I learnt to drive in a Gypsy in 1984 & now I’m back on an old familiar playground, with old familiar tunes.
BHPian SUVolens recently shared this with other enthusiasts.
It’s been around 9 days since I brought home our Jimny. In Bluish Black, manual, Zeta trim. And yes, all my angst and efforts paid off, and I completely avoided the unreasonable showroom demands of ‘mandatory’ add-ons etc. Simply cherry-picked what I wanted and rejected what I could get cheaper outside/buy later.
To get back to the car itself, in little over the week I’ve had it, it’s already clocked 1000 kms and I took it in for the first checkup yesterday, retro-fitting the OE fog lamp as the only concession to stock I’m making right now. Personally, I like the Jimny in its stock form and find a kind of unassuming, underdog charm to its lines and a vanity project, at least for my use case, is not on the cards.
Notable mentions in life with the Jimny over these 1000 km:
At least for now, till it doesn’t become a more familiar sight on the roads – this car sure gets a lot of attention. Strangers wave and make all kinds of appreciative gestures. I’ve had a middle-aged woman pull up next to my moving car, roll down her window and give me a wave and a huge thumbs up. I’ve seen cops writing a challan, stop and stare as I wafted by and this goes on. It’s all a bit too ‘celebrity’ for me.
The Jimny has been showing me spectacular fuel efficiency so far. A Delhi-Chandigarh run returned an indicated 17.1 kmpl and the tank-to-tank reconfirmed the exact figure. And city drive between Noida to Gurgaon and back on weekday peak traffic turned out 16! This is perplexing since I read so much about this car not being able to return above high single or low double-digit figures.
Part of this high efficiency I seem to be getting, I think I owe to the amazingly tractable little mill and the manual 5-speed combo. This setup always seems to shift up early and doesn’t knock or lug even in 5th, ambling at 40-45 kmph in city traffic. It simply crawls up flyovers in 4th or even in 5th, with nary a jar or judder and in fact, acts distinctly surprised if you double-guess and shift down as you would with other manuals about town.
The part about the gear shift is true, unfortunately. It’s a stiff one, not unpleasantly so, but not effortless by any stretch of the imagination. I’m used to it now, but shifting at a standstill is still a bother.
On the highway, this is just a lovebug. Anyone familiar with the 70’s Beetle franchise would get the drift. All that worry about the weak top end, 100+ cruising abilities, handling/stability etc, vanish in the slipstream within the first 10 kms alone with the Jimny. Something about its size, the view outside and overall demeanour, resets you as a driver and you tend to switch modes to ‘70’s flower power’ instead of the anxious, unrecognisably stressed person you’ve become in modern-day traffic.
You’re happy to have traffic pass you (most of them rubbernecking as they go), as you take in more scenery than ever through those innocent wide windows. The stock audio is perfectly in keeping with these demands, the pizza cutter tyres hold the road as well as you can hold a tune and the engine doesn’t bother you in la la land since you won’t nudge beyond 100 anyway. I think the hippie is strong in this one. Buy it for much more, and you’re likely to be disappointed.
I haven’t had a chance to test its off-roading chops yet. Need a couple of months more to bring that plan to fruition. However, near Himachal, I did manage to wade the car into a water-flooded road, where the water simply rose through the engine bay and poured out of the bonnet. I hadn’t figured it’d get that deep before it was too late! No harm done. No ingress into the passenger cabin, and the car shook it off like a happy puppy once we were clear over to the other side.
What don’t I like? Not much so far.
The halogen headlights on the Zeta are pathetic – worse than a 10-year-old WagonR. It’s almost as if Maruti knew people are going to change it anyway, and stuck to candles masquerading as bulbs inside that lens. Will need to replace it with better bulbs, since I prefer the retro look of the reflector to the more neo-LED setup of the Alpha. Just like the steel rims.
The driver footwell remains narrow on long drives, as I had suspected at our first-ever meet. And my large left foot eventually parks itself behind the clutch pedal at cruise, which can be potentially hazardous in case of a front shunt.
The lack of storage inside doesn’t bother me any longer. There are plenty of workarounds and in any case, I think it trains you to be more efficient in packing in these wasteful times.
That rear seat though – heh heh, I’m not going to end up there anytime soon on any kind of journey. No sir. Good for smaller people. Good for kids. For journeys with sensibly planned breaks. That’s about it.
So, overall – do I regret buying the Zeta MT even without a test drive? Nope. I’m glad I did.
Did I need this car? Nope. But I’m glad I got it anyway. I learnt how to drive in a Gypsy in 1984. I’ve transitioned through a bunch of disparate cars in these close-to-forty years of driving. It now makes perfect sense to me that I’m back on an old familiar playground, with old familiar tunes. This one is for my daydreams. For the express services, I’ve got the sedan.
Keyword: Do I regret buying Maruti Jimny Zeta MT even without a test drive?