ODO : 7300 KM; Drive to Gangtok, Nathu La, Lachung and Yumthang in Sikkim, India.
I have already posted a picture-travelogue at
http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/travel...-xuv-w6-2.html . Now here’s the tech report :
Overall : Though I had driven the XUV for more than 5000 KM (including to hills of Kasauli and Nainital) before this trip, it is only during the drives to Nathu La and North Sikkim did I realize what an SUV is really all about. The roads were terrible and the gradients were steep but the XUV took everything in its stride without any huffing and puffing. The ride was never overly uncomfortable and I could maintain 20-40 KMPH on some very bad surfaces. I found the ground clearance adequate as well.
Suspension: Performed superbly throughout. Took some pretty severe jolts and bottomings without raising an eyelid! I guess this drive was really needed to ‘break-in’ the suspension. Some very minor squeaks were audible once in a while but by and large the suspension did what it is supposed to do quite silently. I now have much greater confidence in the ‘punishment taking ability’ of my suspension. The ride quality on the roughest of roads was definitely not magic carpet like but not bone-shattering either.
Tyres : The Bridgestone Duelers performed admirably under very rough conditions. The roads often had sharp stones and boulders and though I am yet to examine my tyres under a magnifying glass, a casual inspection reveals that there is no obvious damage. Traction and cushioning were good.
Steering : Simply wonderful. Personally, I can’t think of a better steering for my XUV. Handling is almost sedan-like and I’m quite satisfied with it.
Engine : A gem of an engine. Responsive, powerful, silent, torquey and fuel-efficient. Pulls even from 900 RPM. There were occasions where I felt that it would have been better if the engine had 30-40 more horses. But such occasions were few and far between. Anyway, what would those extra horses have given me – just the thrill of doing in 3rd gear what I am now doing in 2nd. No big deal really.
Transmission : Superb. Butter smooth. Am running out of adjectives. Earlier I had a problem with my second gear. Now it is as good as gone. Two reasons – the cables were changed and (arguably more importantly) the gears / engaging mechanisms have bedded in nicely after massive use in the hills. To put things in perspective, out of the total distance of 1925 KM covered in this trip, about 550 KM were in the hills of Sikkim where 2nd and 3rd gears were used most of the time. By hindsight, my 2nd gear seems to have been a problem child which needed some ‘
ragra’ to straighten out!
Brakes : Grinding noise, spongy feeling, etc, etc – these happen in other peoples’ XUVs, not mine. I’m quite happy with my brakes, and mind you, brakes are required to be used frequently in the hills even if correct gears are being used while descending. Also, my driving style is such that hard braking is almost never required. However, there was one occasion in the plains when the car ahead of me braked suddenly and I got closer to that car than anticipated despite braking in time. Probably I need to press harder on the brakes; my earlier cars didn’t have ABS / EBD. I need to experiment more on this issue before I can definitively declare that my XUV’s brakes are perfect.
Failure : There was only one – out of the two horns, the LHS one stopped working suddenly. I like to religiously honk at blind curves on ghat roads (strangely, I found that very few vehicles in Sikkim follow this practice) and I wanted to fix this as the decibels were much reduced with only one horn. Once, when I had to stop on the road for a long time due to a road-clearing operation, I started working on this problem. I removed the front grill (my wife helped me) to gain access to the horns and found that one wire had snapped (at the crimping point to a connector). I made some temporary arrangement (I carry some essential tools in the car during long drives) which is working fine till now.
Niggles : There are a couple of body squeaks, could be from the dashboard or doors, haven’t been able to pinpoint it. But they are quite minor, really.
Sub-zero temperature performance : My XUV spent two nights at Lachung (9,300 feet). During the first night, it was parked under a shed and when I started the car the next morning at 2 deg C ambient, the glow plugs remained on for 3-4 seconds and the car started in the first crank. But on the second night the car was parked under the open sky and was nicely ‘frozen’ (ambient temperature fell to sub-zero levels and my car was never started from 1 PM to 7 AM, i.e., for 18 long hours including the entire evening and night, and so it can be assumed that everything in the car reached the ambient temperature of minus 4 deg C) – when I switched on the ignition the glow plugs remained on for 6-7 seconds and the car started on the third cranking, when I applied a slight pressure on the gas pedal. But once the engine started, it idled nicely on its own without any accelerator.
Other sub-zero temp. issues : The windshield (like the entire top part of the car) had a thin and hard sheet of ice and I had to pour hot water over it to clear it. The washer fluid had frozen and thawed out after operating the car for an hour or so. None of the windows could be rolled down as there was ice on all of them. Everything became normal after warming up the car.
Mileage : I reset the DIS average before starting from Jamshedpur. It started from 9.0 KMPL and rose steadily to 18.0 KMPL over a couple of hundred KM. I expected the average to start falling after Siliguri (due to hill roads) but it was showing 18 KMPL even after reaching Gangtok. This obviously means that by the time we reached Siliguri the actual average was close to 19 or 20 KMPL. After the drive to Nathu La the average dropped to 17.3 and after reaching Yumthang the average reached its minimum level of 16.1. By the time I descended to Siliguri, the average had recovered to 16.4 and I finished the trip (at Jamshedpur) with an average of 17.4 KMPL. Though there were only 2 of us in the car with little cargo and AC was never used, an overall mileage of 17.4 KMPL over a drive like this (1375 KM in the plains + 550 KM in steep / treacherous hill roads) is AWESOME.