The 2024 Creta Is the Best Petrol Car

I did an extended test drive of the 2024 Creta SX(O) Turbo DCT Petrol for 75 km, both in the city and the highway, and evaluated it against my requirements. I earlier drove the 2022 Creta for a fortnight. Based on this, my conclusion is that if I had already decided to buy a petrol car rather than an EV, the Creta is the best car to buy.

Let’s discuss various aspects of the Creta, where a + means good and - means bad:

Comfort

The Creta is super comfortable:

+ My stomach doesn’t get pressed, thanks to the high seating position.

+ There’s enough legroom for me to sit comfortably. I can enter and exit the car without the steering wheel coming in the way of my knees. The wheel tilts and telescopes.

+ There’s lots of headroom.

+ The seat is 8-way electrically adjustable — front / back, up / down, thigh angle and back angle. This works much better than the manual adjustment in my Ritz, which is hard to adjust precisely: when I try to recline a bit, it reclines far more than I want. Worse, the seat belt comes in the way. So, manually adjusting a seat when driving is dangerous. On the other hand, electrical adjustment is precise and safe.

+ The suspension is smooth. You don’t feel bumps, imperfections and undulations in the road. In fact, when I was in the passenger seat, I turned to look at an inferior car to my side, and it was moving up and down, while the Creta was floating over the road.

+ You don’t feel many vibrations, and the engine sound is pleasant, unlike some other engines, which sound grating. As a result of the low NVH, 80 kph in the Creta feels like 60 in the Ritz.

+ The Creta has rain-sensing wipers.

+ You can leave the key in your pocket and press the button on the driver’s door handle (or the boot) to open it, enter the vehicle, drive, park, press the button on the door to lock again, and leave, without ever taking the key out of your pocket. This prevents you forgetting the key in the car and locking yourself out¹.

+ Wing mirrors automatically fold when you lock the car.

+ The door has a downward-facing lamp, called a puddle lamp, so you can see where you’re stepping in darkness and avoid stepping in a puddle.

+ You have the typical rear parking sensor with beeps that get louder when you approach the wall. You also have a visual reference with three lines indicating how far you are. When you approach the first line, slow to a crawl. When you approach the last line, stop, and you’ll have a few inches of space left. I can park the car more precisely in reverse than in forward in my Ritz! You also have a front parking sensor with beeps. If you hear a high beep, it means you’re close to the wall, so stop.

+ The rear seats are split, and have two recline positions.

+ The car has auto hold. If you turn it on, once you come to a complete stop, you can take your foot off the accelerator. You don’t have to brake or put the car in park. The car will brake for you till you press the accelerator.

+ The boot is much bigger than that of the Ritz, which gets filled up on occasion.

+ The Creta is spacious and comfortable for four people to travel in.

Driving

+ The steering wheel is light and effortless. One way to explain it is that the power steering in the Ritz supplies 90% of the power needed to turn, while in the Creta, it supplies 99%.

+ 0-100 feels effortless in the Creta. And the car can easily reach 160 kph, which the Ritz struggles to reach. The Creta is more stable at 170 than the Ritz at 160, which feels like it’s bouncing on the road and might topple.

+ I was driving next to a Dzire taxi, and I wanted to get away. I pressed the accelerator significantly, and after waiting a second for the turbocharger, the car accelerated quickly. When I looked in the inner rear view mirror after a couple of seconds, the taxi was at a distance. The Creta is raring to go — tapping the accelerator a bit is all it takes. It weighs 1.5 tons, but it feels lighter than my Ritz, which weighs 1 ton. The Creta feels like it weighs 0.5 tons. Newton said that the default state of any object is to be at rest, and you have to make an effort to get it moving. The Creta’s default state is to be moving! It feels less effort to drive. This is a marvel of engineering, to create an illusion so complete that it feels like reality. It’s not just a marvel of automotive engineering but of engineering.

+ I was able to drive for one and a half hours in rush hour Bangalore traffic and reach my destination fresh and happy, rather than tired and stressed.

+ The 7-gear DCT is marvellous, with a burst of acceleration whenever you need it.

+ The current gear is shown on the instrument panel. This is good for geeks who are curious about how the machine works.

