CarWale Buying Guide: New Maruti Celerio

Introduction

The Celerio is Maruti Suzuki’s latest small car entrant into the A+ segment. It is pretty much their weapon of choice to debut their new technologies like the automated manual transmission and the two-pot diesel engine which they have developed in-house and is their first ever oil burner. Oh, you can also have this car with CNG power but minus the AMT.

Why I’d buy it?

To answer this question in a normal sense, I would simply say this is a small Maruti Suzuki car. Those three words together conjure up feelings of comfort and reliability much like a hot meal of fried potato, lentils and rice. But this buying guide is meant to go beyond the obvious and so I would weigh in by saying that I would buy this car for the AMT that is offered with the 1.0-litre petrol engine and ARAI specified fuel efficiency of 27.62kmpl from the 800cc two-cylinder diesel mill. The former reduces the burden on your left leg while the latter is more in tune with the purpose of keeping your wallet as heavy as possible.

As I had said in my first drive review of the Celerio, it’s a very good looking car and so that should be a good selling point for the car in this selfie-heavy smartphone generation (cue sunglasses, scenic location, car and questionable captions like ‘chilling with my new car’ or ‘taking bae out on first long drive’).

Why I’d avoid it?

The car has been built to a cost and one of the places where this is very obvious is the cabin. It appears that in the process to choose the plastics of the cabin, long life has been given a priority over appearance. This basically means that while you age, the cabin of your car will look pretty much the same for the rest of its existence which is not such a bad thing if you can look beyond the issue.

My favourite version(s)

In terms of the petrol range, I would pick the top-spec ZXI AT as it has most of the bells and whistles found in this part of the market and is the only variant offering an airbag. The AMT is actually pretty decent and with congestion on our roads growing by the day, taking some burden out of the driving experience may not be such a bad thing after all. Among the diesel range, I would choose the ZDi optional variant as it gets the whole feature list offered with this car as well as two airbags for the front row.

Quick facts

Price
Petrol range: Rs 3.97 lakh to Rs 5.06 lakh
Diesel range: Rs 4.57 lakh to Rs 5.78 lakh
Engine
Petrol is peppy; diesel is very efficient but not much else
Gearbox
Five-speed manual or the ‘Look ma no hands’ five-speed AMT for the petrol variants
Fuel Efficiency
Quite high
0-100kmph
Will take you a while to get there but you can stay on for as long as you like.