Took my XUV 300 on an 800 km road trip: Overall mileage & experience

Overall, this trip gave me a very new level of confidence on the vehicle dynamics, and the engine capability.

BHPian ashishk29 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

A mini travelogue highlighting just how much I've enjoyed this car:

Recently did a Pune-Tipeshwar-Tadoba-Pune run with a few work friends. 4 of us, all geared up, car filled to the brim, we were ready to roll at 5:30AM.

Travel plan:

We chose to go via the Ahmednagar-Aurangabad route while going to save some distance. The Pune-Aurangabad part of the route was pretty routine. Having done this route many times before, nothing new here. But then came the big deal: Samrudhhi expressway. I had been itching to try it out ever since it was announced, and finally I had the chance.

Samrudhhi experience Pune-Tipeshwar

To start off, I gradually reached an indicated 120kmph, and set the cruise control at around 115kmph. Within 5 minutes, there was not a shred of awareness in the cabin that we were doing triple digit speeds flat. The car just complies. Very little engine noise, as the car was doing that speed just above 2000RPM. Right at the cusp of the torque band.

The run was smooth. Went on for a bit till I hit the low fuel indicator. I had gotten about 17kmpl at 115kmph, with 4 on board, boot filled to the brim, and AC on blast. I'm more than happy with this figure.

Post that I wanted to try out going a bit further with this. So I gradually reached 115, but pushed on. I won't quote my actual speed figure, but I was quite baffled with just how far the car would let me push. And deeply impressed and content at just how incredibly stable to car felt even at those speeds. The firm suspension, the wide track tyres, the relatively heavy weight, and the long wheelbase, all doing their part to keep it going straight as an arrow.

Samrudhhi passes through several forest areas, and they have erected tall border walls at all bridges. However, those are hardly sufficient to keep Langurs at bay. I had to dodge 2 langurs who hopped on the expressway, while I was doing 115kmph. Not a fun experience, let me tell you.

All this time, I was keeping an eye on the tyre temps in the tiretronics menu. I had inflated them at about 33psi before starting. A psi below the recommended 34. And the tyres were already doing about 36psi, and had reached a peak of 61 degrees C. However, curiously, it was the rear tyres reporting higher temperatures and pressure than the front. No reason for that. But I kept on going since none of the readings were alarming.

Eventually it was time to exit Samrudhhi and head on to Tipeshwar. That route was less than decent. There were vast patches of road just half way through construction. In some places only one side was concrete and the other side was... well.. non-existent. In some places the concrete patches ended abruptly. It was annoying to say the least.

What the tyre?

At tipeshwar I sat down and started an experiment the next day, after our morning safari. I started manually deflating the tyres a bit, and to my surprise, the tiretronics menu was reporting them in the wrong location!

I knew exactly what the reason was. The geniuses at Mahindra SVC had done a tyre rotation, but skipped re-training the TPMS system. So the TPMS was reporting them at their older locations. That's why it displayed rear tyres getting hot! Because they were in fact now the front tyres.

I looked up a youtube video to trigger the TPMS learning mode. And to my frustration, it would enter the training mode, but wouldn't actually start the one-by-one tyre learning. I wondered if the tyre pressure was an issue. I called my service centre guy and he said they had to be inflated to 40psi. I was FURIOUS. I gave him an earful as to how I had to do all this process in 43 degree Nagpur heat, in the middle of nowhere, because these bums were too lazy/negligent to do it. I pumped up the tyres to 40. Glad my tyre inflator came to the rescue. Rinse and repeat. And the damn thing STILL won't start the individual tyre learning. At that point I just gave up. Inflated all the tyres to 34 and was done with it.

Tipeshwar to Tadoba transfer was also about as much fun as the road till Tipeshwar had been. Entire lengths of road just left half way through construction. There was even a road laying machine just sitting there, literally rusting. Meaning this work had been abandoned for months now.

The return journey:

After our Tadoba safaris, it was time to head back. This run was going to be interesting, since we had a morning safari the day of our return journey. So we could start our return journey only around 10:30AM at the earliest.

We did just that, and started off. The target was to join Samrudhhi at Wardha. We had lunch at Wardha, and joined Samrudhhi. This time, it was a bit of a race against the clock. So cruise was set at GPS 120kmph, rather than speedo indicated. Meaning we would have to suffer the beep from time to time. We dropped off one of the guys at Mehkar since he had other plans, and from there the journey resumed.

After that point, I again decided to reclaim some of the time lost, and went ahead with fully depressing the accelerator pedal. I wanted to see just how far I could go. Again, I won't self-incriminate by posting my actual speed, but lets just say that there was nearly no speedometer left by the time I lifted my foot off the pedal. This was hardly for 5-10 seconds. I had no intention of keeping that velocity. And again, thoroughly, thoroughly impressed with the high speed stability. Even rocks wouldn't be this steadfastly grounded.

Rest of the journey was at 120kmph GPS indicated. No deviations. We ended up having to refuel just past Aurangabad, after having refueled at Wardha! Suffice to say I ran through a good 30L in the blink of an eye.

We were greeted by moderate showers on the way. Nothing too crazy. But that made for amazing views. We exited Samrudhhi at Sinnar, and then jumped on to the Nashik-Pune highway. That highway is also in pretty good shape, with the exception of mountain sized speed-breakers at intersections

This part of the journey was with cruise control set to 85kmph. 90 being the limit. This patch was incredibly economical. We encountered heavy rains past alephata or so. At least twice a passing vehicle splashed water all over my windshield. leading to a brief moment of panic each time. But the rest was uneventful.

We finally reached Pune at around 9:30PM. So we managed to do both the major chunks of the trip in around 11hours each. Not bad for a ~800km run!

Parting thoughts:

Overall, this trip gave me a very new level of confidence on the vehicle dynamics, and the engine capability. I used up about 90L of fuel on the entire trip, leading us to a total of around 8k spent on fuel. At 2k per head, that's peanuts for the amount of travel!

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