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A friend in Boston once told me an interesting tidbit. While in college, his flatmates were students from the Afro-American community who were into cars. Naturally, discussions over beer revolved around anything on four wheels. Now they had their own set of wheels that were pimped out to the last drop of two-tone paint. But there was a slight problem. Because they spent so much money on tricking out their cars, they generally had nothing more than a few dollars to tank them up. So whenever they did, they would reach out for the A/C OFF button and prowl the streets.
Am not sure if that's something the owners of the erstwhile Prado in India did/do, but when you have a 4.0-litre V6 under the hood that delivers an efficiency that would cause even the Arabs to literally sell crude in the 'black' market, you know you are in for trouble. So once the new Prado was out and they spoke of a 3.0-litre diesel engine for India, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally, the Prado was to get an engine that it always deserved for the sake of the environment and everyone's wallets. But then, the collective sigh of relief soon turned to collective wrinkles of worry when they realised that the engine is pretty much the same as the one on the Fortuner SUV with small tweaks for a bit more horsepower and torque in a body shell that weighed nearly half a tonne over the smaller Toyota. Suddenly, shoulders drooped and faces turned pale, but not before Toyota threw yet another curve ball – a price tag that threatened to make the Mitsubishi Montero and Audi Q5 seem like discounted wine at a 7-Eleven store. At this point most would say that Toyota's new bottle-new wine strategy seems to be faltering. Or is it?
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