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I think you should also have a look at Princess Di's S-Class which wrapped itself around a concrete pillar in a tunnel in Paris to escape papparazi, driven by her chauffeur. She may have lived had it been driven by her chauffeur who was the only person alive in the accident and lived to tell the tale. That said in a collision between metal and concrete; concrete always wins.

While safe defensive driving, properly planned infrastructure is of extreme importance, there should be adequate safety offered by even the vehicle itself. These are called"accidents" for a reason and sometimes it may happen for no fault of anyone involved. The star ratings provide a decent sense/perception of how good/bad a vehicle is going to be. Along with examples of how they have behaved in some practical scenarios.

In that aspect I humbly disagree with a lot of folks here suggesting that we should not be questioning the decision of a manufacturer selling perceived unsafe cars ONLY here. Let's not blame it on taxes. Brezza managed good ratings, same for Tata cars (right from Tiago), even newer breed of Mahindra vehicles, VW, Skoda all managed to get good ratings. What stops Kia, Hyundai from getting safe cars here? As a matter of fact in other countries (Australia) this same car gets good safety ratings.

I refuse to do any business with such unethical company. Only when it hurts their business, they will eventually get the safer models here.

PS: No offense to existing owners. Just sharing my thought process.

Thanks.

This may be true in lower speeds, but this "splitting in half" thing happens due to high speed/force impact. That too with concrete. Beyond a point while speeding impact is exponential and no car is safe. Relative safety, sure, but then again beyond a point that becomes a technicality. So the most important thing IMO is defensive driving. We really don't know what happened here, seems like everything is speculation.

Brezza sells large volumes, and the NA 1.5 car is priced at around 10L for the base variant (that too barebones base variant). Tata engines are fairly poor to say the least, refinement is not there, couple that with extremely poor QC with hit or miss after sales. They might even be taking a hit on profits right now to capture the market, and they can afford to as they're not purely stuck to the motor industry.

Volkswagen is not cheap to maintain and doesn't return decent fuel efficiency - there are niggles and the after sales again is hit or miss. Mahindra wait times are crazy plus after sales is questionable (have experienced this in our family).

The biggest USP of Kia/Hyundai seems to be feature loaded cars with good engine options (especially in Diesels right now, they provide one of the most refined engines). Again, all brands have their USP and cut corners elswhere.

I'm not making any value judgements on any brands here. My point is taxes are INSANE and shouldn't be excused citing these examples and none of these companies are being "ethical" - their USPs are different and people go for what appeals to them. Tata appeals to the safety aspect (important, no doubt), Maruti appeals to the great after sales + fuss free ownership, Mahindra offers great VFM for what it offers and so on. All these manufacturers do these compromises to sell within the tax bracket - otherwise are we just assuming they're being malicious and selling cars with weaker platforms in India deliberately?

For Maruti, mostly those cars which have been built on Global C platform (TECT platform as Maruti likes to call it) score good in other markets as well as Indian market. I criticize them for their poor ratings on heartect platform as well. But it's not like the same platform is getting good 5 stars anywhere else in the world.

VW, Skoda 2.0 strategy has safe cars for India and other markets as well.

My point is Kia/Hyundai both are perfectly capable of building a safe car. The same car Kia Seltos scores good safety ratings in other markets. But here in India, their chassis is marked "unstable" and hence, the question on their ethics when they are charging ₹20L+ for top spec Seltos anyways.

One can say that we get less features because of Govt tax. But I doubt how that argument applies to chassis quality which is the base of the vehicle.

Regarding the accident, everything is speculation as we have only seen whatever is left of the vehicle. We don't even know if this vehicle was actually overspeeding or not. Maybe poor infrastructure planning is the culprit. We don't know. But in a safer car the chances of preventing loss of life might have also increased.

Thanks.

This is exactly what I am not comfortable with. When Tata and Volkswagen compromise on different aspects, we call them out and rightly so. We do not cite taxes or whatever else to justify lack of engine refinement, poor quality control, hassles in ownership, etc.

But when safety is compromised by Maruti, Hyundai & Kia, we somehow try to justify it citing taxes, road infrastructure, driver behaviour, and what not. (Not directed at you, but this is what I have seen here too often)

And this is malicious from these companies, as they are perfectly capable of building safer vehicles. Just that they chose profit margins over safety of people. Just like Tata chose profit margins over engine refinement and quality control.

As customers, we should be vocal in pointing this out, cause if manufacturers had their way, even two airbags would not have been standard across cars in India.

Our bodies are tuned to sleep at night and there is no point in keeping awake and driving the whole night just to find yourself sleep deprived and not in your best senses the next day.

