34,000 Km update with a Mahindra XUV700 DSL AX7 L AT AWD

BHPian away from home, family & friends shares an update on this Mahindra XUV700 after clocking over 34,000 kms.

BHPian Sommos recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

I have been away from the forum for about six months now and I have failed to update this thread. The reason being I have been transferred from Bhilai Steel Plant, at Durg, Chhattisgarh, where I have worked for 23 years, to Chandrapur Ferro Alloy Plant (earlier called Maharashtra Electrosmelt Limited) at Chandrapur, Maharashtra. Professionally I have gone back by 12 years. Socially also, we are cut-off from all our friends and find ourselves in an old historic city with narrow lanes and unruly traffic and no acquaintance.

The plant, at Chandrapur, is located in the buffer zone of Tadoba (TATR) forest spanning over an area of 550+ acres, which also houses the guest house, employee’s and executive’s quarters etc. Leopard, sloth bear, peacock visit the guest house and adjacent residential area regularly. Even the executives living here are accustomed to such animal sightings. But the idea of crossing path with a leopard early in the morning or even in the darkness of the evening makes me very uncomfortable and I am not accustomed to living such life. Such instances really do happen once-in-a-while but the security team do find evidences like carcass of animals etc. in the vicinity of the guest house which shows that the leopards do visit the area on a regular basis. During my stay here I have seen many different species of spiders, some as big as my palm and insects. Some insects make an unbearable shrill noise at night that sometimes I wake up from my sleep. The only solotion is to spray some insecticide in the direction of the sound and hope that the chemical works - mostly it has worked for me. There is not a single shop inside the boundary area, except for an SBI ATM, and for everything one needs to go to the town, whose nearest boundary limit is around four KM.

I have stayed in the guest house for the past six months, like a forced bachelor, while my wife had mostly stayed back at Bhilai. Recently I have got a rented flat and we are supposed to move there in a couple of days. Amidst all these turmoil / topsy-turvy in my life, the Orion has performed it’s duty like a trusted steed and has clocked 34K KM - 14K in the last 6 months.

Some brief incidents in the life of Orion during the past 6 months :-

• Change of Brake pads : The first set of brake pads were changed at 26583 KM. This part was fine compared to many others who had to change the brake pads in their car at 14 – 15K KMs. But the strange part was that all the four discs were also changed by the ASC as they had developed some waviness in them. This thing baffled me, as I have not read this in the forum anywhere. Anyway, I felt the waves developed in all the four rotors and agreed for the change but it put a dent in my pocket. I did not have to change the rotors in my Linea even once in 10 years of ownership. 


• 30K service was smooth and I insisted on changing the engine oil, even though the same was changed at the 20K service. I had to come back once from the ASC as V4 Ultra was not available with the ASC and I refused to use Ultra engine oil instead. The ASC arranged the V4 Ultra from some nearby ASC and I was called to the ASC again after two days for the regular service.


• I had ordered the 18” alloy wheel rim with the ASC couple of months back. After regular follow-up, the ASC finally delivered the brand new alloy rim @ 10100.00 plus GST after discount. Searched the tyreshops for Bridgestone Ecopia tyre but the same was not readily available in the market, so decided to go with the Yokohama BluEarth RV02. The cost of the tyre with balancing came to 16K approx.. Orion now has a full sized spare in place of the space saver. I haven’t got the time to fix the TPMS sensor in the spare.


• My daily drive to office at Chandrapur is only 2 KM x 4 times and I know that it is not ideal such a huge diesel engine for this sort of distance. But very luckily I never had faced the issue of DEF clogging. During the 30K service, the co-tek detected some soot residue and Orion had to endure the first ever forced re-gen. The ASC used a portable OBD port linked to a mobile app (min ismart) to do the re-gen. This appeared as very handy and useful tool to have to overcome such DEF issues in remote location. 

I had driven around 300 KM to Bhilai only four days back and any amount of soot should have been completely burnt during that journey. I am not sure how much soot accumulation was there or whether the re-gen was actually required at-all.


• I had to undergo a surgical procedure and was on medical leave for 6 weeks. During this time for 4 weeks the Orion was sitting idle in the garage. One day when I was fit enough, just went to check the car; though mentally I was ready to call the ASC. The car came to life at the second crank - so much for the battery drain stories floating in the internet.


• A couple of my colleagues at Bhilai were facing DEF issues in their diesel 700. One of them particularly was very frustrated as his car was clogging at 300 - 400 KM intervals. He raised the issue with the CC team right upto the plant level and mentioned my car as reference (with my permission, offcourse). Later on he told me that M&M had remotely accessed both the cars for one month period to extract driving dynamics, speed etc. and made a graphical presentation to him. No data was shared with him, so there is no evidence, but I have no reason to doubt my colleague.

Fixed this in the car :-

With two fast charging ports, it takes care of the mobile charging issues during long journeys. The device actually comes with 1 mtr. length of chord. Had to cut the chord and add heat resistant & fire retardant electrical wire to increase the length.

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