Team-BHP - Mahindra Scorpio : Official Review

I am a fairly recent convert to the cult of the Scorpio - got my first one only around February 2018. My late lamented "blue buffalo" - a bright blue colored 2014 Scorpio S10 that I bought at 37k km and ran to nearly 55k km in the eight months that I'd had it, before it was stolen from outside my apartment building on the morning of Ayudha Puja last year. Here is my favorite photo of this departed old friend.

Mahindra Scorpio : Official Review-oldbuffalo.jpeg

Buying the Scorpio

An impulse buy, I had gone to a used car dealer to pick up a second car for my wife as my existing All New Fiesta kept getting used for monthly office trips to Bangalore from Chennai.

Instead of a common or garden sedan or hatchback, I saw this blue buffalo and fell in love with it. I knocked down the price quite a bit for it having flood damage that had been extensively repaired (the service history showed me an insurance claim + repairs of over 3 lakh rupees). In any case the car looked, felt and drove like new. The tyres needed changing too, so some reduction for that as well.

What I liked about it

Inside the car
Upright seating posture and high visibility
Large, comfortable steering wheel and surprisingly crisp gearshifts, again compared to older generation Scorpios.
Left armrest for the driver. A real boon, this one - though my right arm initially felt a bit cramped, squashed up against the door as it was. Some judicious adjusting of the seat height and distance helped make things comfortable.
Chiller of a climate controlled air conditioner, with rear AC vents as well
Follow me home and cornering lights - the cornering lights especially are a boon on the road when negotiating sharp curves and blind turns.
Yards of room in the back - so I tend to treat it as a roomy five seater.
Rugged build with surprisingly good paint quality for its price point. Some of the colours - especially the Blue above - are mouth watering.
Under The Hood
Rugged and easy to maintain, torquey 2.2 mHawk engine
Independent front suspension and coil springs, torsion bar and anti roll bar make the ride much smoother than on older generation Scorpios.
Extremely cheap maintenance costs for parts and fluids though I tend to pamper the car with higher grade and quality oils (more below).

Road Manners
This is a cruiser that will take you hours on end at a sedate 100-120 kmph. I've done faster speeds than that once when I was in a tearing hurry due to a personal emergency but I really don't recommend being a speed demon for people with my limited skill level driving a Scorpio on any but extremely straight roads.

People tend to give way to you and respect your personal space on the road - a pleasant change from how you get muscled off when you're driving a hatchback or smaller sedan. At least, people driving smaller cars, autos and two wheelers do, all bets are off for eg a Tata Ace.

With You Hamesha app - Transparent Service History
Mahindra's With You Hamesha app lets you register your car - this is a convoluted process when you're buying used, because you need to ask a Mahindra dealer to register your profile on the With You Hamesha app, and then convince a support rep on the withyouhamesha.com live chat to delete the old owner's profile and map the car to your profile. This involves sending them a copy of the RC showing the transfer of ownership.

Once you've done this, you get access to the detailed service record for your car, including all invoices, regardless of which Mahindra authorized service centre the work has been done in. You also get service reminders and can book services though this part seems a little hit or miss, so the old fashioned "call the dealer and arrange an appointment" works better. The service costs are also let us say indicative because with such cheap costs the dealer has every incentive to hard sell things like brake cleaning, interior detailing, road side assistance etc. Keep the SA happy = buy some of this from time to time.

There are also other value added features, some like an RM service connect for XUV and other premium offerings, others that cross sell Mahindra resort holidays and help you plan long holiday drives.

Ownership Experience

The Blue Buffalo, as I said, came to me at 37k and immediately got itself a set of new tyres and a full change of lubes.

Amsoil 5w40 Turbo Truck Engine Oil API CK4
Amsoil 75w90 Synthetic Gear Oil API GL4
Amsoil DOT 4 Synthetic Brake Fluid
Puroguard Red Coolant mixed 1:3 with distilled water
Oil / Air / AC filters from Purolator (German brand made under license in India, as you all know) and Sofima (Italian brand made under license in India https://sofima-aftermarket.com/)

These cost me rather more than the OEM but it is entirely worth it to hear the trademark growl of an mHawk change into a smooth purr

I then added a few "homely comforts" from Aliexpress -

OBD-II scanner which, along with the "EOBD Facile" app on the app store / google play store detects my Mahindra + has a HS/MS switch for my Fiesta

DSP for my car audio together with Pioneer front component speakers

CNSUNNYLIGHT LED headlights / brake / tail etc light

B Pillar to B Pillar IRVM with a coating that provides some dimming and anti glare

Buffalo immediately became my highway cruiser, because I found it much more comfortable for long highway trips than the All New Fiesta due to my bad back and the minefield roads that any trip to Bangalore's Whitefield can bring you into sudden contact with.

It took me and my family on a series of long highway trips, from the mundane Chennai - Bangalore monthly office travel runs to family holidays in Tirunelveli District and the 40 hairpin 2 km high hill road of Valparai, and performed reliably, carrying just me and a small bag or 5 people and heavy loads of luggage without a murmur, pulling like a train - admittedly a slow and steady mail train rather than a bullet train all the time, faithfully and without fuss.

