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Now these so called DRL's (parking lights of XUV) are getting on my nerves. Few months back, right side LED went kaput and now its the left hand side.:deadhorse

I was wondering, is it possible to make these LED's nonfunctional and add after market DRL's. Instead of going every few months to service station to replace entire headlight unit, its better to put them at rest and add local DRL's.

Good to hear you are getting good economy.
Try and keep the speed, RPM, hard accelerating and hard breaking in control till the running in time, it's worth waiting for.
Breaks have got a bit play, different than other cars in India, also agree that its soft, get it checked and bleed if required.
You can get the head lamps aligned a bit, depending on your and oncoming traffic's comfort level.
A few XUVs have got the carrier mounts, a decent one may cost around 10k is what I have heard. If you are interested in roof box, that can help as well, check with Tropicool India, Pune for one, they have some from Inno, Japan and can be comparable with Thule at competitive prices.

I recently drove an Ooty trip, car behaved well, some of the roads in forest I drove was a great experience.
You can see the garmin adventure here
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/b...2012/#overview
(images are resized for adventure so may not show a good resolution image, you can look at my fb album for more on that - https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...5352202&type=3)

Mumbai - Goa Trip

Just back from my Mumbai - Goa trip. Did around 1500 KMs in 4 days including 1200 of highway running.

I will try and post a detailed report. Here is the brief. I took the Mumbai-Kolhapur-Goa route while going. Had a overnight halt at kolhapur. On the way back - took the old Bombay Goa Highway (bad decision) and did a continuous 11 hr drive.

On the trip to goa - most of the road was flat 2 lane or 4 lane highway with little bad patch between Nipani and Sawantwadi. On the way back - it was 400Kms of Ghat with continuous snaking roads and hairpin pends.

The good points:
1. On the flat highways - the car curised along effortlessly providing a very stress free ride
2. The curise control worked flawlessly and added to driving comfort - especially on the Mumbai - Pune road
3. The car navigated the 6 KMS of bad patch with ease while other cars were struggling to navigate the same patch at a low speed. - Great to own a SUV :)
4. Fuel efficiency of around 14KMs per litre - I am happy!
5. I was satisfied with the headlights - quite effective on the highway.

The Negatives:
1. Very light steering. On highways I had to hold on tightly to the steering as it could turn on a slight bump or pothole. This was very frustrating as my Linea never had this problem. I am not sure if the steering can be made tighter by the A.S.S. guys.

2. Body roll. Quite a bit of body roll even on stratight roads. Now I dont know if this is unique to my car or to all XUV or for all SUVs in general.

3. Rattle - some continuous rattle from dash and front left door plastics. Will get this checked.

4. I had to shift down to second gear on almost all steep climbs. I saw fortuners crusing much more effortlessly on steep climbs.

Overall the trip was quite pleasurable. My major concern remains on the steering. I cant keep holding tightly on to the steering on long drives.

I'm really surprised regarding body roll on straight roads. This is what Wikipedia says "body roll is a reference to the load transfer of a vehicle towards the outside of a turn.", and that's the notion I had in mind. There are drivers who even while driving straight keep moving the steering left to right and back, in a kind of continuous motion. You see that a lot in Bollywood films, particularly the old ones with Dev Anand being the champ! With that kind of driving you might experience some body roll. Otherwise it may have something to do with the "light" steering that you complain of. Anyway, I hope these issues get resolved soon.:thumbs up

I got my brakes bleeded some time back and it improved but still there is lot of scope of improvement. I tried to align the head lamps using the knob next to driver seat but it didn't help much. Will try more experiments next time.

I've just completed a trip to Kerala and back. Average FE was 14.5 kmpl. Mostly highway, 100% on auto climate control (23/24 degrees), 3 passengers and reasonable luggage. It was measured using the tank to tank method. The infotainment system shows 18 kmpl for most of the time.

I guess your FE should improve after the service.

I stayed at madikeri town. There was lot of traffic due to bangaloreans. Also stopped and idled it with AC on many times. That all might have contributed to my FE but yours is definitely good. Anything special you do? How much are you getting in city?

Nothing special. I was cruising around 100-110 most of the time on TN highways.
But in Kerala, roads are crowded and narrow. You cant go beyond 4th gear/80 kmph most of the time. I feel there is still room for improvement.

Saw a sparsely masked up XUV500 on the Chennai-Mahabalipuram road a couple of days back. Seems like the new W10 variant undergoing trail run, as speculated by Autocar India magazine. Couldn't make out much as it was going in the opposite direction. Think a sunroof could be one of the new features, in addition to possibly an automatic gearbox.

More electronic fiddlies in W10? Hope they have sorted all the irritating niggles in the earlier versions.

Could be the petrol variant. Just saw this report. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/m.../1/239289.html

I guess my inputs are almost same as Debuda here but I will add a bit more from my experiences.

Steering: I have used Hydraulic steering in my previous car, but this one looks better to me, it does feel a bit lighter on very high speed, but not really bad! It keeps me alert rather which is required at very high speeds (~120).

Body Roll: So, if you are coming from a well handling hatch or sedan, you may have this feeling, I had this earlier, but lately I find it very good, may be I'm getting used to it, last 2-3 days, I have been driving those 1.5 lane roads with lots of curves/hair pin bends in and around Wayanad, Kerala and found the handling to be good, I was impressed with the burst of power that's needed to quickly overtake on 2 lane roads, it held its position really well, I was like is it trying to come close to my Fiat handling experience? It wont, but its far better than other body-on-frame vehicles.

Rattle: I didn't have them much, after my trip to Uttarakhand, I thought I had, but 50% of them were because of some loose stuff around, please check and eliminate those first. I still have a couple of things that I need to talk to ASC about on rattle from dash, they show up only on bad roads though. This is not that bad as yet.

Climbs: I have good experience so far on this, a couple instances where I'm moving from stand still to climb a slope, I found the engine made some growling noise, but I guess that's expected, need to ensure we use torque appropriately. During my Uttarakhand trip (Badri/kedar/Gangotri/Yamunotri), I managed to go past all the obstacles that the terrain offered with 4+1 passenger and luggage at its full capacity. Never had any issues, yesterday, we climbed a real steep one, that was on the way to Seagot resort, Bansurasagar dam site (you can find it here - 11.652351,75.972318), I have heard couple of vehicles including a safari had to come back and start again, XUV did it just fine (with some wheel spin though). However, this is very subjective thing, it all depends on the person behind the wheel, its more about skills than the equipment/cars here, not easy to generalize.

Have fun and drive safe!

Tictactoe, agree with you on the steering. Had checked with the service guys during first service, but they said it was fine. One reason I see this as an issue could be due to the previous vehicles we had been using and the steering setup in it. I was using a Honda city which had an EPS (electronic power steering) which I believe adjusts according to the speed of the vehicle. At higher speeds I had felt the steering get harder and hence it would maintain a straight line irrespective of the small bumps or potholes. Linea might also be having a similar steering setup .

FundaG

Linea has got the same hydraulic steering. However, what you said may be right, since Linea looks to have the best steering setup, he may miss that over here.

However, somehow I always prefer Hydraulic one compared to electronic since electronic may have show strange behavior during failures and can be dangerous sometimes!