The car finished 1K Kms last week and went for first free service. There were no complaints so nothing much to write about it. The servicing cost was 0. I left the car at White field Honda
at about 10:30 AM and went back at 5 PM to collect it. It was washed and ready. But I observed that the leather seat covers had black stains on them and there was a line scribbled from
blue ball point pen, probably that was from the service adviser's pen. I confronted the service adviser about these. He got them clean immediately. The black stains are gone but that
line from the pen is still visible slightly.
We went for the first long drive in the car to Ooty and back. Covered over 700Kms in 3 days, 16th, 17th and 18th. From Bangalore, Mysore, Nanjangud, Gudulpet, Bandiput, Mudumalai, Masinagundi Ooty.
While coming back , Ooty, Gudalur, Mysore (By pass ring road), Bangalore. This route was nearly 80Kms more than the one that we took while going to Ooty.
We left Bangalore at about 4:30 AM with 5 people in the car with luggage in the boot about 50% full. Drive till Mysore was smooth, reached there are about 7 AM. Since there was no traffic at that time,
more or less maintained constant speed through out. Road after Mysore was also in good condition, but encountered some regular office going traffic till Nanjangud.
Driving was a pleasure. I maintained speed of 80 - 100 KMS for most of the stretches, touched 110 for a very brief period and that's it, beyond
this I was not confident of my driving skills. But the car seemed perfectly balanced at those speeds. It negotiated the curves along the road pretty well, the back seat passengers were all very well
asleep with out realizing that they are traveling at 100Kmph. My mother, from her past experience traveling in my Wagon-R, was worried that she would get travel sickness , but ANHC handled the speed
pretty well with out any body roll.
I faced some problems while climbing up the ghats (I think its called Segur ghats) which has about 39 hairpin bends. I felt that even after flooring
the the accelerator I was not able to get enough power and the RPM stayed at 2 - 2.5K RPMs. I could get just enough power to negotiate the up gradient and the hairpin bends. In fully auto mode
it stayed at 2nd gear. Then finally I had to down shift to 1st gear manually to get a little more juice out of it. In full auto mode the RPM never crossed 2.5K RPMs even after flooring the
accelerator. I am not sure if this is expected, or was there something in the way I was driving, or was it the fuel? I had tanked up at shell@yeshwanthpur and then topped it up at a petrol pump
in Mysore. The drive till reaching the ghats was very smooth and didn't give me any indications of adulterated fuel.
There was an instance where I had to avoid a villager who suddenly decided to cross the road with out following the basic rule of looking to your right and left before crossing. I was at about 90 Kmph and
I had to apply sudden break and do a sudden right followed by left deviation. I never felt that the car was out of control during this maneuver. Is this ABS at work? The steering also felt
perfect at high speeds.
There were 2-3 road humps that managed to hit the under chassis even at dead slow speed. There were few bad stretch around Ooty where the under chassis again manged to kiss the ground a couple
of times. Apart from these all the road humps and bad roads were handled pretty well at slow to dead slow speed.
Two things I missed during thie trip:
- A little more powerful AC with ACC
- More space for 1Lt bottle.
Couple of observations during this trip, I am not intending to make any blanket statement, these are just my observations. Most of the Swifts and Tata Indicas that I came across were being
driven very very rashly. They over take with out making sure that they have enough space beyond vehicle they are overtaking. They just overtake and if there is no enough space to get back to lane
they just barge in to the lane hoping that the other car gets scared and slow down to give him space.