A few years ago, on one of my visits to Toyota, Japan, I made a good friend. Amongst other things, I asked him the obvious question: ‘What do you drive?’ I was expecting him to say the C-word – Corolla, Camry, Crown and so forth – but the answer was a wave of the hand and ‘I drive a big car’. Come on, any big car needs to have a name, right? He realised that I was the persistent type and pulled out a post-card sized photo from his diary. It was a picture of a family standing next to a...er...bus. Sato-san (let us call him that) actually drove a bus and he loved it as much as his family. Mind you, not a motorhome, but a proper, second-hand bus. Later he would explain to me how much he liked touring in the bus and, more than anything else, like every Tokyo-ite who stayed in a small apartment, he appreciated the additional space that came with it. Then, as if to prove a point, he drove the bus, with his three children as passengers, to see me off at the airport. Needless to say, I was impressed.
Well, last week I impressed myself a great deal thanks to the ‘big car’ I chose to commute in. When the petrol version of the Innova joined our road test fleet, we had a thousand story ideas in mind – well, three at any rate:
1. To compare it against a proper car that cost the same money, like the Corolla.
2. To drive it to an exotic location, with the entire team in tow, and have a blast
3. To commute in it as if it was just another car.
We couldn’t organise a Corolla test car and the team had to stay put and work on this issue, so we had to settle for the third option. And not a bad option too, since the Innova petrol is not going to be bought by tour operators in large numbers and the prospective buyer will end up, in all probability, driving it to work.
Monday
My car wash guy is not impressed. He has more metal and glass to clean than normal and this month he is certain to ask for Rs 50 more. Neighbours have a smile on their face too, and one of them gave me a look which said ‘Sucker, gets all sorts of nice cars including Mercs and now he is stuck with a van’. I feel better paying just Rs 20, the same as any other car, at the toll booth though. On the highway section of the commute, the Innova is as fast as any other car – it cruises at 80-120 kph without any effort. The last ten km to my office involves typical metro crawling and the Innova is an oversized piece of metal in the traffic puzzle. I look at Maruti 800s and two wheelers streaming by and think about parking it at a friend’s place and taking a taxi the rest of the way. At the office, the parking attendant hates me – I convince him that it takes only as much space as the Accord that I was driving the previous week. He is not convinced.
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