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My 7-year-old Honda Brio: Few ownership details & full repaint job

1st June 2022, 11:40 by Utkarsh Chaudhary

Initially, we had plans to pick up a Honda City as we already had the Maruti Swift so a sedan would have been the ideal addition to the garage.

BHPian SnS_12 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

We currently have only one car in the family which is our 2014 Honda Brio VX. This car had replaced our 2008 Indica Xeta (Petrol) and shared the garage with my wife's Swift VXI. The Brio is the third car my father has purchased till date with the first car being a preowned Wagon R which he purchased in 2006. Both Indica and Swift were sold off at around 26k kms on the odo and the Brio is the first car to run more than 50K kms. The km reading would have been much higher if we didn't have the Swift as the car had done 8k kms in Chennai before it was sent to Mumbai post my marriage as my father in law didn't want to sell it considering it was just over 1.5 years old and wanted us to use it in Mumbai.

Brio's ownership till date has been flawless mostly on the mechanical front and my expense has been towards regular service, battery and set of tires. Considering this is the last car my father said he will own and I am yet to buy my first car and hence, the thought of selling it never crossed our minds. Also, we have many happy memories in this car we would cherish for a lifetime and that is why I thought maybe this is one car I would not like to part away with it and hold on to as long as it's mechanically possible. Being a Honda it's been reliable as I mentioned earlier and the parts and service are easy on the pocket as well. Also, I really enjoy driving this car within the city considering its size and the phenomenal 1.2 i-VTEC engine and feels like a proper go-kart.

The car will complete 8 years with us in Oct end 2022 and cosmetically it had some dents and scratches (vandalism/battle scars) that it had picked over the years and were starting to bother me and hence, the thought of doing a full repaint came to my mind. Initially, I was thinking of experimenting with some other bright colors which really look good on the Brio (always Googling for ideas with Brio's in Thailand/Indonesia) but then I didn't want the hassle of getting it endorsed on the RC book. Also, since I plan to keep this car as a permanent member of the garage I was ok with the cost of repainting and had no worries of losing resale value associated with repainted cars in general.

My previous experiments painting the Brio have been limited to getting both the bumpers repainted a couple of times and the work done the last time is what I was not very happy with and was also my first experience with those gents. For the repaint, I had a friend's workshop in mind who had painted a few of my bikes almost a decade back and the paint is still holding good. I had never given any of my cars to paint at his workshop considering the location and the time spent travelling from my house. But since this was going to be a full repaint I wanted to get the best work done.

Have many pictures to share right from the day of ownership till today and will explain and narrate the journey from 2014 with some memorable pics.

(31-10-2014) Delivery day - Initially we had plans to pick up a Honda City as we already had the Swift so a sedan would have been the ideal addition to the garage but my dad was not comfortable with the size of the car and hence he decided on the Brio. Also, we wanted a blue shade but this was the last piece they had in stock as the facelift version was on the way, which we didn't want to wait for.

Before taking delivery I had spoken with Vicky at Bombay Tyres to upgrade the stock tires to 185/65 Yokohama Earth 1. As usual, my folks back at home had no idea about it and found it difficult to digest that after dropping them home I was going to change the tires on a new car. The odo reading when I reached the shop.

Stock 175/65 JK tyre

All this rust on a new car was not a pretty sight, to be honest.

Fresh, stickier rubber all set to go in.

The dashboard on the Brio is anything but pretty to look at. Thankfully it's dual tone and doesn't have that weird brown colour like the previous models.

The AC button gets hot to the touch maybe because of the heat from the green light behind it. Also no auto climate control on the top-spec variant. They had to offer something more in the Jazz running the same engine I guess to justify the cost.

Weird panel gap

But my father used it to put his aux cable connected to his phone and stored it in the glovebox. The notes are for our first road trip to Bangalore-Kodai-Chennai in the Brio.