Believe it or not, it’s not the Mountains of the Moon. It’s your own, very clogged suburban artery. And if you’ve got to fight to survive, the just-revised Scorpio and the Safari are a good pair to do it in.
Story by Vardhan Kondvikar Photography Dhaval Dhairyawan

The Sahara. The Alps. The Serengeti. Hunky men in checked shirts and Levis. Tethered horses. Big, immensely scary rocks. Heavy guitar riffs. The stuff of SUV ads.

All carefully placed to tell you that SUVs are for those with real lives, for men with big thingummies, who’ll cock a snoot at their bosses and Greenpeace, and go off into the wild to wrestle rhinos. All meant to suggest that practicality comes second to being the best you can be. All to tell you that choosing an SUV is a matter of the heart, not the head.

All rubbish.

How many SUVs do you know that have ever really left the road? How many SUVs are driven by the cast of Hatari? Most of them, in fact, live in the city and take a suit to work. Even if we don’t have the yummy-mummy culture here, an SUV’s still more likely to tiptoe through the traffic for five days a week than bounce through the weeds after game.
Now, unlike Gautam and Anamit, I like SUVs. I love lording it out over those well-shaved corporates in their piddly little sedans, I understand their sock-down-the-trousers appeal, and planning an off-road trip gives me naughty dreams. But I still want them to work well on tarmac, and I expect them to go, steer and stop, if not like regular cars, then at least better than cattle.

Which is why I didn’t completely take to the old Scorpio. Yes, it looked good, it was reasonably refined and very well priced, and surprisingly quick and nimble through the city, but it handled like a cow. On rollerskates. And it wasn’t particularly comfortable, or spacious, and didn’t have anespecially practical cabin. Mahindra had pitched it as an urban car, and as such it worked fine, but it needed work. To its credit, Mahindra’s been fiddling constantly with the car, changing things every year or so, and this year’s changes include chassis mods, to make it ride and handle better.

The chassis changes are crucial – and it’s a good job. Should be, it was done by Lotus. Whoa! I’m not kidding: M&M really did go to the English handling experts to improve the handling. (The Lotus guys, I presume, drove the car, got out white-faced and insisted on helping out for free.) The big change is a switch from leaf-spring rear suspension to a multi-link/coil-spring job, and some tuning to the front. Tubeless tyres across the range must help too: there’s now some weight to the horribly over-assisted steering, more stability, and a better ride. Not bad.

You’d notice the styling changes first, though.
Did it need them? Nope, not the nasty new front bumper and air-dam, almost Korean in their over-styledness, not the utterly silly bonnet scoop (Scorpio Evo, eh?), not the bulging, Land Rover Discovery-esque tail-lamp design, 60 percent of which is some strange kind of ribbed reflector. So no, not a success here, but at least the Scorpio is inherently good looking, so the step backwards is not too apparent. There are a couple of nicer new bits, like the swept-back roof rails, the spoiler and the rear bumper, butoverall, I think it should just have been left alone.

It’s changed on the inside too, but styling tweaks are limited to new, alien-eye air-con vents in the centre (quite bad, incidentally, at directing air-flow.) The rest are more practical, like adding height-adjustment for the steering and driver’s seat, new column stalks, and bumping up the cubbyhole count. In fact, there’s a rash of little storage bins now: there are eight cupholders now, a cell-phone holder in both rear doors, a PDA-holder (for those who need one along with their cell phone, saddos), a couple of 12v outlets and a handful of other recesses. Whew. Oh, and lest we forget, someone at M&M wanted a bit more light: there’s now illumination in the front footwells, ‘theatre’ interior lighting, an illuminated key-slot, and “follow-me-home” headlamps, which stay on for a bit after you’ve switched off the car, to point out Fido’s doodoo on your driveway. And,here’s the thing – there’s no price change, for now at least. This is brilliant. Slightly absurd, certainly (how many drinks will I have on my daily commute, really?), but it does wonders for the feel-good factor.

