Dressed to Impress

The segment leader strikes back with improved styling, better features, and a cleaner and more powerful engine. Is it enough to continue the legacy?

- Sarmad Kadiri

Since its launch in 2016 the Vitara Brezza has Been one of my favourite compact SUVs in India. and i am not alone. in less than four years, there have been five lakh of them on the road, making it the segment leader. There were quite a few reasons for its popularity. To begin with, a torquey diesel engine, smart styling, and aggressive pricing. Now the company has given the car a makeover and, interestingly, some of these virtues were not incorporated into the 2020 model.

With stricter BS-VI norms kicking in this year, the company has shelved the very popular Fiat-sourced 1.3-litre DDiS diesel engine for a cleaner 1.5-litre K-series petrol unit. Maruti are only looking at petrol engines for their compact car range and, in doing so, miss out on the Excise benefit offered by the government to sub-four-meter cars with petrol engines up to 1.2 litres only. The base variant of the Brezza is about Rs 45,000 to Rs 70,000 more expensive than its competitors like the Tata Nexon and Hyundai Venue respectively.

Intrigued by these developments we undertook an overnight trip to Goa and drove both the manual and automatic versions of the car to see if the new Brezza still manages to impress. The design, for instance, has been given some tweaks to make it appear more SUV-like. There’s a new chrome grille with a larger Suzuki badge upfront, along with a restyled bumper which is of a higher grade and gets a nice silver-finished faux skidplates. our zXi+ test car came with new leD projector headlamps, where the integrated DRLs act like indicators. The fog-lamp housing has also grown in size and holds bright LED fog-lamps. The entry-level LXi gets simpler projector headlamps and separate indicator units which make that variant look a lot like the older Brezza.