HELLO!
Reporting from lush and verdant Goa where Blogadda has organised a meet up of top 50 bloggers to experience the latest from the Tata Motors stable – the Tata Zest.
In a ‘masterclass’ on Tata Zest last evening, conducted by top persons from the design and engineering team of Tata Zest, we lear
HELLO!
Reporting from lush and verdant Goa where Blogadda has organised a meet up of top 50 bloggers to experience the latest from the Tata Motors stable – the Tata Zest.
In a ‘masterclass’ on Tata Zest last evening, conducted by top persons from the design and engineering team of Tata Zest, we learnt quite a bit on what goes into the design of a car and how it is always an endeavour to match superlative engineering with eye-pleasing designs.
To quote one of the experts here “The world would look quite different were it to be designed by an engineer!”
The star of the event last evening was Narain Karthikeyan, who has been working closely with Tata Motors on this project. His confidence in the new engineering and design elements, should be reassuring to a lot of sceptics.
Today we finally got to experience two versions of Tata Zest. One of them was the top end petrol version which comes with a Revotron 1.2T engine, which Narain was very proudly explaining to us.
The DesignNext, DriveNext and ConnectNext are the cornerstones of this car, which we set out to experience this morning.
With Neha and Kavi – our test drive team
This car has a ton of segment first features, some of which we got to try out on our drive.
As some who’s mostly in the passenger seat, I can say that the legroom at the back is ample, and the airconditioning is comfortable, which can be easily controlled from the touchscreen.
I also loved the smartphone integration via bluetooth, mainly to play music via bluetooth. It is immensely useful if you are driving the car, you can make calls, even reply to sms etc. using the touchscreen.
The other first in segment feature are the 15 inch alloy wheels. It is also said to have voice command recognition a la Siri, but a program that recognizes Indian accents (Phew! A relief, no need to fake accents)
I personally drove the Diesel AMT, and hey this is the first Indian car to have an AMT in Diesel. It was the first time I was driving an automatic and I was a little apprehensive.
But no sooner had I pushed the gear to A, it was smooth sailing from there. I did not miss changing gears at all. It is such a relief to drive non-stop especially on Indian roads, where one has to repeatedly halt / slowdown for potholes, traffic, jay walkers and even cattle.
It was a bit disconcerting initially to not have to change gears, every time I had to halt and move again. The diesel engine was surprisingly quiet, and except for the slight noise while changing speeds, until the gears engage, it was a wonderful drive and the 10 odd kilometers I drove was pure fun.
We tried the mid-range model, which did not have all the top end petrol version connect-next features. For a person who doesn’t claim to be a proficient driver, it is useful to have the rear park assist view.
The smooth roads of this part of Goa, the monsoon induced greenery, and a gentle rain fitting accompaniments for a lovely drive.
Overall, it was a fun drive. For more technical specs etc., visit tatamotorszest.com(Link not working on blogspot and hence not on cucumbertown either)
Twitter: @tatazest | @tatamotors
(c) Nandita Iyer 2006-2015
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