From playing the role of a support car at our Off-road Day to doubling up as camera and luggage car at our NATRAX supercar club event to a family weekend trip and to a Mahindra Independence Day excursion, the Thar Roxx has been put to a wide variety of tasks, just as Mahindra intended. The Thar Roxx is indeed a hardcore off-roader with serious hardware like a low-range gearbox, but it’s also loaded with creature comforts like ventilated seats and a killer Harman/Kardon sound system.
Needless to say, at our Off-road Day, the Thar played the role of support car with ease. This year, our event theme was off-roaders of yesteryear, so 4x4s like the Mitsubishi Pajero, Mahindra Bolero 4×4 and first-gen Thar were the stars. At times, these older cars did get stuck, not owing to incapability but more due to age; that’s when the Roxx would rush over a crew to help. The low-ratio gear – fed power from a modern torquey diesel engine and aided by electronics – meant the Roxx pretty much sailed through, especially since, as a support car, it didn’t have to traverse the obstacles but the trails alongside.
On the NATRAX trip, the main task was getting crew and gear from Mumbai to Indore. It did this well enough, but there are other midsize SUVs that are better built for this. I felt this on my trip to Pune, too. The engine is tuned to offer a really punchy feel, something Mahindra does with all of its vehicles; a brand DNA, if you will. But while this is fun for a while, driving the Roxx over a long highway run has its pitfalls. For one, trying to keep the car under 100kph is a challenge. You have to maintain very light throttle pressure, so while your left leg is rested thanks to the autobox, your right leg is all tense. The other pitfall of this is poor fuel efficiency. Our highway runs saw figures of 10 and 11.8kpl, respectively. For a diesel midsize SUV, this isn’t good. On his trip, Rahul also had the instrument cluster go completely blank while driving, which was quite disconcerting but worked fine once the car was restarted. And while we’re on about glitches, one of the AC vents also broke.
I used the Thar Roxx as a daily driver, too. Home to office is an 8km Mahim to Byculla run – right inside Mumbai city. It works, but the suspension is a real pain. It’s built to take a pounding off-road, so you don’t have to slow down for smoother craters and potholes. Trouble is, Mumbai’s traffic slows you down whether you like it or not. When you hit these potholes and undulations at low speeds, the springs don’t compress much, and along with the scuttle shake typical of a ladder-frame construction, there’s a lot of body movement. It’s what you have to live with, given this car’s main mission statement of being a hardcore 4×4.
The engine does a good job here, with its punchy nature helping with overtaking and closing gaps in traffic. The ventilated seats and the Harman/Kardon sound system were also features I really enjoyed on the daily drive, and I have to say the higher perch and the serious SUV look were things my wife enjoyed too. When she’s behind the wheel, she’s always complained about male drivers not respecting her enough; not so with the Thar. So, as I said in my earlier report, it’s not the SUV I’d pick as my daily driver, but if you really love off-roading and the image associated with it, Mahindra has polished the rough edges nicely enough.
