Driving The Car Of The Year

The Maruti Suzuki Swift recently won the ICOTY 2019 award, thus becoming the only car in India to win the prestigious award on three separate occasions. To celebrate, we collaborated with Maruti Suzuki to help write ‘Swift’ across the Indian map, via GPS art.

- Pablo Chaterji

WHEN THE VERY FIRST MARUTI SUZUKI Swift was launched in 2005, I remember driving it and thinking "This thing is going to be a game-changer." There were other fairly capable hatchbacks available at the time, but the Swift stood out as being all that the competition offered (and, indeed, everything that Maruti Suzuki itself offered) and then some more. It was good looking, practical, comfortable and, most importantly for me, a lot of fun to drive. Clearly plenty of others thought much the same thing, because the car became an instant hit, selling thousands of units and winning the very first Indian Car of The Year (ICOTY) award in 2006. An update to the Swift also won the ICOTY in 2012, and when the current model came around last year, it helped the Swift hit the 20 lakh-unit sales mark since it was first launched - and it won the ICOTY again, for the year 2019. This award is the most prestigious in the automotive industry, and thus the most sought after; its jury, of which MW is a part, consists of the most respected publications and experts in the field, and thus it takes quite a lot to impress it.

The Swift is the only standalone model to win the ICOTY award three times, and Maruti Suzuki decided to celebrate this milestone in a rather unique fashion. In collaboration with the member publications of the ICOTY jury, it came up with a plan to write the word 'Swift' across the map of India, using GPS art; teams from the publications would drive Swifts on routes that had been selected to form the five letters in the word. For example, the 'S' would be formed by Swifts being driven from Jhansi to Delhi; MW would complete the drive by getting from Bengaluru to Mangaluru, thus forming the lower half of the 'T'.