Stepping Up

There’s no doubt that we’ve been waiting for the Tata Harrier as keenly as you have. A quick blast through Rajasthan’s countryside tells us what it ’s made of

- Aatish Mishra

Gun it. That’s the only thought that passed through my head when I realised how far we had to go and how much time we had to get there.

I hurried Parag back into the car, camera dangling, tripod unpacked and mashed down on that peddle like my life depended on it. The reason for my urgency in the remote Rajasthani hinterland was very justified. You see, we had been handed the keys to the Tata Harrier in Jodhpur and were given strict instructions to be at the Khimsar sand dunes by 7:30pm. Tata’s ‘senior management’ wanted to put us through the regular rigmarole of a product presentation through dinner. Now instead of sticking to schedule, we got carried away shooting the SUV with the setting sun. I really didn’t want to be the guy who slunk in sheepishly 20 minutes after it all began, but with 68km of typical Indian village roads ahead of me (narrow, broken, speckled with bovine road dividers) I didn’t have enough time.

Speaking of time, it was only a matter of time before the Harrier happened. When Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover from Ford back on June 2, 2008, technology from these two legendary marques trickling down to their cars here in India was imminent. We were excited. A Freelander based Tata? Wait, a Range Rover-based Tata!? Heck, I’d have liked them to start dropping bombshells within the next year but that’s not how car development works. It’s slow. And it starts in the shadows. Things did change at Tata Motors – the processes in manufacturing, quality control, checkpoints at every stage from concept to production were being picked up from JLR, and it showed. The current crop of Tata cars – right from the Tiago to the Hexa – are so far beyond anything they made before that they really forced us to look at the brand differently. But now, we finally have a product directly based on a JLR platform.