The car was suddenly dying on me and the "EV warning light" was coming on while driving.

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Over the last month, the E2O has been temperamental. It would go into 'sleep mode' while driving (but wake up promptly when the 'wake up' button was pushed for 15 seconds), the steering would refuse to centre up and pull the car to the right, and the 'EV Warning Light' would show up occasionally. A visit to Koncept Mahindra at Mohan Cooperative Estate later, I had a new auxiliary battery installed. The old battery was apparently not holding up 12v and more when under load, and it was 3 years old.

The problem of the car suddenly dying on me, and / or the EV light coming on while being driven, didn't go away - until I noticed that it would only happen when the car was steered to full left lock. Inference: Something was wrong with the EPS module. The expert there told me it was repairable, though a new unit would cost ₹24k, if at all it can be procured from M&M.

So I left the car at Koncept again after Christmas, and the EPS module was taken out for repair. Got the car back after 4 days, with the EPS module repaired and a temperature sensor on the battery (cell #7) replaced. Over the last 7 days, it hasn't died on me, and no warning light has popped up, even when turning the steering to full lock on either side. The only (mild) bugbear is that the steering is pulling slightly to the left now (wheel alignment and / or EPS module calibration needed), and the steering wheel is not centred when driving straight (again, alignment and calibration needed).

Will make a quick trip next week to get this fixed, but the car is doing just fine otherwise. Total expense of less than ₹10k, including the new battery (₹5.2k) and all the repairs, didn't hurt too much!

Update

The pull-to-left-side problem was resolved after a visit yesterday to Koncept again, where the front wheel alignment was corrected and the EPS module was calibrated through a laptop, while I waited. The car is tracking straight now, and drives as good as expected.

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I decided to keep this small switch pressed for a minute as a last-ditch measure before calling a tow truck and voila, the electric vehicle came to life after about 20 seconds!

BHPian SS-Traveller recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

The first glitch showed up in our E2O this morning. I had left it on charge for a couple of hours, then disconnected the charger, unlocked the door and got in - and suddenly the car was completely dead! No lights at all, no horn, no power, absolutely nothing!

Called up Koncept Mahindra and spoke to their (one and only) E2O specialist. Said he needed to connect a laptop, and he's so busy that he can't make a house call. Suggested I check the auxiliary battery (12v) and replace it if needed. Or maybe I could get a tow truck to bring the car over to the workshop.

The auxiliary battery seemed to be healthy once I checked (took apart the rear seat and boot of the car to find it).

Finally, I read up on the internet about a 'Wakeup Switch' next to the 'Communication Port' where they plug their laptop in - this is situated in the rear footwell, on the right side plastic front panel under the rear seat. It is a little dot of a switch that's really hard to find, but I did. Pressed it for a few seconds, but nothing happened. Then decided to keep it pressed for a minute as a last-ditch measure, before calling a tow truck tomorrow - and voilà, the car came to life after about 20 seconds!

Drove the car a bit, and it seemed to be running fine and as usual - then a warning message popped up, saying Check EPS, and the EV warning light on the dashboard lit up.

Switched off and back on again, and that was gone too!

Looks like this is the famed Mahindra self-healing technology at work here!

Major worry, a sleepless night, and unknown, but presumably substantial, expenses saved.

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With the AC on, the EV gives a range of about 75 km and with no air-conditioning, just about 85 km.

BHPian Rajain recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Hello,

Our e2o has been doing its humble city duties. The ODO is now reading 57000 km.

I have to report the following experiences:

• One time, the gear lever was unable to slot in - it was fixed in about 3 days at the workshop (cost about 8k).
• One time, the AC was not working - fixed at the workshop the same day - cost about 12k.
• One time, depreciation of the battery - from 110 kms range to 97 now. Took about 15 days of time to source the part. Cost about 14k.
• Charging cable - cost 6k or so.
• Overall service at every 10k km - in about Rs 700-800.
• Sometimes in a month, it does over 1500-2000 kms also. There are days when it is doing 150 kms plus (charge, keep going, charge again).
• 3-hour charge gives a full 97 kms range. With AC, it mostly does 75 kms or so and then with no AC, just about 85 and then I have to find a charger.
• I have 2 chargers - both for regular 15 amp socket and they work fine.
• On safety, nothing to write home about - fibre body, fragile vehicle.
• Cabin comfort - really? What's that?
• AC - it is okay for Bangalore but keep it in the sun and it cannot cool the car down at all.

Overall - still fine for the local errands and city drive.

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The small EV was with us for 5 years and covered under 20,000 km.

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After a little over 5 years and just short of 20,000 km, my sister parted ways with her E2O+. The biggest of all reasons being the poor overall fit and finish quality of the vehicle (it was known when it was bought but there were hardly any other options in the EV segment back in 2018). The second major reason was that recently the service experience at Mahindra was going down. Due to the unavailability of parts (as the car is no more in production), even for small things, the wait times were high.

