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Hello Smartcat,

My Sincere & heart felt thoughts on this thread , Indeed Brilliant Work,Brilliant patience & Brilliant
Perseverance exhibited.

Thanks a lot for maintaining this thread from almost an year back till this point relentlessly.

One Question here - Does VW Vento TDI come with ABS + EBD. If I am not wrong it only comes with ABS...!!!

I am sure people like it or not - this is going to be One stop shopping point (referral guide )for somtime.

Just looking forward to this thread when New VERNA & new Fieast joins this league followed by FIAT 1.6 Multijet (May be early 2012) with Maruti & TATA as well homing it.

[SmartCat]

You are right - Vento is not equipped with EBD! The website/brochure mentions only ABS everywhere.

[Auto_Song]

Hello GSM ,

Barring Vehicle condition and so on...for 30K I think anything between 6-7 L could be a Good Price for this diesel beauty. You may have to go for thorough check up before concluding.
Also keeping Chevy's resale history (poor) , You can take a call finally , BTW what color is it?

[dionysus]

This is lots of information, the tread is turning out to be a bible for buyers in this segment, kudos!

[Jakku]

Thanks a lot SmartCat, Dr. AD, Echo77 and all. Great thread and I completed reading this entire thread in 2 days after office hours. The next read is your small car valuation and waiting eagerly for your SUV valuation (or is it out? I am not having that link). I have saved all the files in my personal system. Let me see if I can add some value to them by putting some more sheets/ calculations etc. keeping in mind "too much analysis creates paralysis" as quoted in this forum.

I am now too confused (as rightly said by SmartCat) which car to go for. In my dreams it was Optra one day and Linea the other day, but now the intensity of swing has gone up. My heart says go for Linea, head says to go for Optra. At the same time, another part of my head warns me about my state after 4/5 years if the production stops in a year or 2. Totally confused.

I will work on the spread sheets by taking out the not so important parameters for me and will come out with a ranking of my personal liking and will post here. Let us see what that suggests.

I might go for a Scorpio/ Safari, but no Cruze as I personally disliked the comfort inside (no intention to contradic, purely personal). Looks & everything is too good, but the driving & riding comfort is not what I liked. Might be because I drove in heavy traffic coupled with the sales person's attitude made me dislike Cruze. Still I did not liked it. Again no Linea T-Jet as it is petrol.

[kryptonite]

Originally Posted by smartcat

We did a quantitative rankings of all the small cars sold in India.

Just stumbled upon this thread.
smartcat - Brilliant compilation, 5 stars all the way... Appreciate the efforts.

When you have the time, would be great if you could refresh your compilation with the recent launches (Skoda Rapid, new Fiesta, Fluidic Verna, freshed Linea, Sunny, etc) & to reflect price drops on the Honda city, Cedia - to name a few.

BTW - I did something similar (but not quite as exhaustive). Spreadsheet is attached in my Rapid ownership thread here:
http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/test-d...ml#post2597878

Thanks again

[manojgautham]

Originally Posted by smartcat

ROUND NUMBER 4 - SAFETY

Since we don't have EuroNCAP ratings for all the cars sold in India, we depend on 100 kmph to zero braking distance as a decisive factor for ranking the safety of cars. Research has shown that almost all head-on collisions occurred because one or both the vehicles involved in the accident could not stop in time (I made that up ).


100 kmph to Standstill - Braking Distance in metres:

Attachment 537592




We also consider safety features like presence of driver & passenger side airbags, ABS & EBD.

Attachment 537593



We now assign either 25 pts or 0 pts for all cars for each of the 4 safety features. Electronic Brake Force Distribution is as important as ABS. I have personally avoided a crash because of EBD on my Civic when I was forced to hit the brakes and turn the steering wheel at the same time on a fast curve - the Civic followed the curve without losing composure or skidding - only because of EBD.

Attachment 537600



Re-basing the points on a scale of 1 to 25, the safety rankings of our cars looks like this -

Attachment 537601



Comments:

- Rear discs equipped Linea T-Jet stops from 100 kmph in just 41.1 metres while the rear drum brakes equipped 1.4L Linea petrol takes 7.7 metres more to stop.

- Diesel engined cars have a 10 to 15% longer stopping distance than their respective petrol engined siblings. Apparently, engine braking is not so effective in diesel engined cars (plus there is the extra weight of the diesel engine)- so this is something one needs to keep in mind when buying a diesel.

- Optra diesel is an exception though. It stops in 49.5 metres while Optra petrol takes 54.6 metres. Reason? Optra diesel is equipped with rear discs while the petrol version has to make do with drums at the rear.

It's time for the manufacturers to equip all their cars with rear discs!

- The Verna being sold right now has no airbags. But the new one that will be launched next month will have six!


Ranking of cars that offer the best compromise between performance, practicality, features & safety -


Attachment 537602



Coming up next - ranking of cars based on their running costs (fuel costs) and the on-road price.

I am not sure about the accuracy of this data. I had read somewhere that the 100 to 0 stopping distance of sx4 Zdi is less than Vento. Also the Vento does not come with EBD

[avimal]

These tables need update for cedia after its recent price cut.

[mchanna]

Wow, What a compilation. what an effort!! How did I missed this thread all these days.
Really a one stop report for all the new buyers.

I think this exercise needs to be carried out once again as there are many more new models out in the market, precisely 9-12Lakhs bracket.

[prakash_ajp]

Originally Posted by mchanna

Wow, What a compilation. what an effort!! How did I missed this thread all these days.
Really a one stop report for all the new buyers.

I think this exercise needs to be carried out once again as there are many more new models out in the market, precisely 9-12Lakhs bracket.

Not just new models, some are not available any more and some are not even in the price bracket anymore. For e.g. Octavia has just become few lakhs more expensive between 2010 and now

[santoshr]

Also requesting Skoda Rapid 1.6 TDI to this data. Curious to know how it fares.

-Santosh