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There’s too much ugliness in the world right now,” says Martin Ulharik, VP and Head of Global Design, Tata Motors, and Executive Director of Tata Motors Design Tech Centre at the presentation of the Tata Curvv. This is Tata Motors’ desperately needed mid-size SUV to take on the Hyundai Creta, Kia Seltos, VW Taigun, Skoda Kushaq, MG Astor, among others.
Now whether the Tata Curvv is a thing of beauty is for you to decide. Styling is a personal choice, and you don’t have to like what I do. To my eye the family Tata Motors front end looks great, but the rear is too bulbous, the result of the designers’ SUV-Coupe roof line having to accommodate the engineers’ rear headroom mandate, culminating at the mid-SUV category’s 4.2-meter length stipulation. A longer car would give the designers the space to elegantly taper the back end but that wouldn’t fit into the gap in Tata Motors’ portfolio, between the Nexon and Harrier.
Martin says the Curvv is a Covid baby and rewinds back to 2020 when the world worked remotely and, “Instead of three, we had 180 studios. We had time to reflect.” It also helped that the wild response to the Sierra EV concept at the 2020 Auto Expo meant the conventionally handsome SUV would follow the Curvv in less than a year. They could take a risk! Or at least that is Martin’s justification for not twinning the SUV-Coupe with a conventionally styled SUV. This is how all manufacturers have hedged their bets, from BMW which gave birth to this segment with the X6 to Citroen who will launch, in the very same month as the Curvv, the C3-based Basalt. By sheer, crazy coincidence, August will also see the launch of the Urus SE in India!
Far from refuting, Martin is rather flattered by the comparisons to the Lamborghini. No surprises that the winning sketch for the Curvv concept came from the Turin studio. “The proposals from Italy were very dynamic, very emotional, caught the spirit of what the product is supposed to be.” The winning interior proposal came from Pune, and the project was executed at the Tata Motors Tech and Design Centre in the UK housed in a sprawling building nestled in the Warwick university campus. Here 100 designers work alongside an equal number of engineers in open plan floors that are shared with Jaguar Land Rover, the Warwick Manufacturing Group (a think tank that focuses on advanced projects) and the Tata Group’s battery business Agratas (that is building a 40GWh battery plant in the UK and 20GWh in Gujarat). On the third floor of the building is what’s called the showroom where concepts are presented to management for review. And that’s where we get our first look at the production-ready Curvv, albeit in full-size clay models.
First time we saw the Curvv was as an EV concept in 2022. Then the ICE concept at the 2023 Bharat Mobility Show. And now we have both EV and ICE ready hit the market. Having a multi-fuel strategy was always part of the plan to drive volumes towards the Creta’s average of 10,000 a month, and the future might even include CNG. Vivek Srivatsa, Chief Commercial Officer, TPEM who wears both ICE and EV hats acknowledges a certain amount of overlap but adds, “Overlap is something we would like to have so we can upgrade customers. It is required for us to expand our overall customer base.”
Being a design immersion, there was no talk about architecture or powertrains, but we do know that the Curvv sits on a heavily adapted Nexon platform. And it will finally debut Tata Motors’ new direct-injection turbo-petrol family that was first shown at the 2020 Auto Expo. With the 1.5-litre 4-cylinder reserved for the Harrier, Safari and upcoming Sierra, the Curvv will make do with the 3-cylinder 1.2-litre. Its acceptance against the Creta’s 1.5 T-Gdi is something that will heavily be influenced by pricing. The design immersion did include some interior sketches and the fact that the Pure (base) version doesn’t seem to have much in the way of an infotainment screen suggests a very aggressive, possibly Rs 10 lakh, starting price (for the ICE). Which also means the Nexon’s 1.5 diesel, not the Harrier’s 2-litre diesel, will be the oil-burner of choice.
Read the full interview with Vivek Srivatsa, Chief Commercial Officer, TPEM here
The big differentiator from concept to reality are the body-coloured “precision-cut” and “machined” elements in the grille and air dam which echoes the style already executed on the facelifted Harrier and Safari. The Curvv EV is differentiated by the charging port in the nose, blanked out grilled and vertical blanking elements in air-dam. Says Martin, “We focussed on the front end as a reflection of the powertrain and more cooling. This was right level of differentiation.”
The full width LED DRLs, lights, angular and sharp LED full width tail lamps, squircle (squared-off circles in designer speak) wheel arches and flush door handles, are all common between the two with the only other differentiator being wheel designs.
I prefer the wheel design on the ICE Curvv, but again you don’t have to agree with my opinion. And while we are on opinions, I must add that the Curvv looks undertyred even on the 18s of the top-end versions. Clearly it has been styled for 19s, maybe even 20s, and I wonder what the stance will be like on the 17s of the lower versions.
Acknowledges Martin, “I am a big advocate [of bigger wheels] from a proportion point of view. We have pushed the envelope [but] we have to think of usability. We want to make sure the customer is not changing the tyre every time they take the car out.” Clearly Tata Motors hasn’t recovered from the traumatic warranty issues of the Hexa’s 19-inch tyres.
Martin acknowledges that physical buttons will return to car cabins but the Curvv was designed in 2020 when touchscreens were all the rage and it is a reflection of the long lead times in the automotive industry that the Curvv will stick with glossy-black touch panels. All of which are familiar from the rest of the Tata Motors range.
You get the Tata steering wheel with the illuminated logo – a world first, mind. The design of the dash is similar to the Harrier and Safari with the horizontal lines to stretch out the cabin and give it a sense of width while generous mood lighting lifts the ambience. There’s the mandatory panoramic sunroof. A 12.3inch infotainment sits alongside the digital cluster. And most importantly design, engineering, marketing – all the teams insist the headroom will be as good as any conventional SUV in this category. “We moved the rear wheel and stretched wheelbase for better ingress and egress and then extended the rear overhang ensuring the styling doesn’t look forced,” says Martin.
Does the unconventional SUV-Coupe give Vivek sleepless nights? “I am very confident,” he counters, insisting that Indian customers are ready to, “Embrace a lot of newness as long as it suits requirements.”
But slowing EV sales surely are keeping him awake? Vivek attributes it to, “A temporary blip. There are two big requests from customers – range and charging infrastructure. With the Curvv we will give newer range options and more predictable charging infra. In the next two years a combination of start-ups, government, and oil marketing companies are going to pump in a lot of money while larger battery sizes will deliver longer distances thus liberating customers.”
Tata Motors’ focus on EV remains unwavering, with the Curvv first launching as an EV on August 7. Elaborates Vivek, “It is the top version we will [first] deliver to showcase potential of Curvv as a product, and the sheer features that the EV architecture allows us to unleash.”
EV naysayers should remember that success of Tata’s EVs is what returned the company to profitably and fund development of the desperately needed new petrol engines. We will soon find out if the (petrol) Curvv will have the show to match the go, but Martin gives us hope. “There is space for an emotional SUV. Sportiness, SUV-coupe, premium, sharp, progressive, modern, high-tech. All buzz words [but are] not throw-away lines. They are part of the DNA of product.”
Design though is what will make or break the Curvv, and Martin sums up, “Adding a little bit of beauty is no bad thing.”