Yesterday MG Comet came home to take its place.

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The E2O made things too easy, but the Comet is more like a motorbike with a roof!

BHPian SS-Traveller recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

I had the opportunity to TD a Comet this afternoon, and benchmark it against my E2O Plus P6. Somehow in the last few days, I had missed the detailed pricing that had been announced by MG, and the fact that the top model costs ~Rs 10.5 lakhs on the road in Delhi was the first shocker - I was fixated on the ~Rs 8 lakh price announced and thought the car with all its bells and whistles would be around Rs 8.5 to 8.75 lakhs OTR. My fault for not keeping track.

It certainly is a very attractive and cute-looking car. It goes reasonably fast, but not in the league of the Nexon EV. The E2O will keep up in F mode up to 60 km/h with the Comet in 'Eco' mode, and in B (boost) mode with the Comet's 'Normal' mode.

My wife flatly refused to struggle to get into the rear seat. There just wasn't enough space for her to get in and out, she said. So poor Mr. Manish was confined to the rear seat, while my wife made herself comfortable in the front passenger seat.

As soon as she was seated, I elbowed her in her right arm sharply as I turned the dial to Drive mode. For the rest of the drive, despite my apologies, she sat half-turned in her seat, with her right arm firmly out of the way of my elbow. Took her a while to cool down!

The car moves off smoothly, but there's no creep function as in most automatics and EVs, including the E2O. So manoeuvring in and out of parking spaces meant switching between the A & B pedals, and not just modulating the brake pedal for accurate positioning. This one feature (or the lack of it) made me lose my cool a couple of times. Oh, and the Comet has the grabbiest brakes of any car I've driven in a long while, or maybe this particular vehicle had that problem.

Talking of cooling, the AC works well, is a lot less noisy than my E2O, and though not a chiller in the 42°C ambient temperature outside, does the job reasonably well (at the expense of battery charge, of course). For the 8-km road test, we ran down the charge from 76% to 71% - and this was while driving in a leisurely fashion, never exceeding 50 km/h. My E2O would drain 10% battery for a similar trip with AC on, so based on this, the Comet ought to run about 145-150 km from 100% to 20% SOC. I wouldn't go below 20% for any EV unless it's a dire emergency. So my place in Greater Noida and back on a hot summer day might trigger range anxiety in the Comet but is impossible in the E2O.

The suspension is silent over very rough roads (the E2O does make some noise, but it's nearly 6.5 years and 40k km old), but body roll and pitch are uncomfortable unless slowing right down to below 10 km/h. The little tyres don't ride over bumps and potholes easily, and the E2O shows its advantage here with its 14" wheels.

Manoeuvrability is fantastic, the steering is light at parking speeds, and visibility all around is superb, even without mod-cons like the reversing camera or 360° view. Now, I park in reverse down a narrow lane, and I've parked much bigger vehicles in my parking slot, like the Scorpio / Ciaz. The E2O made things too easy, but the Comet is more like a motorbike with a roof!

Here are a few pics to compare the size of the two cars alongside each other:

The boot space is non-existent in the Comet, and here's a comparison pic. So no airport pickup / dropping duty for 2 people with luggage in this car, which the E2O effortlessly manages:

And the rear seat has not had enough knee space, length or thigh support for comfort. Here, the setup in both cars is with the front seat adjusted for my height, with me sitting behind that seat (top pics = Comet, bottom pics = E2O Plus):

When seated behind the wheel, there is too much information, in too small a font, with too low a brightness in the extra-bright summer sunlight of Delhi, on the huge expanse of the screen in front. Some of the writing is not even legible, and it would be worse if I were to wear sunglasses. That screen turned out to be quite a distraction while driving! I am 'nit-picking here in an entirely different sense, but there should have been a slider to turn up the brightness of the screen like that of smartphones, and some sort of option to increase font sizes.

Tried to turn on the headlights, and another surprise - the light switch at the end of the right stalk has to be turned anticlockwise to turn the lights on, and clockwise to the off position. Why, MG?

All in all, I am put off by this overpriced little toy, which doesn't even have space for me to park my mobile phone safely, and am left wondering why Mahindra discontinued the E2O Plus. With a better battery pack and motor for better range and top speed, that car would have been the perfect city car - not too small, not too cramped, and certainly not as quirky as the Comet. But then, Mahindra has a different customer in mind, with its bigger, pricier EV that competes with the Nexon - the XUV4OO; and my first spotting while I was driving the Comet.

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We reduced our garage from 3 cars in 2016 to just a Maruti Ciaz by mid-2020.

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Introduction

There was a time over a decade ago when I was driving ~50,000 km every year for work as well as recreation, and burning diesel like there was no tomorrow.

