Tata Hexa: evo fleet

Words: Anand Mohan

There’s no better  feeling when you land at an airport and a car is waiting for you at the exit. No cabs, no airport shuttles, a car with its key handed over to you for your time in a new city. Our Hexa is that car, every time I fly to Delhi. If you’ve been reading our series of ‘Hexapade’ stories you will know that the Hexa isn’t domesticated.

It is our latest workhorse starting its life as part of the evo India fleet in Pune and as soon as it walked into our parking lot, it signed up for a hard life. Aatish drove the burly Tata to Valparai in Tamil Nadu in its first month. Once it got back, Ouseph took it to Spiti and crossed mountains and rivers in it. The Hexa got back to Delhi and has since been the car that receives me at the airport. What I wasn’t aware of is how prepared the team was to take the Hexa practically anywhere.

I popped the boot to haul my luggage in and two sand ladders fell on my feet. The rear seat was folded and buried under an extra spare tyre, an air jack, a tent, towing ropes, a shovel and dust, a lot of it. It looked like we were going to war with nature. All it needed was camouflage and two machine guns on the hood.

We drove to Bikaner from Delhi the next day for some trail driving, something a soft-roader like the Hexa could handle, but as it turned out, the car was a lot more capable. We bashed dunes in style, and all with the simple twist of the wrist to engage Rough Road mode. Its chassis, engine and gearbox have the DNA of the Safari Storme, instantly giving it the capability to rough it up when presented with a challenge. The 400Nm of torque that motor puts out is more than enough to climb semi-steep dunes. Since the steering has improved and turning radius reduced from the Storme, it is a much easier SUV to drive anywhere. The Hexa is as big as a condo so the improved drivability is more than welcome.

Road trips are fast and less tiring, especially when the surface isn’t smooth. You don’t need to slow down as much as average speeds are usually high. We got back from Bikaner to handover the car to our colleague Vipul in Delhi and returned the following month to drive the car to Janjehli valley and cross the challenging Magru Gala mountain pass. The Hexa has done over 14,000km in its time with us, and thus far, we’ve sheared a tyre over a rock, topped up its brake fluid and broken the passenger seat’s recliner handle. Oh we also punctured the intercooler while fording a deep stream that we hadn’t checked for hidden rocks but astonishingly we could drive it all the way back to Delhi to get serviced, never did we need emergency repairs. This thing is tough.

I like the high seating position while off-roading, the cooled glovebox for all the Red Bulls and chocolates we’ve consumed on our roadtrips, and the massive door pockets that will not just hold bottles but a laptop bag if you run out of space to store things. More than anything, I like the suspension. It’s not just tough to take the constant beating on bad roads but also beautifully damped to even out our road irregularities with perfection. In India, it’s not the power, or the steering or the features that is the most important to ace, it is the suspension. We’ve got way too many bad roads and the Hexa swallows it all up.

We’ve taken on water, slush and sand without losing a sweat. Maybe we should pack some logs for a bonfire next month. What a lovely life with the Hexa!

Date acquired                                              July 2017

Duration of test                                           5 months

Total mileage                                                24,950km

Mileage for December                              1032km

Overall kmpl                                                  12.5kmpl

Costs for the month of December        Rs 120 (brake fluid)