suspension than Santro. It does not matter much to front passengers anyway but my experience of sitting in the back in both the cars made me feel that way.
Conclusion - You will not get all the good features of a small car in one particular model. And this is as true of this car as it is for other. Having said that, it’s a good small budget K-car (that’s what Japanese call such tiny cars - Kei Cars) for a family of 4, even 5 could be squeezed in if it’s a short ride. The cost of owning, running, maintaining and disposing is fairly affordable. Even a non-stop driving of 300-400 km will do no harm to it, though I am not advising it. To sum it up - A sturdy, comfortable machine with cool looks and easy handling. To top it the car comes with an anti-theft system - a chip embedded in the key. Which means though a thief can open your car and steal the valuables (music system, soft toys, upholstry, etc) but he would not be able to start the engine. The fuel supply will take place only when the original key is insterted in to the ignition key slot. Maruti brands this feature as ’I-CAT’. I don’t know if other manufacturers (like Hundai, GM, Ford, etc) install this feature in their lower end cars.