The Mahindra XUV300 is one of the best compact SUVs available in its segment. The accolades are mainly credited to the way it looks and drives but majorly, because of its safety quotient. Mahindra & Mahindra had launched the XUV 300 back in 2019. Since then, it has been an excellent seller for Mahindra, constantly trading runners up honours with the Scorpio amongst Mahindra’s sales chart. To spice things up even further, Mahindra recently launched the XUV300 Autoshift variant and now, another heavily-camouflaged variant of the XUV300 has been spied testing.
More details
Since the car still feels fresh, it is being assumed that the test mule might be the Sportz variant of the XUV300 which was showcased at the Auto Expo 2020.
It will most likely be propelled by Mahindra’s new 1.2-litre TGDI engine, which is a part of the new Stallion range of petrol motors that were introduced at the Auto Expo 2020. What’s so exciting about this new 1.2-litre turbocharged motor? It makes 130 PS of power and 230 Nm of torque, which is an increment of 20 PS and 30 Nm over the current petrol engine which powers the XUV300.
This new motor utilises direct injection instead of multi-point fuel injection and has been paired with a 6-speed manual gearbox. It will power the XUV300’s Sportz variant which gets a few decals on the outside along with red brake callipers for visual differentiation and a cabin with red inserts around the dashboard. Everything else is identical to how things are inside the XUV300 which is on sale right now.
The same 1.2-litre mStallion turbo petrol unit was expected to be made available in Ford EcoSport as well, however, since the joint venture between Mahindra and Ford fell off, all projects under the JV have been put on hold. The XUV300 Sportz will in all probability sit at the top of the range and ask a little more than the top-spec, petrol-powered XUV300. The XUV300, as we mentioned earlier, is also one of the safest cars in its segment. It scored a 5-star rating during the Global NCAP safety test.
Based on the Internationally sold Ssangyong Tivoli, the compact SUV also scored the highest points among all 5-Star rated, made in India cars tested so far by Global NCAP. The XUV300 also became the first Indian vehicle to score a 4-Star child safety rating. The official Global NCAP test for the Mahindra XUV300 was conducted in Germany and it has shown the lowest level of intrusion and best side-impact crashworthiness performance of any model tested so far.
Source: Instagram handle: @yt_talesofmiles