Speed Breaker Nation

Indian cars dodge speed-breakers, not chase speed. Ground clearance paranoia and soft suspensions are redefining how the world designs cars for Indian roads

- RAJEEV NARAYAN

Imagine buying a feisty new car with a boisterous engine that reminds you of childbirth, mated to an agile chassis that makes you want to procreate.

Then imagine yourself spending most of your driving life negotiating broken tarmac, potholes and jumbo speed-bumps that threaten to launch you and your car on an unexpected journey to Planet Mars. This is neither voyeuristic nor an exaggeration, just the basics of the everyday commute for drivers on Indian roads.

While roads in Europe and America are engineered for BHP and torque, India's roads seem designed to kneecap performance cars and nut-punch thrill-seekers. Drive a low-slung coupe and you realize that vehicle geometry is not philosophy, it is bare-bones survival. The truth is that India's roads don't just influence how our cars waddle along, they prescribe how they should be (re)designed for India. Somehow, engineering elegance has been supplanted by the obsession with road-clearance.

'TRAFFIC-CALMING' DEVICES

The problem begins with the speed-breakers themselves. Across cities and towns, traffic-calming devices — built without standardisation, reflective markings or basic planning — have become hazards and not safety features. In Nagpur, for one, unscientific and unauthorized speed-bumps dot even national highways and cause crashes, prompting court intervention and reprimands from road authorities. These are anything but the gentle gradients explained in engineering textbooks; they are physics experiments on unsuspecting car-owners and suspensions.

The chaotic ground reality is precisely why India's idea of a 'perfect car' gravitates first to ground clearance before anything else, even if reviewers would rather talk about horsepower or luxury. A 170-180-mm ride height is now an unwritten baseline for comfort, not a luxury spec.

CLEARANCE COMES FIRST