Mahindra Thar
To the Mahindra Adventure Academy with our Thar
The new Thar takes to trails with far less drama and struggle than the older one
THE THAR IS TRULY EXCELLENT in the city. I doubt it was ever designed to be so but I can tell you it is absolutely excellent, the best in-city commuter that we have in the fleet right now. But that’s a subject I will touch upon in next month’s long term update. This month I want to talk about the weekend I spent at the Mahindra Adventure Academy in Igatpuri, on the outskirts of Nashik. And it begins with how easy it is to munch miles with the Thar.
Igatpuri is an easy two hours from Mumbai but twice as far from our base in Pune. After muscling our way out of the city I handed over the ’wheel to my better half as I jumped on a Zoom call with R Velusamy, Mahindra’s global head of product development, to understand the nuances of the XUV700’s control blade rear suspension. And I understood everything he said, a testament to how liveable the Thar’s ride quality is. Okay, it is nowhere close to that of a monocoque but, considering this is a short wheelbase ladder-on-frame 4x4, the fact that I could do a Zoom call with the camera on and not get a headache (or even give a headache to the person on the other end of the call) is proof that you can easily live with a Thar.
Now I’ve done enough off-roading but I wanted my wife to experience the capability of the Thar (she fell in love with it on the city commute) and thus the signing up for the two-day Trail Survivor course with her doing the driving and me doing the shouting and screaming from the passenger seat. It’s a course I can heartily recommend to any petrolhead, you don’t even have to own a Thar as the Academy have a fleet of Thars for you to sample — so our Thar was safely parked under the shade while we scared ourselves in the old Thars shod with MT tyres.
But I had to see what the new Thar could do and on the evening of day two I took her out on the Sarpanch, a rock-climb trail. And to my astonishment discovered the new Thar, even with regular OE tyres, takes the trail with far less drama and struggling than the MT-shod old Thar. Manish, lead instructor at the Academy, told me that they will soon have to alter the trails because it’d be too easy in the new Thar.
The last session of the Survivor course was recovery and, to get some pictures, I threw our Thar into the slush pit to get it stuck. It refused to! Okay, I do know how to off-road a bit but I’m no champ and yet whatever I did our new Thar refused to get stuck. The only thing I succeeded in doing was cake her with mud — which, turns out, should be the number one accessory for a Thar judging by the number of heads I turned driving the mud-caked Thar to Mumbai. Supercars turn less heads than a muddy Thar.
And that’s the joy of having a Thar. It’s an enabler. Instead of lazy weekend bingeing on Netflix it gets you out into the outdoors, acquire new driving techniques, gets you to meet like-minded petrolheads. And on the way back transforms back into the fastest city commuter you’ll find. More on that next month. ⌧
(@SirishChandran)