But there’s a price to pay for success: the Scorpio must now endure a typically heartless TG comparison (mwahahaha.) Had we told Mahindra what we intended, they would have protested that the Scorpio has no real rival, that it’s a one-of-a-kind urban SUV. To which we would have laughed hollowly, because there is a rival: the Tata Safari Dicor. The Tata’s a considerably bigger vehicle, with a bigger engine, but comes in at only half a lakh more, which is fantastic. And Tata’s never had any hang-ups about market placement. The Safari’s an off-roader, pure and simple, drawing on off-road ability and comfort and to hell with yummy-mummies.

The Safari’s also had a quite recent makeover, getting a new engine and some styling changes. All to the good, of course, but that makeover didn’t do anything about the Safari’s biggest weakness: quality. The Safari has an unenviable rep for parts going boing, and plastics are a foot-long thorn in Tata’s side. Try this for a test: get yourself a blindfold, climb inside the Safari, and grope around. If your fingertips don’t rebel at what they’re being subjected to, I’ll take them out for dinner. The dashboard, the door-pads and especially the roof-mounted air-con, all feel cheap and very depressing. It’s not a good start.

Your backside, however, will be saying something very different. You’re incredibly comfortable, whether in front or back, with acres of room for your legs and very well shaped seats. In fact, the accommodation is so good you don’t want to get out at all. Finally, when you take off that blindfold, you’ll see that the cabin doesn’t even look that bad, a bit bare, perhaps, but serious and purposeful and cleanly handsome.
Just like the exterior, in fact. The Safari’s a handsome beast – perhaps next to the Ford Endeavour, it’s the hunkiest piece of SUV metal you can get in India. And while it doesn’t have the Scorpio’s aggression, it also does without all the annoying ribs and ripples which mar the Mahindra. It’s a very old-school SUV look, which works very well.

Scorpio Engine

Part of the reason here is the engines’ different characters. Both use common-rail intercooled turbo-diesels, both make 115bhp, but the Scorpio’s 2.6-litre engine is peppy and responsive, with short gearing giving you that zippiness you need through rushhour. Similarly, overtaking on a single-carriageway highway is quite a bit easier: squeeze the throttle and you’re through. The Safari’s engine is a menace here: what exactly do you do when you have a 3,000rpm redline and a weak bottom end? The Scorpio’s motor is also vastly more refined than the Safari’s engine, which sounds absolutely agricultural, and shudders alarmingly every time you switch it on or off. In fact, the impression you get in the Safari is of something crude and unpolished. An old-school SUV, in fact.

Safari Engine

When it’s a Toyota Innova. The giant from the giant was something quite unexpected, a tourist van which had nearly as much street cred as a Corolla. And as such, it’s a car to consider if you want seven seats and long-distance ability, but can’t stand the image, weight and crudeness of a real big-boots SUV.

Now, just to get things straight, the Innova isn’t easy through traffic either: the length makes it a pain to park (rear visibility is horrific), and it feels like a bus if you’re switching lanes. That said, it’s still car-like, with well-weighted steering, brakes which are decidedly superior to the sponge-beds in the Scorpio and Safari and a gearshift, which though long, is precise. It handles well too: it never truly shrinks around you, but it’s stable round bends, and high speeds don’t faze it.

Its 2.5-litre engine sits neatly between the Scorpio and Safari: it pulls away cleanly, though not as fiercely, as the Scorpio, and though the top-end isn’t as strong as the Tata’s, it’s a tractable, friendly motor. Refinement, however, is way beyond the other two, both noise and vibes damped out.

Seating is flexible, and you have options of a fold-and-tumble middle bench or captain’s chairs: we’d recommend the chairs, which are incredibly comfy. Plus, interior quality is superb. The others don’t come close. One bad point is luggage space: seven-up, stick to shopping bags.

And, though it’s not an SUV, it handled dirt tracks as well as the others; sure, it’ll never keep up over rocks, but we’re not invading Iraq, hmm? And if you’re not, you’ll want to try this one.