A NEW BENCHMARK RISES

We test the new Hyundai Venue, a small SUV that has always lived in the Creta's shadows.

- CYRUS DHABHAR

But this time, can it shine bright or will it fade away? There is no better time than the present to buy a car - in any segment. Rising prices aside, there are rarely any bad cars around. In fact; I can probably count on maybe two fingers of a singular hand the number of truly bad cars sold in India today. Almost every car sold today is well equipped, drives well, is safe and has some sort of cool enough differentiating factor to make people want to buy them, especially in mega mass market segments like the sub 4-metre, subcompact SUV. So what does one have to do to stand apart in such a hot segment? Hyundai, with the new Venue, seems to have cracked the code.

HANDSOME LITTLE THING!

Creta The Second a.k.a Creta Junior a.k.a. Baby Creta a.k.a Creta on a budget, etc. are some of the ways we could address the new Hyundai Venue. It's like someone took a Creta, put it into a Xerox machine, and printed it at 80 per cent. None of these are a negative by the way, especially considering how many Cretas Hyundai has just sold in the month of November.