Digital features

+ The car supports wired CarPlay. This is more reliable than wireless, and charges your phone, too.

- CarPlay works only via the A port.

+ There’s also a C port for charging.

+ Sometimes there are two routes to a destination, and Google picks the wrong route, taking me on tiny roads which, if unfamiliar, are stressful. Or the roads may be in a bad state of disrepair. So, when navigating, I want to pull over, pinch to zoom out to see which route I’m taking, and Re-center. Unfortunately, this is not possible since the car’s screen isn’t multitouch. You can’t even use your phone screen — in CarPlay mode, it shows a list of directions and not the map. You can’t get it to show the map. So I end up unplugging, checking my route, plugging it back in and restarting navigation, which is a roundabout way of doing it.

- CarPlay also has a problem of the car’s OS and iOS trying to live on one screen. In the car’s OS, there’s a CarPlay button you tap to enter CarPlay, at which point the car’s screen starts showing what’s on the iPhone. This shows an iOS-like UI with apps and an app switcher showing various apps like Google Maps, Phone, WhatsApp, Audible, and so on. One of these apps is Hyundai which, if tapped, puts you back in the car’s UI. It’s jarring, with a completely different and uglier UI theme.

- On the topic of WhatsApp, I often send voice messages, but I could not do so in CarPlay. It insisted on transcribing and sending it as a text message. I don’t like this because speech-to-text is inaccurate. It would have been easier to just send the audio, but CarPlay doesn’t offer that.

- The car seems to have its own GPS receiver for location, which is passed on to Google Maps running on the phone, resulting in location that’s always accurate even when surrounded by buildings.

+ The car has an amazing Bose premium 8-speaker sound system. My favorite music was emotional. In fact, it was an emotional moment, floating on one of the flyovers at the edge of Bangalore at 100 kph, listening to Blackmore’s Night.

- The car has some second-tier apps built-in — Here Maps and JioSaavn — so you have to use better alternatives like Google Maps and Apple Maps or Spotify on your phone via CarPlay.

Big vs 4m car

I’m used to the Ritz, which is a 4m car. The Creta is bigger, at 4.3m.

This is the first time I drove such a big car. I was told that big cars are not suitable for the city, and that they’re slower and more stressful to drive. Neither were true. It’s as good as a small car even in rush hour Bangalore traffic: I didn’t take any longer to reach my office driving all the way across the city from C.V.Raman Nagar to Jayanagar. It was less stressful than the Ritz. I could navigate tiny roads as well as the Ritz.

Only when parking it is there a difference: when parking in my apartment, I have to slow to a crawl to avoid hitting the pillars, and be vigilant. Even then, the gap between the car and the pillar is tiny. When parking on the road, I sometimes have to rock the car back and forth to fit into a tiny parking area. When I open the door, it opens into the traffic, adding risk, unlike the Ritz, where I’m off the side of the road when I exit the road. But parking is a small part of driving.

So if you want to buy a big car, don’t hesitate that it will somehow not be suitable for city driving, that you’ll be slower to reach your destination or that the drive will be more stressful.

Given the lower fuel economy of this car vs the Ritz, I do have to spend more at the fuel station, like ₹5K instead of the typical ₹3K I spend.

Cooling

+ Climate control, so you can set the temperature to (say) 21C, unlike my Ritz, where I have to keep constantly adjusting it, and it often ends up too cold, too warm or too stuffy.

+ Dual-zone AC.

+ When the car is parked in the hot sun for hours and I then get into it, it cools down quicker than my Ritz, because of the panoramic sunroof. Hot air naturally rises up and leaves the car quickly. By contrast, in the Ritz, I’ve sometimes been hit by a mini heat stroke, because the car is too hot too long.

+ The car has two thermometers, on on the instrument cluster and one on the infotainment screen. I think the former shows temperature using the car’s thermometer (the car has one), and the latter from the Internet, similar to a weather app on your phone.

+ The car has ventilated seats for both the driver and the front passenger. If you’re not familiar with them, they evaporate sweat from your back. They’re subtle, so you may not notice it, but after a while, you’ll feel cool and comfortable².

+ The car has rear window sunshades, which you can close to keep the car cool when parked in the sun:

If only the front seats are occupied regularly, you can leave the rear sunshades on 24/7. They don’t reduce your visibility because they’re not on the front windows, windscreen or rear windscreen.

