Mahindra NuvoSport review, road test

Dramatic – that’s a good way to describe the NuvoSport’s face. Gone is the rather blunt-looking face of the old Quanto (and Xylo) and in its place is a rather interesting blend of angles and creases. The challenge was to give the car a new, more SUV-like look without drastic alterations to the Quanto’s ‘body in white’. So, while the position of the headlamps is more or less the same, the bonnet has been raised with the help of a big new bonnet intake (to feed air to the new top-mounted intercooler) and a pair of LED ‘eyebrow’ daytime-running lamps. Lower down, there’s a massive new grille and an equally vast lower air dam, flanked by round fog lamps.

From there rearward, the car is identical to the Quanto. The doors, windows and roof are as before, but Mahindra has draped the bottom half of the car in black cladding to good effect; it keeps it from looking too slab-sided. The 16-inch alloy wheels look good too. There’s a lot more black around the rear too, with more cladding on the tailgate, a blacked-out D-pillar and smoked tail-lamps. It’s not a lot, but it does make a slight difference.

The NuvoSport uses the Scorpio and TUV’s ‘Gen 3’ hydroformed ladder-frame chassis, onto which the old body has been mounted. That makes it more rigid than the Quanto, but surprisingly, at a portly 1,670kg, the car overall is actually 30kg heavier, not to mention several hundred kilos more than its monocoque rivals. It also gets the same suspension setup as the TUV300 and, likewise, it’s been tuned by US-based Cayman Engineering for a better ride and handling balance, says Mahindra. The layout is a fairly standard double-wishbone independent front suspension, with a multi-link, coil-spring setup at the rear, and the steering, as before, is hydraulically power assisted. So, under those Quanto-sourced body panels and that new face, the NuvoSport is identical to the TUV300 mechanically.