“THIS WILL DEFINITELY DRIVE LIKE A VOLKSWAGEN”

Says managing director of SAVW, Gurpratap Boparai, the man helming the technical, engineering and production teams that brought the mid-size SUV to production

- SIRISH CHANDRAN

MAJOR DIFFERENCE IS IN THE TRANSMISSION TUNNEL “The rear floor is different because we have flattened that out. Other than that there are parts that have had to be changed slightly to adapt to the local steel, the material flows differently for different physical properties [of steel] in terms of stiffness and tensile strength. They may be the same but a different chemistry of the steel makes it flow a little differently so you need to modify certain radii, etc so as to use local steel. Those are the major changes that we have but most of the parts are interchangeable with this platform.”

This is the longest wheelbase as of now

“Obviously you can stretch things but currently this is the longest wheelbase. There are a couple of products with the same wheelbase.”

We can do the top hat now

“We kicked off things at the beginning of 2018 but the real action basically started from May 2018. The platform was managed from Europe and the top hat was done here with of course final validation of that work at the headquarters.