Continuing our fuel economy runs that have garnered a lot of interest in the past few months, we decided to put the new Maruti S-Presso through our ‘light right foot’ test. During our media drive event in Rajasthan [Read], we managed to squeeze out just about enough time to carry out the entire exercise of extracting the best from the S-Presso’s 1.0-litre petrol motor. We had the AGS or the AMT model with us and this is what happened during the run.
As is the case with all our runs, we headed to a petrol pump to fill the little tank of the S-Presso to the brim. The process is slow but helps us eradicate any kind of error during the fill-up post the run. Once the car was filled to the brim, we re-set the trip meters and the fuel economy display and headed out towards the highway. The aim was to drive the car with a light right foot, maintaining about 70-75 km/h on the speedometer. The S-Presso does not come with a climate control system and hence I rotated the ‘temperature’ knob slightly, so as to reduce the pressure on the compressor.
The S-Presso is powered by the same engine that we also see in the Celerio, Alto K10 and the Wagon R. Power and torque figures remain unchanged but in this car, thanks to a peppier state of tune, ARAI rated economy stands at 21.7 kmpl. This is lower than that of its siblings. However, on the fuel economy run, I was pleasantly surprised to see the display registering 26+ within kilometres of the drive. And once the highway opened up, this figure only went up!
We were in the AGS or the automatic model but as this was a pure 5th gear run, the economy did not take a hit at all. Yes, I did slow down for toll booths and the occasional stray animal but a quick flick of the lever to the left, and I would upshift manually, ensuring as little wastage of fuel as possible. We had tanked up at Jodhpur, drove to Khimsar, took a u-turn and stopped at the same fuel pump after having covered 170.2 kilometers. The same slow process of the filling up the tank was followed and in the end, she took in 6.02 litres of fuel. Simple calculations revealed the Maruti S-Presso had delivered 28.2 kmpl on this run. The display in the meantime read 30.1 kmpl, which is about 5% more than what we actually achieved. Good enough?
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