23000 km of hassle-free ownership with XUV700; Finally ran out of luck!

The confidence on the reliability of my XUV700 is badly shaken at the moment.

BHPian StraightDrive20 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Imagine this scenario when you casually get into your car parked in the neighbourhood market’s parking slot to go back home. You put the car in R and use the rear camera in the screen to reverse as carplay connects and music starts to play. While thinking about your plans for the evening ahead, you reverse the car and put it in the ‘D’ mode. Now as soon as the car starts moving forward, you realise something is absolutely off !! The steering feels very heavy and the car seems off balance as if a tyre has gone flat.

As you are shaken back to your senses, you realise all indicators/lights on the instrument panel are ON !! The parking brake sign, the engine sign, the EPB off sign and various other such signs ( see image).

Bewildered, you pull the car on the side and once it is stationary, put it in the ‘P’ mode. Then comes the biggest shocker - while the stick is slotted to ‘P’, the parking brake is not engaging. And since the parking brake is not engaging, the car is NOT turning off even if you press the start/stop button.

So here you are - all indicators on the panel are flashing, you are manually keeping the car stationary by pressing the break paddle as the parking brake is not engaging, and the car engine is running since it refuses to turn off !!

Thankfully the AC was still operating as in this situation I realised I had started to sweat due to stress. In an attempt to turn the engine off, I tried several times engaging and disengaging P mode by moving the gear stick to R/N/D and back to P. While the car was moving forward/backwards aligned to D/R, It was the same result for P i.e. the Parking break wasn’t engaging without which the Start/Stop button was simply unresponsive.

After a point, I just left the gear stick in P mode, kept the break paddle pressed as the parking brake was still not engaging and started exploring my phone book for Mahindra service support. While doing this, I kept fiddling with the Start/Stop button. I think I long pressed it (I am not sure) but the car engine finally stopped.

Knowing from numerous examples here that a ‘hard restart’ fixes most things for an XUV, I was keen to start the car again with the hope that things would reset and the car would be fine. I started the car with great hope and noticed all indicators on the instrument panel were gone EXCEPT the Engine sign!!

I turned the engine off and on a couple of times but the engine sign remained. My place was hardly a km away, I drove it to the basement and parked it before trying to stop/start one last time. The engine sign remained.

This episode happened in the early evening today. It was an open parking and it was quite hot. The car was there for almost an hour before I got into it and had this experience.

I have no clue why all these things happened and I’m still hopeful I may not find the engine sign on when I start the car tomorrow morning. At the most, I’ll get it sorted in the service centre in the coming week.

But my CONFIDENCE on the reliability of the XUV is BADLY SHAKEN. Mechanical issues can happen with any machine and are acceptable but an issue of this nature which seems purely electronic is scary and can easily lead to a severe mishap. It may not happen again and I may forget about this instance in a few week's time but right now I feel like exploring a reliable replacement.

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