Aug 30, 2016 08:16 AM
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I turned around – this time it was a Swift, it’s young driver’s hands firm on the steering wheel, head popping out of the window and the rest of the passengers in the car shaken from their sleep by the sudden deceleration.
“Is this the new Swift?”, he yelled from across the highway. I nodded, too tired after having taken the same question over and over again from owners of Santros, Swifts, Citys. This guy had a red Swift. As did I. But even going past at speed, he could tell the difference. Impressive.
By now, I was ready to pat the new Swift designers’ backs. They had managed to direct its evolution perfectly. New for sure, but without letting go of the old car’s inherently good design backbone. That the new Swift’s looks haven’t come out of a clean canvas may not sound good on paper but the execution in this case is near faultless.
Bigger, bolder, better, and here’s how. . . Obviously, one of the reasons current Swift owners are noticing the new car is the fact that it looks much bigger. A major grouse of most Swift owners was that although the car was big, it didn’t correspondingly have a lot of space inside. As a result, wheelbase had to go up. Compared to the earlier model, the new Swift is much longer, marginally wider and nearly as tall. Length has gone up by 155mm and most of that has gone into the rear. The front bonnet area looks elongated, adding to the stretch feel.
There are a lot of new design elements, almost all of them inspired by the outgoing car. The headlamps are similar shaped but now stretched further back. The tail lamps get the same treatment. Bumpers and wheel arches are more flared and the front grille now a more prominent area at the front.
The rear hatch is small in a cutesy way and gives the car a nice squat look from the rear. What these changes do in tandem is make the Swift look fresher, more muscular, and a more proper big hatchback. Which is pretty much how you want it to look. On certain counts, it reminds you more of the Mini design theme, especially in the way the flatter bonnet spreads. Which is a good thing.
The old Swift was a good drive. The new one is better. The pictures you see here are from a stretch of road outside Udaipur, on NH76. It’s a clean stretch – smooth tar most of the way, not much traffic since it doesn’t lead to any big town of consequence, the only hazards coming in the form of stray cattle or the odd oncoming truck on the wrong side of the road. And it is here that you appreciate the new Swift’s dynamic characteristics. First, the diesel.
It is the same DDIS unit – fixed geometry turbocharged with intercooler – that did business in the first-gen Swift and continues to do so in the DZire. The free-revving, punchy little unit – left mostly untouched for the new car – instantly gratifies, with first the 190Nm of torque from as low as 2000rpm, and then the 74bhp at twice those revs.
The petrol engine in comparison supplies 86bhp and 114Nm. The latter is slightly more than the outgoing car’s K-series unit. The new unit features VVT or Variable Valve Timing, which Maruti Suzuki first used in the SX4 two years ago to make it BS IV compliant. The same mechanism features in the Swift and what it does in absolute terms for the car is nudge its efficiency up. The official claim is now 18.6kpl – that’s 0.7kpl better than the earlier model. We reckon the real-world figure will hover around 13. The diesel claims a more outlandish 22.9kpl, which is 1.2kpl more than the previous car’s figure, so expect this to be around 18kpl. Not a bad thought at all.
