My Tata Altroz ownership experience from booking to end of lease

I read all the reviews and everybody said take the diesel for an enjoyable ride. So I trusted the experts and booked an XZ Diesel without even a test ride.

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A Tribute

Part 1: The Research

Rewind <<<<< 2019 <<<<< and I am doing my research for my first car. I was one of those who believed cars are unnecessary and public transport, taxis, and bicycles are all that one needs to go anywhere and the struggle (which didn’t seem like struggle back then) builds character (it does).

Anyway, not everyone buys into this argument, and neither did my wife, but I convinced her that there was no way I could hold her hand and have a relaxed conversation while we traveled around in Bangalore as I could sitting in a cab if I were to be driving our own car. I am to date surprised that this worked as long as it did.

Anyway, years went by and now I had a kid and put Corona in the mix and all of a sudden, with my beloved public transport no longer being dependable or safe, and with my world starting to revolve around the young one, I decided it was time to take on the stress of driving.

I had read people sing songs about the Polo and the Jazz and since that was the size of the car that seemed fit for me, I was sure it would be one of the two and that is where the research started.

I liked both the cars. But, I had seen them for the last 10 years and they still looked the same. Maybe, they are so good and evergreen, that there was no need for an update? But the other countries seemed to have gotten an update. Oh wait, not just one update, but several updates. The Polo in Europe seemed to have transformed into something else altogether. And the Jazz in Thailand looked like a great-grandchild of the one in India. And yet, and yet, I visited a Honda showroom, and guess what, we were going to get an update too! Hooray, I thought and waited for a month or two and there it was - The Jazz with ALL NEW TAILLIGHTS, inspired by a cat! You have to really see the ad-

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Anyway, I am not a cat person, and neither did I particularly enjoy mints with holes so I decided to move on. I think I really did not appreciate the fact that the companies thought we didn’t deserve better here and there was no way I was going to spend my money on them.

On a side note - I fully get it that the Jazz is >4m outside India and so is the Polo and given the numbers that they did in India, it does not make economical sense for these companies to keep retrofitting newer updates on the India specific modifications, but then you’re not going to get our business either and it doesn’t take Nostradamus (or Sybill Trelawney) to predict the demise of these companies (in India). And hell with the stupid 4m rule.

Part 2: The booking and first taste of the Tata Sales and Service

And so it is 2020 already and there was a new kid on the block - Altroz - it boasted a 5-star rating, and since my world revolved around my kid now, the rating seemed to matter too, and boy did it look stunning! I read all the reviews and everybody said take the diesel for an enjoyable ride. So I trusted the experts and booked an XZ Diesel without even a test ride (would not recommend that to anyone) and a 4-week wait began.

But just two days into the booking I couldn’t believe my luck. The sales rep called saying that he has a car ready for me as the customer to whom it was originally allotted to had issues getting a loan sanctioned and now I could take that instead. I said why not and told this to a good friend, who said it should be fine and decided that we would do a PDI over the weekend and get the delivery soon! I contacted the sales rep and we went on the time that was decided upon and sat in the showroom waiting for the sales rep to take us to our car. It was on a Saturday and the showroom was brimming with people with a lot of interest in the Nexon (which I also considered but I thought it was better to take a fully loaded Altroz over a mid-spec Nexon given my budget) as well as the Altroz and there was a bright red one right inside the showroom with people waiting to get inside and experience the cabin. And so did we, getting a first feel of what it may feel like a few days from now.

After a while, the sales rep came to meet us and we asked him to show us the car, he said he’d get back to us in a minute and went away to check for the details and then came back and told us that the car inside the showroom where people were going in and out left, right and center was the car that has been allotted to us indeed.

My heart sank a little, but I am a mellow guy and let my logical brain take over from my emotional brain, and we went again near the car and since this was to be my own, I went near it with full claim on it. And all of a sudden started noticing all the blotches and stains that people had left on the uncovered seats. I took my friend aside and asked him if there was even a possibility of rejecting this and he sensed my feelings and told the sales rep, we do not want this.

Another sales rep joined the conversation and said that people actually prefer the cars that are inside the showroom as it is taken care of better than the ones in the stockyard and there was no reason for me to reject this. I politely told him that if they had at least kept the plastic covers of the seat in place, I wouldn’t have minded, but it pains to see all the stains even before the delivery and it was not right on their part to let the car be made available for display to the larger audience when it was allotted to a customer.

Anyway, I think they got the point, and a fresh booking was made and my dates went back to the original 4-week waiting period. And I also got the point of what all the forum members meant by ‘hit and miss of the Tata service’

When it finally arrived, more or less in the given time, I was taken to the stockyard to do the PDI, but was told that no key would be given and I could only see it from the outside. I was also buying this car via the car lease policy and the billing had already been done - so silly me, I’m not sure what I would’ve done even if I got a lemon.

