Ever since its launch, the Hyundai Creta has enjoyed an almost exclusive space for itself among a herd of compact SUVs flooding the market. While no other carmaker has come close enough to challenge the Creta in terms of performance, features and premiumness, a contender has emerged with the potential to turn the tables in its favour. Nissan recently launched the brand new Kicks in India with an ambition to reinvent itself for the Indian market. The Kicks in India is larger than its global counterpart and boasts of segment-first features. Lining it up alongside the Hyundai Creta, Auto Tech Review ran a head-to-head comparison of both compact SUVs to evaluate performance, comfort, safety, space and more. Read on for the significant and conclusive findings.
Hyundai brought the Creta to India in 2015. The compact SUV was quick to captivate the interest of many buyers looking for an urban SUV that held a distinct aspirational value to it. Since then, the Creta has sold in big numbers to rank among the top SUVs sold in India. The Kicks, on the other hand, has been running globally and has finally been brought to India on the Terrano’s M0 platform, giving it a bigger avatar.
Nissan has given the Kicks a competitive edge with top-of-the-line safety features such as a quad airbag set-up and a segment-first 360° camera system, alongside driver aides such as ABS with EBD and brake assist, vehicle dynamic control, hill start assist among others. To run a comprehensive head-to-head comparison, we lined up a top specification diesel manual variant of the Hyundai Creta and Nissan Kicks. Through the evaluations, we bring our readers exclusive data on interior dimensions, air-conditioning cooling performance, 0-100 km/h and 100-0 km/h test timings.
VEHICLE DYNAMICS AND POWERTRAIN PERFORMANCE
For the first test, we mapped the acceleration of both Kicks and Creta in a controlled environment. While both the Kicks and Creta boast of power figures ranging in three digit figures, the Hyundai Creta offers more punch with its 1.6 l, four-cylinder, VGT diesel mated to a six-speed manual transmission. The Kicks, on the other hand, gets a finely tuned 1.5 l, four-cylinder, turbo diesel mill married to a six-speed transmission.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of Auto Tech Review.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Auto Tech Review.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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