Mahindra Quanto: Larger Than Life MPV?

There are girls of your dreams – the ones who look like a supermodel and have legs till their ears, who can’t hold a conversation but you really don’t care because well, look at her – you tell yourself. Till one day it all blows up like a car tank in a movie. And then there are others, the ones you have a great time with, who have great legs till where normal people do and can hold a good conversation. The Mahindra Quanto is like the latter – odds of you falling in love with it on first sight are fairly low, but it’s a whole different story if you manage to stick around.

The first time we drove the Mahindra Quanto, it was boring, there wasn’t half as much pick up as we’ve grown accustomed to from Mahindra. Something dreadful had happened to the punch, the air conditioning was appallingly slow and then somewhere between all that, there was the shame of knowing that people outside were staring weirdly at us. Nano owners will know what we’re talking about.

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But the second time the Quanto arrived for a review (the first time was a TD posing as prospective buyers at a showroom, we used fake names and made an evening out of it) it was another story all together. We had spent the last 3 hours stuck in a traffic jam trying to get back from the Formula 1 when we picked up the Quanto. This time around things were drastically different – the 3-cylinder 1500 cc engine was peppy and much more than eager to overtake. While the first TD car was struggling to get to 80 kmph, the new one was more than happy to get to 100 kmph till an annoying beep made us slow down. You look around to see the tiny digital display on the central console blinking – and it’s here that Mahindra Quanto struggles to not be a taxi – it’s baffling what would push you to set a speedlimit on your own car. The Quanto feels planted and has distinctly less body roll than the Xylo despite apprehensions to the otherwise. The ABS system and the brakes are responsive. The digital display is a boon for rear-seat drivers who can see the speed, gears etc without straining their neck. This also makes the Quanto one of the few cars that display the speed and stats in not one but two places – again useful if you want to keep an eye on the driver.

The interiors are pretty much the same as its older brother Xylo – unexciting yet they don’t have the flappability of the Renault. The salvaging aspect of the exterior is the rear-door mounted spare, which gives it a more SUV look. We think that black bumpers would give it a more butch look and the rear seats that Mahindra has received so much flak about can seat one average adult and a Chihuahua. Yet somehow when you look at the Quanto, you keep expecting there to be more of it. It’s a bit like reading a kindergarten level fill-in-the-blank.

The brakes are effective, the top model comes with an erratic start stop system, which switches off the engine when the car is in neutral on idle and then starts off the minute you press the clutch. Unfortunately, this function is far from seamless – the engine and the gearbox shake noticeably and repeat the drill when coming back on.

At the end of the day, the Quanto is a good car – as long as you’re willing to strip the colour from the bumpers, the electronic beeps from the indicators, the limiter alarm and the different coloured alerts in the dash display (headlight, dipper, handbrake alerts are all of different colour). Or you can see if they’d give you a basic version with ABS and airbags, which will serve you well till the time you save up money to get an XUV or a Rexton.

From the November 2012 issue of FHM India.