Road to Lavasa - Mahindra KUV 100

When it comes to a road trip, self-driving rental cars are turn out to be the best option available. You can take it wherever you want, you can listen to the music you want and you can save yourself from your cab driver's stories. So, to experience the road trip to Lavasa which is located around 60 kilometers away from Pune, I decided to rent a self-driving car from an application called Zoomcar.

Zoomcar is very famous and the only one I knew, which provides a self-driving car rental service. I was using it for the first time, so I downloaded the app and logged in. The first time, it was showing "no cars available in your area". I tried again and got my luck, it showed a Tata Tiago, Ford Ecosport and Mahindra KUV 100, I wanted to rent Ecosport but it was parked around 25 Kms away from the place where I was staying. So I decided to go for Mahindra KUV 100. The process of renting a car in Zoomcar was completely unprecedented for me.

First, you have to select the day and time for pick up and drop. Then the best part, you have to choose the car. It will show you the available cars and where it is parked. After selecting the car, you have to make a payment which also includes a refundable deposit. You will also have to upload your driving license, they will verify it and then only you'll be able to drive the car. Once your license is approved, you'll receive the exact location of your car. By following the GPS, I reached at car location, the car was parked in front of one shop and there was no one(from zoomcar)...! App told me to check the car for damages. Once I varified it from all sides, app told me to click on "Verified and Unlock" and the car automatically got unlocked from my phone...! The keys were inside the glove box. Now, I just had to turn the car on, check the kilometers on the odometer and that's it. I was ready to go.

So let's come to the car. The car I was driving, was Mahindra KUV 100 NXT K4+, which had 1.2 liter Diesel engine. That anyone can recognize by the sound it makes when you crank the engine up. It has a nice interior and three seats in the front row. But you can make an armrest from the middle seat in the front row. The gear stick is mounted on the dashboard to make a room for the third person in a first row. Gears were pretty smooth but it took me a while to get used to with the position of the gear lever. All the cars from zoomcar are having a speed restriction of 80 Kmph. I was a bit disappointed with this restriction, but eventually, I could not find any road to Lavasa, where I can take it to more than 80 Kmph. Roads were single lane and so curvy that one can barely take it to the speed of 60 to 70. But It was really fun to drive on roads like this. It has an electrical power steering system, which I would not appreciate for the drives on twists. Feedback from steering was not what I would expect and there was not much change in the feel at high or low speed. It was very hard at low speed and it remained the same at high speed as well.

But it really was fun to drive on the curves of Lavasa. The entire road from Pune to Lavasa is a single lane road. So, you'll have to use the torque and power of your vehicle to overtake the other vehicles. But it was getting too hard for me to get the juice out of this KUV. On the climbs, I had to keep changing the gears to keep the car pushing. I thought it was because of the speed restriction zoomcar had done to the car for the safety reason. But it was not the restriction from Zoomcar, it was the restriction from Mahindra. The car was running in the Eco mode. Eco mode reduces the horsepower and torque to decrease the fuel consumption. It was like there were no turbos in this diesel engine. Power and Eco button were located on the right side of the steering wheel. As I pressed this button, the turbos kicked in. There was a sudden surge of power, I really had to change the way I was pressing the accelerator paddle. Pressed the paddle few millimeters more and the car was behaving like a stone thrown from the slingshot. Power mode was a really fun part of this car.

The weather of Lavasa is so dramatic. You can get a chance to feel all the three seasons in a single day. The moment we started climbing it was sunny and on the upper level, it was raining. It took us around two hours to reach Lavasa from Pune. The fun part for me was to see amazing bikers on the way up to Lavasa. Finally, we reached the city. Lavasa is designed and planned based on an Italian town Portofino. It is a private town which is developed by a company called HCC (Hindustan Construction Company). But it seems like an incomplete city, still under construction due to some controversies with a government. You could see the houses and apartments for the sell but few parts of the town just felt like a ghost town, abandoned and bit scary. The town consists of all the basic facilities that you would expect from any other ordinary town. Back in 2010, Symbiosis Institute was planning to establish their university for liberal studies on this hill town.

A road train was there, which took us on a tour of this town. After this 20 minutes of ride, we went to the food streets of Lavasa, it was located on the riverside. The view was a complete replica of what I have seen in some europian movie scene. Cuisines from all around the world were there to beat your hunger. I tried some Lebanese falafel and it was mouthwatering. We spent 3-4 hours on the hills and started our journey back to Pune before it starts getting darker. As it was my first zoomcar journey, I was also bit worried about the procedure of returning the car.

As I reached Pune, I checked the app for the car returning procedure. It was showing the same location from where I picked up the car in the morning. I was expecting some zoomcar guy at the location to inspect the car, but surprisingly no one was there. I just had to find a place to park the car and inspect it again. So, I did the same, put key again back in the glove box and car got locked by itself with help of my mobile application. The app sent me a message saying that deposit will be refunded within 2-3 working days. And it was transferred to my account just next day. The whole journey of 150 km cost me less than Rs. 2000/-, which is including the fuel. It really was a phenomenal experience.

(I highly recommend you guys to try the Zoomcar app, its a new convenient, comfortable and hassle-free way of traveling, You can use the code devasyqs05m to make your first booking of Zoomcar and get 15% discount. Click here to download - http:// onelink.to/tg44qu )