Its run of bad luck was extraordinary in the six months that I had it - and through all of these incidents, I and my family came out unscathed and safe. I owe that Blue Buffalo a debt of gratitude wherever he is, and I cordially wish all the bad luck it might have carried with it onto the thief that lifted it - though he'd have a huge grin pasted to his face every second he drove it.

Anyway, all these happened to my poor Blue Buffalo

T Boned by a drunk auto driver, who hit the passenger door and bashed a huge dent in it, and turned turtle himself, spilling out of the vehicle with some broken bones, and his old lady passenger was shaken but mercifully unhurt except for bruises. The cops decided to let it pass claiming he fainted due to not taking diabetes medication. My wife who was on that side of the car was completely unhurt.

As the guy was from a known auto stand I agreed and took a hit on my insurance (which was the ICICI insurance the previous owner of the car had taken). My possibly bad mistake was taking the car to a FNG for denting and painting. I had to get the entire side of the car painted to match colours, but these guys decided to pay me only for the cost to fix the damaged panels. A measly 7000 out of nearly 15000 that I ended up spending.

Rear ended by a Thar whose driver couldn't keep his tongue from hanging out and drooling long enough to brake before he hit my bumper. He paid up like a champ though, after a cordial conversation about the car and more drooling over it.

Disaster. It was finally stolen on the very morning we were going down to give it its first Ayudha Puja at our home in October 2018 :Frustrati ..

All this in under 6 months. Therefore, this thread will have one notable exception from all other fine ownership threads that I see here.

NO PHOTOS WHATSOEVER OF MY NEW CAR, by firm order of the home ministry, who is a firm believer that the theft and accidents were caused by all the envy + eyes popping out reaction from various people drooling over the blue buffalo - nazar, drishti etc and what have you.

Note - All this bad luck was despite a series of pujas at various temples and even ropes tied to the rear bumper from the famous Bodyguard Muniswarar temple, that ultimate place of worship for Chennai based car owners and drivers.

Anyway, with my blue buffalo stolen, and any insurance settlement likely to take months (in fact, I got the insurance money only in early April 2019 over six months after the theft), I grit my teeth and sold some investments I had not planned on touching, to fund a new (used!) Scorpio. This time, my wife insisted that I pick a drab and non eye catching colour.

The Quest For A New Scorpio Begins

Picking a used Scorpio is a bit of a challenge - some of the ones I evaluated were -

Facing a rust bubbling and spitting issue - internal rust probably from defective manufacturing processes. Further, the wiring had been horribly mangled to install aux lights and extra horns. Clearly the property of some aspiring politician, and at the shop of a dealer who took major offence at the detailed PDI I was doing on the vehicle. Clearly he didn't want anyone at all to look at it too closely. Chaliye rustbucket Scorpio ko vanakkam.

Clean and well maintained, but rather high mileage, and because it belonged to some sort of travelling music troupe, had ugly green stickering on the rear windshield and body advertising the band and with vinyl photos of the lead singer. Some sort of shady light music troupe too, not a rock band. Immediate reject.

A 20K km run bright red Scorpio. Looks very clean, full service history available from India Garage in Velachery, where I have a known SA who cheerfully assured me that it was a good buy. "Only the dipstick has been changed under warranty saar, should be OK". Lying with a dealer - forgot his name but this was in the lane next to Hotel Ranjith on Nungambakkam High Road, and this was what I ended up buying in early November.

The first step was to replace all the lubes - engine oil, clutch / brake / gear oils and coolant. Engine Oil was changed to Shell Rimula R5 CI4, Shell Spirax GL4 gear oil and Shell DOT4 brake oil, Puroguard red coolant concentrate mixed 1:3 with distilled water. No Amsoil because I had to source Amsoil from their distributor in Coimbatore and he'd have to ship it to me by tourist bus cargo, and all such deliveries were heavily backlogged due to the festival season.

However, very soon I noticed something very quickly indeed given my high mileage use of the Scorpio (it is currently at 40k km - so run a bit under 20k km in the last 6 months, almost all highway use). The rate of oil consumption was criminally high - about a litre every 10k km and a bit of blowby from the dipstick hole, which was probably the reason the original seller sold it in such a tearing hurry, fearing he'd have to spend on a short engine block replacement.

The real cause was a clogged oil separator - which I found thanks to some help from various BHPians (especially @Jeroen) and from a BITOG thread I started on the subject. Remove the intercooler to reach and detach the oil separator, clean it in diesel oil and put it back in and this excessive oil consumption just plain stopped.

I have since changed the oil to Amsoil 5w40 CK4 turbo truck - my usual Scorpio staple diet. Good thing - Amsoil now has a Chennai distributor, yay. Rajagopal / 98233 49676. The Coimbatore distributor is no longer with Greaves Amsoil, apparently.

The red buffalo has just crossed 40k km now. God willing, many more ahead so this truly becomes a long term ownership review. More later in future posts to this thread.