Month One

It has been exactly a month since the Honda Amaze joined our long term fleet here at CarWale. The arrival of this compact sedan has ticked off two checkboxes for our young team-petrol power and automatic transmission.

The biggest reason for anyone to buy this car is to make their driving experience easier and that is something the Amaze lets you do with ease. It gets the 1.2-litre four-pot petrol engine mated to a five-speed automatic torque lock-up converter. This is a clever little gearbox which responds with upshifts and downshifts depending on the throttle input. The basic aim being that the ECU has been programmed to keep you in the best torque range. This makes the driving easy but consequently hits out at fuel efficiency.

Honda claims an ARAI figure of 15.5kmpl but the best we could ever manage was 14kmpl with an average of 12.5kmpl in mixed conditions. At around Rs 84 a litre of petrol, this an expensive proposition if you are driving over 20km every day and are better off buying the diesel version. That said, if you’re willing to drive sedately out on the highway, the car’s efficiency indicator routinely shows figures above even the ARAI claimed efficiency, but we don’t see too many people buying this particular Amaze variant for its highway cruising ability. The auto box is a nice to use but lacks the top end zing that we expect from Honda‘s engines.

Our car is maroon which looks good in pictures and is an easily noticeable colour if you are searching for the car in a crowded parking lot but consequently one that will look soiled very easily if you have to drive it on dirty roads, a daily occurrence in Mumbai’s monsoon.

The general consensus in terms of the design among the team is that the Amaze is a good looking car but it is one that you will decide on the first glance rather than over a period where its looks are expected to grow on you.

Having had the fortune to tour costal Andhra Pradesh in the diesel version last year and take many, many photos, I personally like its cab-forward design and think that it is a well-designed package that looks like it has been designed to be a complete car rather than a boot-on-hatch design.

Honda has gone with the beige interiors for the Amaze (like the rest of its range) which is pleasing to the eyes but hard to maintain and even more so when you have to run the car daily during the Mumbai monsoon. It is not the most spacious of cars (by virtue of it being a compact sedan) and with our team comprising majorly of plus-sized humans, we were at best able to squeeze four large people into the cabin.

I have found the music system to be a very basic unit and the sound is as you expect from a music system of a car in this price range, but newer competition seems to have better audio systems and certainly better-looking head units, so we expect the Amaze facelift, whenever it comes , to have a major head unit upgrade.

It has a cavernous 400 litre boot which can literally swallow up your bags but you will need to do a bit of arranging to fit everything inside. My colleague Charles, an avid musician was able to pack his instruments (sans the guitar hard case) into the boot with ease. Outside of our team members, the car seems to be hit with Charles’ family as well as my roommates who despite the slight lack of room at back don’t mind squeezing in as the ride is quite comfortable.

On the dents and scratches front, I did manage to scrape the Amaze on a pavement in Navi Mumbai and there is a massive scratch on the front left bumper, so a repaint is in order.

The Amaze is almost due for its first full service, the one that happens at 5,000km. Once it is back, we expect the fuel efficiency to increase a little, and we’ll also get a fair idea of what it costs to maintain the Amaze.

In the meanwhile, I’m sure many more adventures await us with the Amaze.