Contrary to general perception, the Tata Safari Storme is not a minor facelift or a “refresh”. The Storme is pretty much a new car, with a new platform, new power plant, fresh design philosophy and very different driving characteristics. This is almost nothing like the Tata Safari you have been used to seeing, and driving. In simple terms, the Safari has always been an unpretentious thoroughbred SUV. Just for the perspective of numbers, the Safari Storme is double the kerb weight of the Renault Duster, and has more ground clearance than the Mahindra Scorpio and the XUV 500. I had a chance to drive this proper, affordable SUV for a few days. Heres what I thought. Tech upgrades: Tata Motors seems to be understanding the need for geeky stuff! Its good to see Tata Motors working on bringing the Safari closer to its rivals in terms of the tech bits inside the car. For a while, the Safari did feel like the unloved beast, with a very basic feature set. It had essentially, a bunch of knobs that did the basic tasks, and that was that. However, things have changed now. There is a now a 2-din touchscreen unit, with a phone pairing feature via Bluetooth. When you pair a phone to it for the first time, the phonebook gets synced to the on-board memory. Happily enough, this contacts list can only be accessed if that particular phone is connected to the system - which is a good privacy and security aspect. We connected an HTC One to the system, and the hook-up was smooth. The first time it did that, there was a prompt on the phone to allow the system to access the phonebook. After giving it the permission, the system showed that the contacts were syncing. For around 700 contacts on the device, the process took just a bit more than a minute. There are two ways through which you can make a call - use the phone itself to make the call, or the number-pad on the touchscreen. This is also the case when receiving a call. However, we couldn’t find a way to see the contacts list on the system, like on Ford’s Sync (EcoSport) and Fiat’s Blue & Me (Punto and Linea). The addition of that feature would have definitely made this a more sophisticated setup to use. At the moment, what this just helps is in identifying the incoming call party, or if you want to see the last dialed numbers. Unlike Sync and Blue & Me, Tata’s system at the moment has no voice command control, but considering the accent and pronunciation issues most similar systems face, we aren’t really missing that. For music playback, we connected an iPod Touch, and again, the setup was quick and smooth. The playback - pause/ play, next/previous track and volume can be controlled via the touchscreen or the steering column’s right hand side lever, which also doubles up as the headlight control! The system offers good sound quality, but most purists would prefer an amplifier and sub-woofer after-market installation. All in all, while we appreciate that Tata Motors did understand the need to add some geeky stuff to their high-end vehicles, it is still very much the very first step in that refresh cycle. If at all the company is willing to go through with this, then something like the Ford Sync would be the ideal benchmark to try and achieve. The current 2-din system feels like an afterthought and an after- market addition, and the future implementations need to integrate the setup better into the dash.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:05:19 +0000
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