Then, tomorrow arrived.

In 2016, I quit my job that required me to drive ~150 km every day, our daughter went abroad, and we became empty nesters. For the next two years, I still had a 3-car garage - a 2009 Scorpio 4WD, a Thar (acquired in 2017), and a 2006 Swift ZXi. Our usual driving was reduced to ~10,000 km/year between all the cars.

Come 2018, the 3 cars were becoming a maintenance headache. Along with that, the issue of air pollution in Delhi, the diktats of the NGT to ban diesels over 10 years, and petrols over 15 years old, and the rules relating to odd & even registration numbers being allowed to run in the city on alternate days, were becoming too much of a hassle. Since all the cars bore odd numbers, we first chose to sell the Swift, which was the oldest of the three. Being BS-3 and almost 13 years old, there were no buyers for it in Delhi - and I wasn't too keen to scrap it, considering it was well taken care of. Finally, we drove to Guwahati and handed over the car to BHPian chiranjitp.

In 2019, the Scorpio was nearing 10 years. A perfectly running car, I did not want to part ways with it but was forced to. And we had to buy an adequately comfortable car to replace it since the Thar was not quite there in the department of comfort. So we bought a Ciaz.

2020 came, Covid-19 arrived, and our daughter visiting us for 3 weeks in March 2020 got stuck in the lockdowns and flight bans for nearly 2 years. No driving for weeks and months on end, and the two cars (the Ciaz and the Thar) just sat outside the house, running their batteries down and gumming up their engines. Sometime in the middle of 2020, we got an opportunity to dispose off the Thar. My wife used to drive the Thar after the Swift was sold, though she never enjoyed the heavy controls, and neither my wife nor daughter wanted to ride in the back seat of the Thar when the 3 of us went out together. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief and said Good riddance once the Thar was gone.

And so we were left with a single car. Not that we felt much need for a second car, but the Ciaz was not something I liked to take into congested areas or narrow lanes. Throughout 2021, with Covid-19 refusing to go away, we neither had many opportunities for road trips, nor did we need to go to the markets frequently, thanks to a multitude of online shopping portals, and a local market with grocery & medicine shops, Mother Dairy & Safal barely a 100 yards away from our doorstep. I work from home, and driving to a job was not a need at all. To put things in perspective about how much we drive nowadays, the Ciaz has done 27,5xx km from end-February 2019 till the end of 2022.

In March 2022, our daughter could finally leave India and return to her work and the place she enjoys living in. We were looking for a small car for those short trips and visiting some congested areas (anyone who's been to Sadar Bazaar in Gurugram or Delhi will know what kind of congestion I am talking about). However, with the extremely limited running we had, we refused to invest in a new car (though we did consider the Kwid, Alto and S-Presso at one time). Used cars in good condition were hard to come by, and prices were outrageous. It was as if everyone was desperate to buy cars immediately, and since the OEMs could not provide new cars fast enough due to chip shortages and other excuses, people were paying new car money to buy slightly old cars!

So, right through 2022, the search went on. Until the end of November…

...when my cousin who is an early adopter of EVs, decided to sell his E2O Plus and upgrade to a Nexon EV Prime. He had owned an E2O since 2013 and upgraded to the E2O Plus later.

That is my cousin's new car

The car

This vehicle was registered in January 2017 and had done 37,4xx km before we owned it. A complete service history is available. It did not come with green registration plates (but the white plates are HSRP), and I am not sure how to apply for green ones (in the event that they would at all be required, since neither my cousin / his chauffeur nor I have been pulled over for the lack of such plates). At the Koncept Mahindra service centre, I did notice all the E2Os still sported white plates, not green, so I suppose I don't need to do anything about it immediately.

The battery had a range of 110 km on 100% charge when new, but a cell balancing / battery optimization procedure done 2 years ago reduced the range to 99 km. A check-up with a laptop at Koncept Mahindra's Mohan Cooperative Industrial Estate showed all 16 cells to be in good health, except that the temperature sensor on cell no. 7 is on the blink, showing an occasional overheat light on the dashboard (but without any loss of performance). The part has been ordered, and I should be having it replaced in a few weeks (supposed to be a full-day job, involving the removal of the front seats and all the plastic covers).

The tyres (ContiEcoContact3, 165/60R14) are in good condition, though 6+ years old. The spare tyre has never been used. Since the car is used for short distances at low speeds within the city, changing the tyres right now is not under consideration, though I installed an external TPMS to monitor them.

The front suspension has a bit of a rattle over rough patches and will be attended to soon (though the service centre said everything is fine). The body is not metal, so despite a few scratches, there is no corrosion apparent anywhere, except on the charging port lid, which is metal.

