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My XUV 3X0 AX5L AT comes home: Initial list of likes & dislikes

9th August 2024, 11:11 by Ananth Iyer

We felt that Brezza was overpriced for the feature set it offered and also did not find its looks attractive.

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I got our XUV 3XO AX5L AT petrol last Saturday and below are my initial impressions of the car and the buying experience.

The purchase decision and the buying experience:

We had been wanting to replace our Honda Jazz since 2022. We were on the lookout for a compact SUV automatic with some good features such as Auto dimming IRVM, TPMS, and 360 degree camera. Shortlisted Toyota Hyryder, Creta, Brezza, Sonet, Nexon, and later added Fronx to the list.

We found that Hyryder strong hybrid and Creta were well beyond our budget of around 17 lakhs. We felt that Brezza was overpriced for the feature set it offered and also did not find its looks attractive. Fronx was out the moment my daughter sat in the back and remarked about the lack of headroom and cramped feeling.

Nexon ticked all the boxes, but my wife was apprehensive was about a Tata car. We had owned Indica and Indigo Marina before for several years and the overall experience was not great.

The 2024 Sonet has a great feature list including an L1 ADAS and a good engine. I was attracted to it. However, after a trip in the back seat of a Venue for about 4 km I decided against it. The Sonet back row space was similar to that of the Venue and that was not acceptable to us. Also, the dark interiors were a put down for us.

We started despairing about finding a car which would satisfy us in the given budget. Around this time, I saw the news about XUV 3XO and was excited. The 3xo had all the features we wanted and some more! In addition to the features available in the top variant of Sonet, the AX5L variant had L2 ADAS with a radar in addition to a camera. I was thrilled when I saw this. And we did not know that it had EPB with auto hold when we booked it.

We visited the nearest dealer’s showroom, Mahindra PPS on Kanakapura road, and we all liked the car. Went for a test drive after a few days in an AX5 TCMPFI AT. I had no problems in driving the car even though I had not never driven a compact SUV or an automatic before. We booked the AX5L TDGI AT of nebula blue colour.

The buying experience was smooth. The PPS executives Mr Guruprasad and Ms Chaitra were always helpful, and the car was delivered within the promised 3 months – 11 weeks to be precise. The only jarring thing was the utter lack of information from Mahindra about what was happening during the waiting period. Mahindra must be more transparent in this age of online commerce.

We got the car on 3rd August. There was a small ceremony at the dealer’s place and after that we drove back home. The next day drove the car for about 80 km and yesterday drove it for about 120 odd km. The drives were a mix of using city roads and highways.

Some observations:

I read in a review and a few posts that the car sometimes lurches forward. I had this experience twice, once while starting from the showroom and again while starting from rest in the petrol bunk. This can be quite disconcerting as it is unexpected. Then I found that this happens when the electronic parking brake (EPB) is auto released by pressing the accelerator. If the EPB is released manually with the brake pedal pressed, then car creeps slowly upon taking the foot off the brake pedal. This way there is no lurching encountered and the car is completely in the driver’s control.
A smaller lurch happens when the auto hold is active, and you press the accelerator to drive away. This is not disconcerting. If needed this can be avoided by pressing the brake pedal, switching off auto hold and then releasing the foot brake.
Once when the car was accelerated was beyond 70 – 80 kmph and then decelerated during normal driving along the highway there was some noise, from transmission I think, for a few seconds. The noise did not recur. The car was driving fine.
ADAS has been non-intrusive so far. The executive from PPS asked me to leave the auto emergency braking on and I was a bit apprehensive of sudden braking happening. But no such event has happened over 200 km of driving including that in heavy traffic so far. There was a warning only once when a car before me braked but the warning stopped when I started braking.

Likes:

At the top is the engine. A very light foot is enough to accelerate this car and I love this. The Jazz would take some time to accelerate up an incline with the throttle pressed if there were four passengers in the car. No such problem for the 3xo. At low speeds the car goes over speed breakers with foot still on the brake pedal. It reaches high speeds without you even realising it.
Navigation display with Google maps is very good. A nice touch from Mahindra software team is that of showing the longer route on the infotainment screen while showing the immediate route on the driver console. This avoids the pinching and zooming we do usually to see where we are headed. Very useful.
Ride is comfortable even on bad roads. My wife sat in the back, and she felt fine even over some quite bad stretches.
The cabin is comfortable and roomy. Driving position is good.
Air conditioning is good. Much better than that of the Jazz.
Steering felt fine to me in the zap mode. This maybe because I come from Jazz which has a low effort steering. It weighs up well when speed crosses 30-40 kmph.
EPB with auto hold is a really nice feature to have.
The rain sensing wipers automatically adjust the frequency of wiping based on the intensity of rain. Great feature!
Love the nebula blue colour.
Like the looks of the car from behind and side. Front is okay and could have been better.
Build quality. Like the way the doors and bonnet close. Not tinny at all!

Dislikes:

The SVS (360-degree system) has not been calibrated. This is not a dislike of the car as such but the QA system of Mahindra. I am taking it to the dealer tomorrow to fix this.
When drive mode is changed using the hard button, the two displays take their own sweet time to show the changed drive mode. This is annoying. When a 20,000 rupee phone can work with zero lag why can’t a car system do that?
The idle-engine feature is active every ignition cycle and has to be switched off. Not a great feature as the engine shuts off even when you have stopped a few seconds in the traffic. The default should have been off.

To summarize the experience has been very good so far. Mahindra has done a great job with this car. It reminds one of what they did with XUV500 - giving many advanced features at a reasonable cost. As of now none of the competitors in this segment offer L2 ADAS and this powerful an engine. And none offer EPB with auto hold and auto dimming IRVM in a variant below the top variant. Great to see an Indian brand lead the way.

It is an easy car to drive. Parking in crowded basements is a bit difficult because of the car width and the steering radius. But that is more on me and will not be difficult for most other drivers.

Will post more details after driving some more.

Below are a few pictures of our nebula coloured hunk of a car.