Cross Purposes

The facelifted Maruti-Suzuki S-Cross should make the car appeal to buyers, but the loss of the 1.6-litre engine is a pity.

- Kushan Mitra

 There is a joke that does the rounds between us motor noters, which is that almost every other car company in India would love to have a car that Maruti, the Indian automotive industry’s 800-pound gorilla, considers a flop. There are so few Maruti ‘flops, and even when you think of a car that has failed from Maruti (because you did not see huge numbers), you discover that sales have been rather good. That brings us to the S-Cross, a car that most would consider a poor performer. The outgoing model sold around 2000 units a month; those are numbers that would have made the marketing chiefs of some other manufacturers pop the Moet, but they didn’t satisfy the million-and-a-half unit a year Maruti machine.

There were some decent reasons for that. The first was that the S-Cross was the guinea pig for the Nexa premium sales channel that Maruti-Suzuki opened. The second (and in my opinion the bigger reason) was that the S-Cross went head-to-head with the Hyundai Creta, which had been launched a couple of months earlier, and despite the fact that the Creta had a higher sticker price, it started flying off the shelves. The S-Cross undercut the Creta in price, a similar feature set and, thanks to the 1.6-litre DDiS 320 engine under the hood, actually performed better, while it also came with the standard 1.3 diesel motor. Still, burdened with a pretty dull adver