Admiration Guaranteed.. Review on Fiat Linea

Fiat India has introduced its new model Linea in three variants -Active, Dynamic and Emotion. All these variants come in 1.3 ltr dieseland 1.4 ltr petrol engines. I test drove this car almost a week backand couldn’t manage to write a review. After my initial reviews on Tata Indica vista, Maruti A-Star and Hyundai i20, here is my much delayed review on Fiat Linea. you can all these reviews on my blog @ https://mohanbn.com/blog/

Looks:I went to Bangalore Concorde Motors show room on Hosur road near dairycircle. This show room was the authorized showroom for Tata Motorsuntil Fiat announced sales and after sales service tie up with Tatas.There were Fiat Linea Dynamic and Emotion models for display.

No secondthought on its looks. The Fiat linea commercial lives up to its tagline of “Admiration Guaranteed“. I really liked the boardstyling, buttons & switches design/quality, steering design, seatscomfort - these will certainly grab anyone’s attention.

On theexteriors - twin barrel head lights, rear lamps and the stylish frontgrill will get your eyeballs rolling. However, I am not much impressedwith the quality of plastics in this car too. They are just veryordinary. Other than that features like climate control a/c, integratedstereo with controls on steering wheel and USB dock are awesome. Multifunction display, instantatious milage Info, ABS (only on high endmodels), alloy wheels, blue ’n’ me software, rake adjustable steeringwheel etc., are the other features you should check out in these cars.

Test Drive and Engine performance: Diesel variantof Linea Dynamic was the vehicle allocated for my test drive. Steeringrake is adjustable and I don’t understand the logic behind havingignition key going vertically down. Slight noise of the engine wasaudible from inside, I would say it is much better shielded compared toother diesel engines.

So I assume petrol version would hardly have anyengine sound. There were 4 of us in the vehicle including a showroomguy. I am not impressed with its initial pick up, for a diesel engineof 1.3 ltr I expected much better performance.

Another fact that let medown was the gear shift. It wasn’t smooth like I had experienced inTata Indica Vista. May be it is a bit harder since the car was very newand had done only about 680kms or may be that the car is lookingforward for its first service.

After reaching a speed of about 40kms+the engine was responding well on the Banneraghatta road. I could drivefor a very short distance at this speed under dairy circle fly over. Ifound the breaking to be pretty good as well. If this slow pick is agenuine issue, then this car wouldn’t be a good option for city drive.Atleast in cities like Bangalore for the kind of road traffic, thiswill be a big minus. I would suggest readers to test drive the car andget satisfied yourself before arriving at any conclusion.

Mileage, colors and Pricing : Buyer has an optionto select from 4 colors. The petrol variants are available with astarting ex-showroom price range of 6 lakhs to 7 lakhs while the dieselvariants cost from 6.9lakhs to 8.1 lakhs.

Road tax and other chargeswill go upto a minimum of another lakh for each of these. You can checkout the exact price from Fiats official site.You can refer to that site for more information on technical specs andall other info. Salesman was skeptical on exact mileage, he told thepetrol car will yield anywhere between 10-14 kmpl for petrol enginewhile 14-17kmpl for diesel engine. No specific numbers on mileage, appreciate if any of the readers can feed in that info.

So, the verdict is that it is a good looking car with lot ofattractions wrt interior and exteriors. Certainly it lives upto itscaption of Admiration guaranteed, but the concern in over theperformance and after sales service. Though Fiat has tied up withTata’s, I doubt if they will be able to deliver an efficient servicemodel like Maruti. You may want to consider similar players in theindustry like Honda City, Ford Fiesta and Maruti Sx4.