Honda Amaze – One Car Many Roles
Honda had first launched the Amaze in 2013 and with that, the company also debuted their first diesel engine in India, the 1.5-litre i-DTEC EarthDreams engine. When Honda launched the second generation of the Amaze sedan in 2018, the vehicle came across as a great package with a lot of talking points, allowing it to become one of the most popular family sedans in the country.
The MotorBeam Team has been driving a Honda Amaze diesel MT for the past few months. The car has become an instant hit with everyone in the team, for different reasons. When the Amaze got inducted in our long term fleet, we had a very tight shoot schedule with multiple shoots happening in far-off locations. Since we were already familiar with the Amaze, we quickly put it to good use and commissioned it on one of our major shoots.
The Honda Amaze was driven by different members of our team and it eventually became the most preferred car to take on shoots because of multiple reasons. The Amaze has a cargo capacity of 420-litres and the boot is well-shaped which meant that carrying all our shooting equipment became super convenient in this car. Now, the Amaze was being driven to all our shoot locations which are pretty far off and here’s where the sedan never disappointed.
We sat to calculate the fuel efficiency figures just how we do for every car in our fleet and we were so surprised with the numbers that we actually calculated the second time. On our regular shoot hauls (4 people in the car plus boot full of equipment) we got a figure of 16.72 km/l in city driving and 21.04 km/l on highway runs. When Dhanil from our team took the car on a solo drive on the NH8 for a good 300+ kms, he managed to extract 24.31 km/l which translated to extremely economical running costs!
Fuel efficiency aside, the diesel engine’s performance is punchy too. When the turbo starts spooling at about 1750 RPM, the torque surge is so strong and addictive, that it makes the Amaze diesel a fun car to drive. The Amaze boasts of good performance on the highways, but what makes city driving easy is the light clutch and the effortless gear shifts.
Honda has introduced the BS6 version of the Amaze petrol and diesel recently. The Japanese automaker has applied its exhaust gas after-treatment system with NOx Storage Catalyst and a Diesel Particulate Filter to meet Particulate Matter and NOx emission targets. Honda’s silver-coated DPF also reduces particulate matter combustion time by 40%.
When Parth and Aariz had to attend an event in Pune, they drove down in the Amaze and both of them took turns while driving. After returning, they actually had an argument on who gets to keep the Amaze for daily runs. The suspension is tuned perfectly for our broken roads and the Amaze always tends to maintain good composure over unstable tarmac and the ride quality proves to be very comfortable for the passengers at the front as well as the rear. Parth even commented on the car’s agile dynamics and how responsive it felt on the Western Ghats.
Finally, Neha took the car for a week to attend to some family outings. When you travel with family, you always tend to carry extra luggage and a lot of nitty-gritties which found their way into the all the cubby holes and storage areas that are present in the cabin of the Amaze. Now we all know that Honda follows the Man Maximum Machine Minimum philosophy for all their cars and the Amaze is no different. Honda’s engineers have extracted the maximum amount of space from the cabin and thus travelling with 3 more adults and a kid became very easy for Neha. Her family members especially liked the ease of ingress-egress that the sedan offered.
Now while we have the diesel-MT trim with us, Honda also offers a CVT with the diesel engine. As far as we know, none of the other sedans in this segment come with a diesel-CVT combo. The CVT is actually a good option for buyers who mostly drive in city traffic because traffic keeps getting worse everyday and the kind of convenience an automatic offers is unmatched.
The Amaze has been keeping us happy and we’ll be driving it even more in the coming few months to get to know it even better. The Amaze has found more than 3.90 lakh homes in India. Honda owners also swear by the cars’ reliability and ease of maintenance.
