The Road to Nowhere
Anand Mohan
Family vacations are confusing. The son wants to do some things, the wife has her agenda, the husband has his, and more often than not, the wife always wins. And Seema always wants an active vacation – go here see that, go there buy that, hike in the morning, drive in the afternoon, swim in the evening, you know how it goes. I was wondering before we hit the road on Monday if I would need a vacation from the vacation.
Alright, I’m not lazy. It may seem like I wanted to hibernate during our vacation but for due reason. From late April, I had been on the run, quite literally. We were executing five high-energy racetrack events from the last weekend of April to the first weekend of June for our sister publication evo India and that meant spending long weekends on my feet, shuttling between hotel rooms and tanning at a rate that would make me a well-done steak had this gone on for a few more weeks. The evening of Sunday, the 7th of June, when I flew out from Chennai after our last event, I was looking forward to getting to the airport parking and swiftly getting out in the XUV 7XO. The next morning would be the start of our road trip, and the beginning of my hibernation once we made it to the resort.
For those of you who don’t understand and start questioning my fitness levels, try having a beer belly and hitting the 20,000-step count every day for every extended weekend over 45 days, and then tell me that I don’t deserve to hang my feet in the air for a week. I wanted a very lazy week ahead and the XUV 7XO was the perfect partner for it, along with my beautiful wife. The XUV 7XO has got the good ol’ diesel engine that’s so smooth and refined at the 90-100kmph mark, you barely feel any noise filter in, so an easy cruise was the way to go. I was particularly appreciating the sound damping on this particular Monday. Basically anything that would allow me to disconnect from the outside world. And Monday was doing a great job at it. Few appreciate the benefits of hitting the open road on the first working day of the week. Everyone’s coming back to town, so your side of the highway is empty, you’ve got to brake less, acceleration is almost never required because momentum does all the heavy lifting. It’s far less tiring when your vehicle doesn’t change speeds like the fluctuations in the stock market.
The only reason to slow down and pick speeds up again is bad roads, and Maharashtra has plenty of them usually, but the exit out of Pune leading towards Bangalore is fresh and newly improved until my turn-off towards forest roads between Satara and Wai. All the stars had seemingly aligned for the perfect four-hour road trip on day one.
At the turn-off under Umbraj bridge, the XUV 7XO was cruising, 15kmpl with easy driving, about 150 clicks done in less than 2.5 hours, all occupants except the driver snoozing comfortably. And then the forests welcomed us.
The heat and humidity went up so we rolled up the windows, got the sunroof shades pulled up, and turned the seat cooling on. Even the rear seats are ventilated now, which makes the XUV 7XO even more comfortable and club that with the crisp Harman Kardon system and you’ve got a go-anywhere premium SUV that isolates you from the world beyond anything in this segment. That’s before you begin to appreciate the DaVinci dampers, and that only happens when you approach the B-roads of Maharashtra.
The state and development of roads in Maharashtra are such a mixed bag of hits and misses. Every few years, you get a big headline project that’s impressive on a national level but the progress in the state tends to overtake the pace of infrastructure development. This is especially evident in the roads that connect coastal Maharashtra to the plains, crossing the monsoon-lashed Sahyadris in between. There’s always that one good enthusiast road that winds around the mountains like a satin ribbon, but for every one of those, you get numerous under-construction or washed-out hill roads that are waiting to break your car. Not this time. You’ve read all about them in a technical deep-dive six months ago in this magazine so I’m not going to repeat it. I’ll tell you what it feels like in the real world though.
Imagine you’re in a 400-metre hurdle race. There are exactly 10 hurdles in a standard race but for you there are only five. The height of these hurdles is another thing. The men’s is set at 36 inches and the women’s hurdle is set at 30 inches. In the XUV 7XO, you’re jumping 28 inches. It feels effortless on broken roads. As long as you maintain good pace, the imperfections don’t filter through, the bigger bumps don’t feel as big, and in the biggest ones, once you have negotiated them, you can get on the power earlier than other vehicles around you. The real-world time savings are ridiculously impressive.
ETAs changed throughout the week, shaving off 15-30 minutes every few hours, without even putting in the effort to hustle. After a few days at Koyna spending time away from network and particulate matter, we headed to the beach at Dapoli. The beach in Dapoli is littered with plastic for the most part but there are a few sections away from the entry points to the beach where fewer people visit. And the sand packs with seawater hard enough to allow you to drive on it. It’s one of the few beaches in India where you can drive your car and even though the XUV 7XO I was driving is only FWD, the good ground clearance meant I could carefully drive up and down the beach for some surreal shots. In between, we enjoyed the warm water gently lashing the coastline, the shell collection in the sand and the stillness of the mornings.
Then there’s the drive back home, through B-roads that were under construction and the final familiar stretch through Tamhini ghat. It was possibly one of the easier road trips I had done in a while, made easier still with the XUV 7XO. Mahindras have built a reputation of taking you beyond most cars can, and that lasting appeal goes from generation to generation, but it also does the simple things now, especially with this modern fleet of Mahindras