Apart from the risk of dozing off at the wheel due to sleep deprivation at nights the other risks of night driving are:
- Much lower visibility, increased chances of missing that pothole, speedbreaker, mis-judging curves, parked vehicles on the highway without tail lights, animal movement, encountering dense fog.
- Headlight glare from oncoming vehicles especially buses and trucks with multiple headlights placed quite high.
- Encountering recklesslessly driven passenger night coaches who usually drive with scant regard to safety.
- Higher risk of getting mugged.
- Increased chances of encountering vehicles with drunk drivers.
- Increased personal risk in case of breakdowns and unavailability of help at night.
The risks of night driving far outweighs any possible benefits.

Also the practice of starting early at 4 AM comes with higher risk of encountering sleepy drivers (4 AM is the most vulnerable time when the human alertness levels are the lowest). Also one can only start a trip from home at early hours only on the first day, the next day onwards, one tends to start late post 8 AM from hotel after having complimentary breakfast :). Therfore starting after 5:30 AM (or after dawn) is quite a safer practice and helps reduce risks.

There may be extreme personal emergency scenarios where night time travel may be unavoidable.
But for all regular touring and travel scenarios, it is always a safer and practical approach to do dawn to dusk (6AM to 6PM) driving.

Understood. But in my experience, Hyundai and Kia are excused FAR LESS compared to reliability issues and after sales of Tata. Go over to youtube and you can see this fearmongering (rather than a nuanced discussion) on how Tata is vastly superior and images of Seltos splitting in half (frankly, I can get you this for dozens of vehicles - assumptions mean nothing). I feel Tata/Mahindra gets a much lenient treatment compared to Hyundai/Kia. This is my observation, of course. My point was purely being we shouldn't be in this position in the first place - especially being one of the largest markets in the world. We need lower taxes and better regulations (that's based on sound science and not nonsense, which is unfortunately what's not happening right now)

I mean, companies are always greedy - I don't buy into this facade of "ethical" companies. They are all in it for charity. They all want to scale up and sell volumes. They just have different selling points. We're getting at the root of capitalism itself (which might not be appropriate for this thread anyway), but that's what it is. Only we're the ones ending up being screwed. People who can't afford the higher segment vehicles, especially.

Oh, I totally agree. We should be vocal about all this. But again, I would say we would either be served crappy vehicles one way or the other. Or would price it way higher, and owning a vehicle is already damn expensive. Just see what the vehicle costs before all the taxation and you'd understand why we're getting vastly inferior products! And it's not like we have exceptional infra to show either for all this.

I agree with the above findings.

Depends from person to person. Like i have a problem waking up at 4am and driving. But i can drive until 3.am comfortably. I can do more consistent speeds and cover good distances due to almost nil pedestrian traffic, two wheeler traffic, less distractions etc.

Couldn't agree more.

On highways my 10 years old son asked me (like any other kid) - why do I drive slower and how could almost every car overtake me so easily on those roads. Now - this is when I was at 100-110 on Bangalore-Hubbali.

The rating driven advertisement had made him assume that a 5-star rated Kushaq can go to any speed without any issue. The rating is no doubt a USP but eventually boils down to you, fellow drivers and luck.

Yes. The image illustrates this well.

Another thing is that new cars insulates you from this sense of overspeeding. I was TDing Sonet D AT (getting this soon) and I absolutely didn't realize that I reached 70-80 KMPH! I thought I was driving super sedately while I was driving at decent speeds. I'm a member of a Sonet group in FB have seen many people comment casually about travelling at 140 KMPH+ and one guy was even complaining about how speed dropped below 183 when he slotted into 6th gear. Absolutely insane.

I guess they might feel a sense of false confidence with the well refined engine and well insulated cabin. On the other hand my 15 Amaze feels super fast at 60-70 and I rarely take it beyond that.

The higher you sit from ground, the lesser is the relative feel of speeding. If you are driving a Volvo bus , even 100kph doesn't feel like 60 in a sedan. That is also a reason why driving low slung sedans and sports cars is exhilarating.

Accident really means not specifically done on purpose. There are very few road accidents where there is no fault. It is almost down to hitting stuff that falls from the sky! One example that I can think of is the invisible spilt oil, and even then, another person may tell me that I should know how to handle the sudden unexpected skid.

In any accident, somebody got something wrong.

Yes exactly, the rating is just a number and indicates the degree of safety the car affords. The rest depends on multiple factors plus luck and providence.

Like if one is wearing a bullet proof jacket, he must not take liberties to callously roam in a zone which is teeming with gun-toting shooters.

On the simulator, yes.

In real life, at a speed above 100km/h, the air drag spoils the party for SUVs. They start perceiving that they are going at a faster speed due to engine rpms getting higher for the same speed.
Visual pseudo perception due to large field of view is still there, but other inputs like vibrations, engine rpms, road noise etc. counters this pseudo feeling.

Can't believe that a family man can also do such blunders.
https://youtu.be/CNgtgB0Vogw

Couldn't merge the two consecutive posts as the last one was posted 10 hours ago.