Hyundai Creta Turbo

Ready to take back their mid-size crown is Hyundai with the all-new Creta. Is the party over for the Seltos and Hector?

- L Sirish Chandran

NOBODY SAW THE opportunity of a car-like, midsize SUV before Hyundai came along with the Creta five years ago. No, I haven’t forgotten the Duster, also a game-changer, but that was more SUV than car. The Creta, it took everything that was good and great with the i20 and lifted it off the ground by a couple of inches. The ride height, the seating position, the whole shebang got jacked up, fresh new styling was slapped on, more features than you could wave a stick at were thrown in and — in the proverbial blink — Hyundai went from a maker of small cars with a `10 lakh price ceiling to a mass premium manufacturer that could easily command at least 50 per cent more. Just that one car achieved an image transformation for Hyundai, something that Maruti Suzuki required a whole new Nexa line of dealerships to match. It was an instant best-seller. In a year, in my very immediate family, there were over a dozen Cretas. Over the five years, 4.67 lakh units were sold in India and 1.93 lakh were exported. It won every single group test, every single award, and funnelled profits into Hyundai’s coffers like nothing else. You wouldn’t be wrong to surmise that the Creta’s success gave the Hyundai Motor Group the cash and confidence to launch the Kia brand in India — and of course the unprecedented response to the Seltos proved they were right on the ball. In fact, it was only the arrival of the Seltos that knocked the Creta off the top ten charts; robbed it of the 10,000 plus volumes it clocked month after month.