 "Car review: Celerio's automated manual transmission is simply brilliant")
Maruti has finally launched its much-waited Celerio hatchback in India at Rs 3.90 lakh onwards. Unveiled at the 12th Auto Expo, the Celerio is built on an all-new platform that has been in the making for close to three and a half years.
A team of around 175 designers, engineers, product planners, visualisers, marketeers etc from both India and Japan have combined their efforts to this end.
Except whoever came up with a name that sounds like a veggie in a salad mated to Mahindra’s favourite alphabet is anyone’s guess. According to Mayank Pareek, COO Maruti Suzuki, Celerio means a ‘celestial river’.
From various angles the Celerio brings to mind the Toyota Etios Liva, especially that smiling grille with the twin smiling slats flanking the Suzuki Logo. In fact, if you took off the Suzuki logo and replaced it with a Toyota badge you could easily fool anyone into mistaking this car for the latter.
At the front, the bumper is a strong element of the design and looks sturdy and well-sculpted, though the inverted curve to the lower air dam and the single fog lamps scooped inside the bumper continue to remind you of the Etios Liva.
The side profile is sculpted with two sweeping character lines that appear running parallel to each other. The one running along the shoulder starts at the fender and sweeps upwards towards the rear window with a sculpted kink. The outside rear view mirrors with integrated turn lamps and smaller indicator lamps on the fenders are the only ornaments that give this profile a sparkle.
The rear is my least favourite area. The tallish tail lamps look a bit out of place, though the chunky bumpers look quite in sync with the rest of the body shell. The rear tail gate can only be accessed from the outside and not from within the car.
The cabin like every contemporary Maruti is outstanding. The quality levels are top notch and the design and layout is simple, effective and yet stunning to look at. The centre console is a smart-looking unit surrounded by a chrome bezel within which the music player and the air-con controls are housed.
The steering wheel too looks pleasing, but it’s the top-end variant, the ZXi, that gets the audio and Bluetooth telephony controls on the steering wheel.
For a new car, the Celerio packs in quite a lot of simple yet innovative solutions. I think that is what is appreciable in this package. And the automated manual transmission is simply a brilliant idea. Maruti would like to usher in a new era of progress, they firmly believe that like the air conditioning and power steering became essentials over the last couple of decades in cars, automated transmissions will take over the future and they are going to focus their energies in that direction. India’s largest car manufacturer has even larger plans!
This article was first published in Overdrive ( Read the entire review here)
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