Tata Tiago long petrol term review, first report

What the Ganesh gridlock also revealed is that the Tiago, despite being a relatively heavy car, is genuinely effortless to drive. On one of the Visarjan days, the 7km drive home took me over an hour, but the light and progressive clutch took the sting out of the awful bumper-to-bumper conditions. And unlike the Zest and Bolt which had no place to park your left leg, the Tiago has a dead pedal which certainly came in handy when idling for ages at clogged junctions. The steering too is pretty light, and though it’s not as accurate or feelsome as the bigger Bolt’s, the well-finished wheel is great to grip.
Our Tiago has been city bound from the time we got it, except for a solitary trip to Pune. The 85hp, 1.2 motor feels a bit overwhelmed on the fast Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and you really need to wind the engine up to overtake quickly. But again, if you don’t want a rapid change of pace, the Tiago will cruise quite happily.

The expressway also highlighted the Tiago’s biggest strength – that planted, big-car feel which smaller cars simply can’t match. For Rs 5.34 lakh (on-road, Delhi), you just won’t get a car that feels this solid. It thumps through the potholes that smaller cars bounce in and out of and, on the moonscape that is the highway just after Vashi, the Tiago’s 170mm ground clearance came in handy.

It’s a free-for-all on that monsoon-destroyed road with trucks, buses and cars jostling around perilously close to the Tiago, but it didn’t stress me out. Knowing the price of the Tiago and subsequently that it would be cheap to fix, I subconsciously developed a casual attitude about the odd scratch or ding I might pick up wiggling between trucks.

Fuel efficiency? We got an average of 10.5kpl, which isn’t great, but this figure is a bit misleading as the Tiago spent a lot of the past month idling in traffic. To be fair, I never used ‘Eco’ mode even once, but I wasn’t too fussed about saving extra litres at the pump. It’s the car itself which takes your money far. I have to say I’m still gobsmacked by the sheer content that’s packed into the Tiago. Tata coined the line ‘More car per car’ with the Indica, and now, 18 years on, that claim has never been truer.