Concerned about my XUV700's reliability, even after a year of ownership

Our Honda city is fuss-free, while our Tiago is a testament to the fact that Tata has 0 QC.

BHPian Tmittal93 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

I am an owner of XUV 700 AX7L petrol purchased in May 2023, having covered 2,000 km. The car has very low running due to the fact that my Tata Tigor covers the daily duty and Honda City VX 2015 handles the small outings.

Since XUV has such low running, I have luckily not witnessed any faults so far.

Owning Honda City has been largely fuss-free with minor issues, but Tigor is completely opposite standing true testament to the fact that Tata has 0 QC.

However, knowing Mahindra A.S.S. is also a hit or miss, I have always considered their vehicles extremely reliable, something that a lot of people would agree on.

The situation seems to be different now with the following cases coming to limelight:

1. XUV700 burning in Jaipur in 2023 - The company claimed it was due to after-market fittings.
2. Another recent case of XUV 700 catching fire while parked outside the home of the owner in Banaras- the owner has claimed, it is a top model and no mods have been installed. The company response has been a lousy one and no investigation has been launched.
3. The case of Scorpio N losing control and the owner losing a leg after hitting a barrier on the highway.
4. Another case of Scorpio N wheels not responding to steering wheel input on Ahmedabad highway.
5. Multiple cases of Thar catching fire.

There must be many other smaller cases that may or may not have caught media and public attention

This makes me wonder having spent close to Rs. 28.5L on this car what if someday such an incident happens with me or my family?

The recent case with XUV 700 catching fire was parked outside the owner's home in Banaras, mine is parked inside my house behind our main entry exit door. If something similar were to happen in my case, our whole house could catch fire with no exit either.

Currently, lakhs of Mahindra cars are plying on-road, and these are a handful of cases but still enough to raise questions on the reliability of a product costing this much.

Not installing after-market mods is one thing, but one can never rule out the lousy job done by service centres during service leading to some major incident in future.

What do other members have to say about this? And what steps can we take with our limited knowledge about the car's machinery to mitigate such incidents from happening to us or our family members?

Also, in most of the above cases, Mahindra did not respond until the videos and news went viral, what can we do to ensure, we are heard if we were to suffer a major issue or incident?

Here's what BHPian Shreyans_Jain had to say on the matter:

It is a hard fact that anything related to issues on Tata and Mahindra cars gets blown out of proportion. If you go around looking for issues, you will find that they happen across brands. There are entire threads here on airbags not deploying in Toyota cars, on Maruti’s dangerous steering system, on Hyundai’s rampant part failures after 4-5 years and on how the company uses inferior structural elements on its Indian products. Your car has not given you any reason whatsoever to doubt it. Personally, my suggestion to you would be to let go of the paranoia and enjoy the creamy turbo petrol.

But in case you keep having such thoughts, you are never going to use or enjoy the car. I mean, 2000km in a year, your car is literally just lying there rotting away, unused all the time. Think of how much money you are losing in depreciation. Might as well sell it, you’ll get good value at this point. My suggestion would be to sell the ageing Tigor as well and get an Innova HyCross. You clearly value reliability and fuss-free ownership above everything else, so nothing better than an Innova.

Here's what BHPian IshaanIan had to say on the matter:

Of course, only a few out of the millions of Mahindras plying our roads will have such fatal flaws and that means that unless you have noticed anything odd about the way your car drives in any way, you should mostly be fine.

The only thing we as consumers can do is boycott the brand until their standards improve. We are yet to hear about any progress with a member’s top-of-the-line XUV500 that crashed so poorly without deploying the airbags that his son suffered extreme injuries. Now we have the XUV700 and the same disregard for consumer safety is displayed so clearly the brand has not changed at all.

I feel that guys like Tata and Mahindra sell well mostly due to consumer sentiment where people want to support local brands but if you look at other nations like Japan for example, 95% of all cars sold there are Japanese and Korean, they absolutely stand by their Hyundais. When Mahindra and Tata are ready to do a good job they will surely sell far more but the problem is they already struggle to meet current demands so they just don’t care what bad news floats around about them because they are still yet to grow to a point where they witness lost potential in sales numbers due to such callous quality control standards.

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