After a remarkably quiet 2013 Maruti Suzuki has begun spreading its
gigantic wings all over 2014. They begin the year with a brand new
offering aimed squarely at the Indian market. The Celerio, if you aren’t aware of it by now, is a hatchback that will eventually replace the A-Star and the Estilo.
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’, but don’t ask me
what’s the connect, I’m as clueless as you and many Maruti Suzuki
employees are!
But get past the name and what you can clearly see its antecedents in
the Alto, there are definitely faint hints of inspiration from Maruti’s
largest selling car.
Exteriors
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. As it is, driving this car on the busy roads around
Jodhpur did not elicit much interest from the very people who would in
the near future be buying this car, the aam janta! And let me tell you
in the past there hasn’t been a single new car that hasn’t grabbed
attention on these drives.
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. I like the hood which has this slight clamshell
effect to it and gives the Celerio a sporty character.
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.
Where dimensions are concerned, the Celerio is comfortably long and
wide, though to put it in comparison, it’s shorter in length than the
Hyundai Grand i10 though taller by a few inches. At 2.425 metres,
however, both hatchbacks share the same wheelbase and that also means
the Celerio has substantial amounts of interior space, especially knee
room, just like the Grand i10.
Interiors
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.
The slim seats with the integrated headrests liberate loads of
interior space, though I can’t say for certain how comfortable these
will be over long distances. The ZXi (optional) variant gets height
adjustable seats as well as front fog lamps and alloy wheels as
standard.
Now for the mechanicals and the driving bit, the Celerio at present
comes only with a 998cc 3-cylinder petrol engine. A diesel will follow
but nothing has been set in stone yet. This petrol motor is an updated
engine that uses aluminum in its construction and is named the K10B;
it’s also called as the K-Next engine. Maruti has worked hard to lower
the NVH levels, and while at idle this engine is impressively quiet, as
speeds rise it has that typical whine I’ve heard in every small
displacement Maruti as you push the engine harder and harder.
The 4-valve per cylinder arrangement allows it to make 68PS of max
power and 90Nm of max torque. Now those figures aren’t as hearty as
those pumped out by the Grand i10, which has a larger displacement
engine, but it’s the transmission that makes all the difference in the
Celerio.
The transmission has been big news for some time as Maruti claimed to
offer a clutchless driving experience in the Celerio. I’d like to point
out at this moment that it’s not because of an automatic transmission.
Innovatively, Maruti is using what is called an automated manual
transmission, which basically is a sort of a gadget that takes care of
the duties of the clutch without there being a clutch pedal in the
driver’s foot well. So instead of a manual gear shift stick you get
something that looks like an automatic shifter, except if you look
closely you won’t see a park mode.
So what may appear to be an automatic transmission, is essentially a
manual gearbox cleverly tricked out to perform as an automatic. Is there
any harm in that? Actually not, and I do firmly believe this will help a
lot of people appreciate the convenience of using an automatic
transmission and help them graduate to automatics, especially those
driving in crowded urban areas.
With this technology, Maruti has achieved a fuel efficiency of nearly
23.1 kmpl which, they claim, is the same as what you get in the manual
transmission, and I don’t dispute that since this is a manual
transmission. On long vacant stretches of highway skirting Jodhpur, the
transmission feels reasonably smooth. But in urban areas it’s jerky, and
unlike a torque convertor, the shift quality isn’t seamless — you can
actually feel the clutch being actuated every time a gear needs to be
engaged. That also influences you to try and modulate throttle to reduce
the sensation of that clutch kicking in and it could never give you
that incredible efficiency figure. Nonetheless, for having taken away
the effort of having to use a clutch several hundred times even over
short distances is something Maruti should be applauded for.
Onto dynamics then. The front wheel drive Celerio runs 14 inch wheels
and tyres suspended on a reworked suspension. Ride quality is good,
certainly not in the league of older sibling the Swift but it’s
comfortable. The Celerio has impressive stability at high speeds and
never for a moment felt like it was too light or unsecure. The steering,
on the other hand, is an electronic power assisted type and like most
EPS systems it’s absolutely dead where feedback is concerned. It feels
like it has some heft but has no variable ratio so the weight does not
increase as speeds rise. Yet in the city this steering is light and
precise enough to let you go scampering through crowded streets.
For a new car that we expect will be priced close to the Grand i10 (Rs
4-4.5lakh), 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!