+ The car has a cooled glovebox to keep water cool in summer.

Safety

The Creta is equipped with:

+ A seat-belt pretensioner with a force limiter.

- Airbags, including side and curtain, but not for your waist or hip (which I’ve marked with an X):

+ Electronic stability control

+ Electronic brake force distribution

- The Creta doesn’t have active rollover protection or multi-collision brake, with only Volkswagen offers.

+ The car has daytime running lights. And auto headlights, which turn on in a second when you enter a basement.

+ Blind spot monitoring: when you indicate, it shows a blind spot video feed on the instrument cluster. If there’s a vehicle in the next lane, it beeps and shows a flashing red triangle.

+ Lane departure warning: if you change lanes without indicating, it will beep.

+ Lane keeping assist: if you change lanes without indicating, it will rotate the steering wheel back to keep you in your present lane³.

The above features are proven to reduce deaths or permanent disabilities, according to ChatGPT.

+ The Creta has a rear wiper with a water spray, and a rear defogger. These solve the problem I occasionally have in my Ritz, which is that the rear windshield is either fogged up or has too much water on it, and I have to drive blind, which feels dangerous.

+ Blind spot monitoring when exiting vehicle⁴.

+ High-beam assist

+ Adaptive cruise control

+ Impact-sensing door unlock

+ Front collision warning: cars, pedestrians, cycles, and intersections

+ Rear collision warning and automatic braking. It prevented at least one potential collision for me.

+ Quad beam LED headlamps

+ Turn indicators appear on the wing mirrors, which are visible from behind.

+ Rear disc brakes.

Which Creta to buy

+ The Creta comes in a choice of CVT⁵ and DCT. I’d buy the DCT:

1. The CVT has a continuous annoying whine, even when you’re not accelerating. By contrast, the DCT is not audible even at 100 kph when you’re not accelerating.

2. With the CVT, sports mode runs the engine at a high RPM of 3-4000 even when there isn’t a lot of load on the engine, which exacerbates the whine.

3. The DCT is more suited for spirited driving. I wouldn’t have been able to leave the Dzire taxi behind so quickly with the CVT. A CVT would get damaged if you regularly floor it to accelerate quickly or maintain the maximum speed.

4. The Creta’s DCT is class-leading, while the CVT is worse than that of the Kiger, which costs 11 lakh less! So the choice is not just DCT vs CVT, but a class-leading DCT vs a second-rate CVT.

5. The DCT comes only in the flagship SX(O) variant, which I’d want anyway for the 8-way electrically adjustable seats.

- The N-line is a variant that’s tweaked to be more sporty. Don’t buy it:

1. It’s supposed to have a slightly firmer suspension, though I couldn’t tell the difference.

2. It has bigger wheels (18 vs 17 inches) which is supposed to result in a less comfortable ride, though I couldn’t tell the difference.

3. It has a visible exhaust, while the regular Creta has an exhaust hidden underneath, which is sleeker.

4. It has a bigger spoiler, while the smaller one on the regular Creta is sleeker.

5. It has a round steering wheel, while the regular Creta has a D-shaped one, which is less likely to hit your knee when you turn it.

6. On the plus side, the N line has cherry red accent color, which looks more lively than the regular one.

+ Buy white:

1. It looks good. It’s not the lifeless white you see on taxis.

2. The other colors are dark, and get hot in the summer.

3. Dark colors show dirt. To remove this dirt, you need to regularly wipe and shampoo it, but that causes scratches. On the other hand, white doesn’t show dirt, and so requires wiping less often, which causes fewer scratches. Besides, scratches that do exist are less visible on white.

4. White is more visible at night, and so safer.

5. Skip dual-tone.

1. Or have the car remain unlocked, in which case anyone can get in and drive away.

2. Ventilated means only that a fan is blowing, not cold air from the AC. The latter are called cooled seats, and the Creta doesn’t have them.

I’ve test-driven a Mahindra with perforated seats, which don’t have a fan, but small holes for sweat to evaporate (according to the salesman), but it doesn’t.

3. But you can apply more force to override it.

4. The car calls this “Exit safety”.

5. Which Hyundai calls IVT.