Maruti Suzuki Vitara Brezza ZDI Plus Long Term Report 3

The Brezza was due for a long trip and this time I managed to put plenty on the odo, 2240 to be exact. Plenty of open stretches, some bad patches and some extremely good roads. We expected some really good efficiency figures and not to mention a good, entertaining drive thanks to the Brezza’s playful dynamics. So here are two good and two bad things observed during the road trip.

The good

Excellent A/C

A full day of driving in the sun will usually test the aircon system to the limit. But in the Brezza we barely had to crank it up to even half of its blower speeds. Even on the rear bench the cooling was quite uniform with no requests coming in to increase blower speeds. In fact once the sun set in, the cabin became so cool that we had to keep blower speeds to a minimum even in auto settings. All said and done, we were extremely happy with the Brezza’s aircon.

Very effective headlights

The Brezza comes with projectors in the ZDI plus variant and believe you me, it’s one of the best features of the Brezza. We did a lot of night driving and the headlights lit up the dark highways quite well. The high beam is very good with a very long throw and decent spread. The fog lamps could have been more powerful but around the city, it’s pretty decent.

The bad

Efficiency

Now this is quite debatable actually. So in city conditions the Brezza had managed 17.4kmpl. So we were pretty much expecting it to cross the 20kmpl barrier once it hit the open highways. But that wasn’t to be. With three people on board and our luggage, the Brezza still managed 17kmpl. With the speedo hovering around 110kmph the Brezza’s tacho is nudging 3000 rpm, keeping the engine quite busy and that’s one of the reasons why the Brezza cannot dish out better figures at higher speeds. The lack of a 6th gear limits the efficiency even further.

Limited bad road capability

Now we had a few places where the cars had to follow the bikes in an off-road trail. The Brezza was accompanied by the Duster AMT and immediately for the more difficult sections, the Duster was the car of choice, even though neither cars came with AWD gear. The Brezza is clearly not very comfortable when the going gets rough and it makes sure the passengers are uncomfortable too. Speeds slow down considerably in the Brezza over bad sections thanks to the overtly stiff suspension set up and anything worse than bad sections, it’s best to keep the Brezza away.

Vehicle Stats

Variant – Zdi Plus

Odometer reading – 15,733

Positives of the report – Great headlights, very effective aircon

Negatives of the report – average fuel efficiency at slightly higher speeds, limited bad/off-road capability

Fuel Efficiency – 17kmpl

Photos: Kapil Angane & Abhishek Nigam