There is another charging port flap to the right of the car, which appeared to be jammed shut, so I asked the service centre person about it. On the P6 and lower models, this is a dummy cover that cannot be opened. On the P8 version of the E2O, this contains the fast charging port with a GB/T type connector, but my car does not have a fast charging port. The Level 1 (slow) charger that came with the car uses this IEC60309 type of connector.

Driving the E2O Plus

Getting in the driver's seat is easy, except for the space between the battery pack (under the seat) and the front edge of the door sill is not quite enough for large shoes to fit in sideways. I need to twist the right foot to avoid snagging the shoe.

The seat offers enough forward and rearward travel to accommodate me or my wife comfortably.

However, the A & B pedals are somewhat offset to the left, and one's right foot does not intuitively reach the pedals. So one needs to adjust one's position a little awkwardly, placing the left foot on the dead pedal and making sure the right foot knows where the pedals are.

It takes a bit of fiddling to power up the car. Press the start-stop button and an orange light blinks, until the key fob is physically touched to it, when it turns green. A few seconds after the orange light starts blinking, the digital meter console displays an "Authenticate key" sign, after which the key fob bing touched to the button shows a "Welcome" sign. Touch the key too soon (before the "Authenticate key" sign is displayed), and the light will turn green but the display will show "Restart" instead of "Welcome". One then needs to switch off the start-stop button and start all over again. Not a car for the average valet parking attendant to start and drive!

Before shifting from N to F or R (these are the 3 positions on the gearshift, apart from a B = Boost position for extra power on demand) requires the brake pedal to be pressed at the first instance, but subsequently shifting from F to N position (or vice versa), one does not need to press the brake pedal.

Moving off is smooth and noiseless like any other EV, and the car crawls at 2-3 km/h without A-pedal input. Perfect for bumper-to-bumper traffic. There is a distinctive motor whine from the rear as one drives, and the noise level increases when lifting off the throttle as Regen kicks in. At slow speeds, one can hear the electric brake booster hissing when brakes are applied.

It isn't an enthusiast's car, but it pulls cleanly from the traffic lights and stays ahead of most ICE cars till 40 km/h. Up to 50 km/h it's a hoot to drive, though at 60 km/h it runs out of steam, and one does feel a certain degree of instability in the road-holding capacity of the car. The brakes are not bad, but need a heavy push to make the hydraulics activate - before that, it stays in Regen mode. Note to self: check the brake pads (service centre visit after I wrote this shows plenty of life left in the pads).

Parking the E2O Plus

The steering is super-light at slow (parking) speeds, but seems to weigh up a little as the speed increases - it has 4 turns from lock to lock, and the turning circle is the smallest of any 4-wheeler I've ever driven. The short and narrow car is so much fun and joy to slot in into spaces where my sedan won't fit, or have loads of space on either side to open the doors wide and step out, when occupying a standard parking slot vacated by a bigger car!

That's the lane in front of my house, where I park regularly. Compare the width of the E2O with the humongous Land Rover Defender parked behind!

This is the only car that can do a 5-point 180-degree turn within the width of this lane - every other car has to reverse out when driving in (or vice versa).

Continue reading SS-Traveller's ownership review for BHPian comments, insights and more information.

Coming from the 4-yr ownership of my humble e2o, I am not new to EVs, but the Nexon EV is a HUGE step forward in all aspects for sure.

BHPian cool_dube recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Let me take this opportunity to post a quick write up and few pictures of my Nexon EV XZ+which came home about three weeks back.

The car has done close to 1,300 km since (now you know why I needed an EV ), and I am loving each and every moment behind its wheel. Coming from the 4-yr ownership of my humble e2o, I am not new to EVs, but the Nexon EV is a HUGE step forward in all aspects for sure. While the e2o was doing its job well, it was more of a "trial" for us when we decided to join the EV bandwagon back in 2018 and playing it safe, bought a pre-owned, well-maintained e2o (2-door). As we grew more and more comfortable with an EV, longer range and better creature comforts led us to upgrade to the Nexon EV. I had initially booked the Dark edition in the XZ+ trim but later moved to regular XZ+ trim, given the maintenance overheads associated with a black car. Moreover, we felt that the "electric blue" shade goes well with an EV. I was tempted to wait for the longer range variant of the Nexon EV (now christened "Max"), but decided to forego it as current variant fits my use case (of strictly city runs) perfectly in terms of range and its supposedly-limited set of features are just fine for me. I like my cars simple.

I have always liked the Nexon for its looks, build quality, and ride comfort. Thankfully, all of these have been carried over to its EV counterpart as well. So far, I am super happy with the car and thankfully, no niggles to be reported as yet. As expected, I am getting a consistent driving range of 210-220 km in city traffic with sedate driving and regular usage of a/c, infotainment, etc. I usually charge it overnight at an SOC of 20-25% with a charging time of 7-7.5 hours.

Will keep the thread updated with my experiences. Please feel free to post any queries that you might have and I will be more than happy to help.

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