THAT FAMILIAR FEELING

There's a new Swift in town. Is it a case of 'so what else is new?'

- Pablo Chaterji

Ever heard of the phrase 'familiarity breeds contempt?' It's self-explanatory, but I'll explain anyway it means that if you know something (or someone) extremely well, you're likely to become bored with it, and begin to treat it without respect. What does this have to do with the all-new Swift, you ask? Well, I'm old enough to have driven and tested every generation (and variant) that Maruti Suzuki has launched in India, so it can be safely said that I know my Swifts rather well, which puts me in a position of possible over-familiarity. Would this colour my perception of the new model, I wondered? There was only one way to find out.

Maruti sold 2,03,500 units of the Swift in 2023, making it the largest-selling car in the country (beating Maruti's own Wagon R by a few thousand units); so much for SUVs being the flavour of the season, then. Just over two lakh people opting for a car that's been around for close to two decades means that MSIL is doing something right and one of those things is that it isn't messing around too much with a winning formula. Take the Swift's design, to begin with; the OG is still a funky looking thing, and successive generations of the car have been tweaked, rather than completely reinvented. This is not to say that they've been nipped-and-tucked, however; each update has become a little fleshier, as tends to happen with small cars, and the new car is no exception.