Part 3 - The Machine

I took it slow, this was the first time I was doing any real driving, and paid the price in the first few months itself - constant short drives to the park and back with the kid and slow speeds resulted in the DPF clogging within the first few months of purchase itself and then the loss of power too and this was new for Tata too and so much so that they even sent a tow truck to pick up the car to make sure there is no damage to the engine. Needless to say, it was just the DPF clogged up and nothing else to it.

Read all about DPF, and learned quickly that this car needs to be driven and driven hard since then, there has only been only one other occasion in the entire 45k kms that it has been driven that it ended up in the service station for DPF regeneration and a couple of times where I have managed to regenerate it on my own and so 4 times in total in a span of 44 months is not too bad at all.

I really think it helped me that I was driving it fairly early in the morning to the office that is 21km away at decent speeds when most of the other cars are still having their bath and I would do at least 100 km on an average in a week within the city.

Months passed by, and I felt like my Toruk Makto moment, the man and the machine were getting along pretty well. I experienced what it meant to have ‘great handling’, ‘amazing steering feedback’, and ‘glued to the road’ and all of this coupled with the amazing fuel efficiency of 14-16 inside Bangalore and 21-24kmpl on highways in speeds of 90-120, there was a machine which I really thought deserved a lot more buyers than it had.

Yes, the engine is not as refined as others, and yes it has halogen headlamps - (but if I had a rupee for the number of times I curse drivers who are on full beam and on LED lights, I'd be a millionaire), and yes it has manual IRVMs and you have to use your finger to flip it at morning and night - still remember a hyper-enthusiastic YouTube reviewer who couldn’t believe that in 2020 this supposed-to-be-premium hatch had manual IRVMs in it (when I heard that first time, I thought IRVM stood for some extreme tech - Infra Red Visual Monitor or something), but apart from that, if you’re looking for the bells and whistles, there are quite a few too - In the first few months, I can't tell how thankful I was to the auto headlamps and auto wipers, it would always take over at the right time and work flawlessly allowing me to simply concentrate on the road. For the classical music (where the best music is concert recordings of yesteryears) and podcast listener in me, the sound system always felt pretty great, the glove box is big and accommodating, so are the door pockets, I appreciated the front and the rear fog lamps as well as the incredibly powerful AC (in fact a bit too powerful for my liking).

Well, not everything is hunky dory, there has been a mild rattle right from the delivery date which I think also mildly increased since the time they tried to fix it, the panel gaps are apparent, and the glove box latch gave away twice in a span of 15 months which one may not see in the Korean cars.

But really, when the driving is as great, you can live with these niggles, at least I could. My wife’s place is 400 kms away, and it has always been a smooth ride and such a pleasure to drive. The seats are rather comfortable and the space throughout is rather generous. Even the ground clearance at 165mm has never been an issue. I have done a few 1500KM+ and several 1000km+ trips in a span of 2-5 days and it has always been a well-behaved, reliable machine. Frankly, this car could’ve certainly handled more power, I always thought there was probably no reason to detune the Nexon engine, on highways the heart always wished for more simply because of the superior ride quality.

Yes, the service centres take 2 days more than what is required (and they are truly overloaded too), sometimes I feel as if the car drove better before the service than after, and sometimes there are minor niggles for which it had to go back another day, but at the same time, the service advisors in large part have been pretty assuring and responsive. If something was amiss, they have been keen to fix it and frankly, this is alright.

Of course, I have to admit that I have had the cushion of the car being under lease and the lease company almost always did a fairly good job of taking care of the maintenance of the car, and if something horrible had to happen, I knew that I would have their support. But having said that, this car really deserves more numbers than it garners.

Part 4 - The Parting

Come 2024 and the end of the lease I had made up my mind that I was keeping this car, but as the months progressed and so did the metro construction on the roads of Bangalore (almost on the entire stretch of my office route) that there was a span of two months and on every single occasion where I had to leave the office at 6 PM or later took me 2 hours to do 21 kms and on a week where this happened on 3 consecutive days, my knee started to complain (mind you the clutch is rather light) and that really set off some alarm bells. As much as I have started loving driving, my love for hiking is still magnitudes greater and I couldn’t afford a bad knee already. With the lease ending, I parted ways with the Altroz a week ago in favor of an automatic (undecided yet). And how

I wished there was an automatic for the racer (minus the stripes!).

Part 5 - Final thought

I really wish more people considered this wonderful car and I really wish Tata came up with the right automatics and the right engines from the very beginning.

I used to pride on using public transport but honestly, I am now spoilt in that aspect and have greatly enjoyed the freedom of mobility.
It has allowed me to explore the nooks and corners of southern India, has made for many great conversations with good people, a help for many on many occasions, and many safe journeys with a lot of peace of mind.

End of the day, well done Tata, and thank you

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