Quote:
Originally Posted by phamilyman  @anupsaab: the fusion costs a bomb to begin with,rest tbhp is full of Ford A.S.S gathaas. I read hvk saab's log and the amount of repairs his car needed would buy a normal man a new bike. To think of it, all I did was change my oil after the ride. And a good wash 
@hvk saab: Why not the palio mjd/swiftd? i saw more diesel pumps. swift ki by default suspension is mashallah for back pain guys like me 
btw, the amount of beating matiz took was due to:
a. your driving? didnt seem rash to me, but maybe you were in quite a tearing hurry to cross manali in 2 days 
b. GM's bad quality? Again didn't seem so
c. Age. 2L km mein most people change four cars!
d. Road was exceptionally bad?
My case, I had butter smooth roads except fotu la top all the way jammu-leh. manali-leh was mostly lunar but i did it peacefully in three days. but still, nothing changed in bike. |
Palio a nice car, but body/model may be dated despite the new gen engine. Swift D a good car but may be a very expensive proposition and not worth running it on such difficult terrain.
2003 Ladakh trip was tough - descend from Rohtang till Tandi was all-mud driving. Roads were mostly dirt track after Jispa, except for some ttarred stretches in More Plains and afer Rumtse. Same in Ladakh Valley, en route Pang Kong via Chang La. But worstt beating was in Kargil-Drass-Zoji La which had to be doen in the middle of the night (tthose were the funny convoyy timings then) and there was no road - only rubble, huge boulders all over. And one could not drive slow because of the mad rush of other vehicles trying to overtake all the time in what was a 1-lane road with deep valley on one side and steep cliffs on the other with hardly any shoulder (or a crevasse shoulder). This exracted a heavy toll on my exhaust piping and wheel bearings. Moreover, a truck reversed into me on a slope near Gund and broke my front windshield. Brake pads wore out prematurely and they had to be totally replaced.
2004 was far better, although we had some serious problems - clutch plate breakdown on jalori Jot (tthanks to bad mechanics who omitted fitting oil seals on clutch plate properly), bad roads on Grampoo-Chanda Tal-Kunzum La-Kaza sector.
The Matiz sruts and lower arms are terrible, most of repairs have been on that - poor engineering byy Daewoo for Indian conditions. besides, I had iunnumerable problems with bent wheel rims (and consequenial tyre wear and wheel bearing repalcements) - used to chnage tyres twice every year at approx 30,000 kms (now in my SCorpio, I change afyer 70K).
My Leh drives were pretty sedate affairs (after Manali, till Manali it was a F1 drive), witth lots of stops for photography etc.