Official accessories for my Thar: Rear camera & front grille cladding

The fitment work took 2 days & it seems to have been done very professionally as I have not heard any rattling noise after the installation.

BHPian 84.monsoon recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

The Thar has been doing great through the last few months. Driving is less as have not had a chance to do long outstation trips. On city drives, the drive is butter smooth and feels majestic. There has been a lot of road work going on lately near my house and I find it easy to navigate boulders and sand piled everywhere, while the neighbours fear to tread with their sedans and crossovers.

Decided to get the reverse camera and front grill cladding installed, as after the replacement of the stock grill with the 7-slat grill, the front looks a little bland as the Mahindra logo in chrome is now gone.

The work took 2 days and I am glad I went for the standard rear camera accessory from M&M - Should have actually done this a lot earlier. The image quality is quite decent and visibility at night is also quite good. The icing on the cake is that it costs so less - Barely 3K and even comes with a warranty! The installation seems very professional as there are no additional rattles or sounds coming from the car for having done the installation work.

The grill spoiler was a different story though. First off, it costs a stiff amount for just a plastic part (more than Rs. 4K). Sure it looks good and lends some great character to the car. In fact, I love the way the color combination of the shiny black spoiler works with the mystic copper color of my Thar. See pic below:

However, the part is simply taped onto the grill with double-sided tape. I took the car out for a drive the next day to IIIT Sri City. After clearing the outskirts of the city in about an hour, one needs to drive for about 40 KMs on the Chennai Nellore highway. It is a very good road except for some work going on in certain stretches. I was doing about 100 KPH on one of the nice sections and heard a sudden noise! The cladding had ripped apart from the grill and hit with a loud thud on the front windshield, and then bounced off and landed on the bonnet.

I immediately reduced my speed. The sticky side had landed on the bonnet and luckily it stuck onto the bonnet as I had rapidly reduced speed. I was able to safely pull the car over to the side and retrieve the piece. Luckily there was no damage to the windscreen. Had the part bounced over to the next lane, it could have hit a two-wheeler causing a dangerous accident. Had it simply flown off, I would have lost the > 4K invested as there would be simply no safe way to retrieve it on a busy highway.

Sent the car again back to the dealership and they assured me that this time it had been fixed with extra adhesive and will not come off during fast drives. However, I think this is a serious flaw in the design of one of their official accessories that M&M should look into seriously. Followers of the main Thar thread would have heard about the latches in the initial batches of the Thar breaking off at high speeds and the whole bonnet flipping over and hitting the windshield. Such is the force of wind shear on the front edge due to the boxy shape of the car and the non-aerodynamic aspect of the 90-degree edge formed there.

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