Festival Of Mud – Off-Road With 5 SUVs

MotorBeam Off-Road Day

We pitted India’s favourite off-road SUVs in a unique battle to find out the best off-roader money can buy

It is always fascinating to tread down the unexplored path with capable SUVs and drive them in challenging conditions. What makes the whole exercise even more interesting is when you have a fixed set of challenges and obstacles for every SUV to encounter. This allows you to learn about these mean machines more and come to terms with their positives and negatives. That’s what we did in the Festival of Mud where the MotorBeam Team took 5 different yet capable SUVs to an unforgiving location amidst heavy rains, slush, mud, rocks and what not!

Now before we start, I’ll quickly introduce to you all the SUVs that we used for celebrating the Festival of Mud. The first car is the Tata Harrier which is said to be born of pedigree. This SUV’s platform is based on the Land Rover Discovery Sport and while it doesn’t get a proper 4×4 system, it does come equipped with a lot of electronic features that help it perform in off-road scenarios. Giving company to the front-wheel-drive Harrier is a rear-wheel-drive Mahindra Scorpio. In stark contrast to the former, the Scorpio comes with no electronic gizmos and it is a pure mechanical SUV.

Then we have the Renault Duster AWD which is a monocoque SUV and yet very capable. The Duster is also the smallest SUV here along with being the least powerful. Now we have the Land Rover Discovery Sport HSE Diesel. The Discovery Sport is known for its off-roading prowess, it is very capable and comes with the super useful Terrain Response System. Finally, we have the mighty Ford Endeavour 3.2 4×4, an SUV which needs no introduction and an SUV which has a huge fanbase not only in India but throughout the globe.

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.

Sui Dhaga Challenge – The idea of this challenge is to test the comfort and ride quality of these SUVs. In this challenge, Faisal drove the SUVs one by one while Arushi sat in the rear seat and attempted putting a thin thread through a needle. It might sound easy but it wasn’t because the cars were being driven on rocky terrain and hence there was a lot of movement inside the cabin. To keep the challenge fair, all the SUVs were driven on the exact same route at an exact speed of 20 km/hr.

Despite heavy rains and being covered in mud, the participants didn’t give up and put their best foot forward

Arushi could thread the needle the maximum number of times in the Discovery Sport, followed by the Endeavour and the Duster. However, she just couldn’t do it in the Scorpio thanks to its bumpy ride which made the needle fall from her hand! Surprisingly, she could do it just once in the Harrier even though it boasts of very good ride quality.

Reversing Challenge – While off-roading, you do need to reverse a lot and that is why we included this challenge in the test. The main idea of this challenge is to test every SUV’s outward visibility, ORVMs, ease of reversing on paths, etc. The started off the challenge with the Endeavour which really impressed me with its light steering, huge mirrors and the crisp rear camera. Sure, the pillars are thick and limit the visibility to a slight extent but otherwise, the Endy is easy to reverse, despite being the biggest SUV here.

The Discovery Sport had a really dirty camera due to all the muck and it doesn’t get a camera washer, unlike its more expensive siblings. Nonetheless, the Discovery has good visibility but the steering is a tad heavy. In comparison, the Harrier offers slightly lesser visibility due to the D-pillars but it boasts of very large ORVMs. However, the quality of the Harrier’s reverse camera does feel below-par. Renault updated the Duster recently and now the AWD is offered on the RxS trim which means it misses out on a rear camera, rear wiper and front fog lamps! Due to this, reversing the Duster was tricky even though it is the smallest in size over here. The Scorpio has a high driving position and that coupled with the thin pillars means it offers excellent visibility but slotting into reverse itself is a bit difficult!

Tug Of War – We are all familiar with the tug of war so it needs no introduction. Out of the 5 SUVs, we used only the Endeavour, Discovery Sport and Scorpio in this challenge. We had ordered a high capacity towing rope with durable shackles and these shackles didn’t quite fit properly in the Duster’s rear towing hook which is why we had to omit it from this challenge. We also omitted the Harrier because we almost found it impossible to locate the rear towing hook!

First, we pitted the Discovery Sport against the Scorpio and since our Scorpio was a 2WD, it didn’t really stand a chance and lost. A 4WD Scorpio would’ve been quite something though! Anyways, it was easy for the Endeavour to pull the Discovery Sport but the latter did give it some tough competition. Both the 4WD SUVs battling it out was quite a scene. Finally, we pitted the Endeavour against the Scorpio and it was child’s play for the Ford to pull the Mahindra.

So that’s about it, for now. We’ll be back with the next edition of the Festival of Mud which will have different SUVs of course. In case you guys have any suggestions or feedback, do let us know by commenting below. If you want us to include any particular 4-wheeler or 2-wheeler, do tell us and we’ll try our best to include that vehicle.