Our off-road trail is a mix of rocky terrain, slushy areas, muddy paths and wet slopes. The team sat and designed some unique challenges that every car would have to go through. These challenges test different parameters like manoeuvrability, visibility, ground clearance, ride quality and pulling power! The challenges that we finalised are – Existential Crisis, Sui Dhaga Challenge, Reversing Challenge and the Tug of War.
Existential Crisis – In this challenge, we have put up 10 cones on a path and all the SUVs will have to clear the slalom course without hitting any cone and by trying to avoid any kind of scraping as much as possible. At the end of the path is a U-turn which every SUV will have to take and then cross the path again to end the challenge. Now, the path was quite narrow and we kept the cones not too far from each other which means that the turns were really tight. On top of that, the terrain had a slope and a lot of stones and mud which made it tricky for the SUVs to navigate.
While making tight turns in these SUVs was a tad tricky (while trying to avoid the cones), none of the cars faced any issues in clearing this challenge. The Endeavour with the highest ground clearance scraped its underbelly just once while the Harrier, Discovery Sport and Duster scrapped a couple of times. The Scorpio scraped its underbody just once. All these SUVs are very rugged and can withstand a lot of abuse.