Road trips have a useful way of exposing compromises. A car can feel perfectly adequate around town, but add two people, luggage and a boot full of camera equipment, then point it towards a destination over 350km away, and you soon find out where the corners have been cut.
This was particularly interesting because we weren’t doing it in an ordinary petrol SUV. We were taking the Tata Nexon iCNG from Ahmedabad to Dholavira and back – more than 770km in total – with everything we needed for an overnight stay and a full shoot.
CNG cars traditionally come with a familiar list of compromises. Performance is one. Boot space is another. There is also the assumption that choosing CNG means giving up some of the equipment and driving appeal you would expect from a modern SUV.
The Nexon iCNG takes a different approach. Start with the engine. Its 1.2-litre turbocharged CNG powertrain makes it India’s only Turbo CNG offering, and the difference is noticeable on the open road. The point isn’t to turn a CNG car into a sports car; it is to make sure you don’t have to drive it differently simply because you’re running on CNG – and this makes all the difference when the brief is to drive across the magnificent state of Gujarat.
Once Ahmedabad disappeared behind us, the traffic thinned, the roads opened up, and the Nexon settled into an easy long-distance rhythm, with enough performance for overtaking and climbing gradients without the strained feeling you might associate with a CNG car.
Inside, there is little sense of compromise either. The Nexon iCNG retains the equipment expected of a modern SUV, including its large 10.25-inch touchscreen, digital instrumentation, ventilated seats, voice-assisted panoramic sunroof and 360-degree camera. The latter proved particularly useful when we inevitably found ourselves manoeuvring into tight spaces for photographs.
Then there is the boot. A conventional CNG cylinder can make luggage space something of an afterthought. The Nexon iCNG’s twin-cylinder layout puts the CNG tanks beneath the boot floor, leaving a proper luggage compartment and a spare wheel. For us, that meant camera bodies, lenses, tripods, overnight bags, and everything else could go in without sacrificing the rear seats.
The system also starts directly in CNG, making the transition almost irrelevant to the driver. And over the first few hundred kilometres, fuel was barely discussed. With CNG and petrol available, there was no need to plan the journey around the next filling station.
The road itself provided more to think about. As we moved towards Kutch, traffic became sparse, villages grew further apart, and the vast Kutch sky revealed itself. Eventually we reached the Road to Heaven. The name is rather grand, but the road itself doesn’t need much embellishment. It runs almost arrow-straight through the Rann, with the white landscape opening out on either side. There is no great corner to attack and no climb to conquer. You simply drive into an enormous amount of empty space. We stopped, naturally. The cameras came out, the light changed into evening, and before we knew it, darkness crept up on us and made us head to our overnight halt.
By nightfall, we had covered more than 350km. We had also spent much of the day not thinking about the fact that this was a CNG SUV. The next morning, we turned around. The return journey passed more quickly, as they tend to. By the time Ahmedabad reappeared, the trip meter showed more than 770km. Two people, luggage and a boot full of camera equipment had gone to Dholavira and back without a fuel stop.
That is perhaps the more interesting measure of what the Nexon iCNG achieved. Not that it can cover 770km, but that doing so doesn’t require the usual concessions we have come to associate with CNG: no cramped boot, no reluctant engine, no sense of a stripped-out cabin and, in our case, no need to organise the journey around fuel.
ventilated front seats are a godsend in hot and humid conditions (inset).
We set out to drive to the Road to Heaven and back. And the fact that we did it in a CNG-powered car without actually having to think about it only made the whole thing that much more special.