For a country like India, where fuel prices don’t stop fleeing northwards and traffic snarls getting longer than before, ‘diesel automatics’ are boon to the audience who resides in metro cities. And with the every passing day scenarios are getting better for the said repertoire. Earlier, there used to be only Scorpio and Verna in diesel automatics, but now Germans too taken this segment seriously and rolled out their Vento and Rapid in the same rogue. To an extent, there is also Tata which zest-ed this class with its all new offering called Zest. Though, eluding India carmakers from the list now, we undertook international players for this comparison. Read on to find more how those diesel monsters fare on our Indian roads with regards to on paper specifications.
- Engine
On the powering front, Volkswagen is the parent company of Skoda, so both the cars – Vento and Rapid – are belted by the same engine of 1.5L powering out 103bhp and 250Nm of torque mated to a seven-speed DSG. The Hyundai Verna on the other side is fixed with 1.6L CRDi engine getting out the max power of 126bhp and 260NM of torque, mated to a 4-speed automatic.
Hence, amongst the lot, Hyundai fares best with the most powerful engine.
- Fuel-Efficiency
When talked about diesel automatics, fuel-economy matters, because it’s what compelled the buyers to have their purchase towards this fuel-option. On this note, DSG gearboxes are touted of delivering more economy than manual transmission – because of two additional cogs placed. The case here with Rapid and Vento are not an exception, former delivers 21.66kmpl whereas latter is not far away from the catch as returning 21.21kmpl. The least in this scenario is Hyundai Verna that is bound to fetch a not so impressive 17.61kmpl.
- Dimension
Dimensionally, Rapid and Vento are similar on the height and width except the length where Rapid is longer by a mere 2mm and 3mm higher than its German sibling. On the flipside, Korean’s offering is quite shrugged than the rest two, which is only 1mm broader than the rest. In fact, Verna’s wheelbase is the longest, but the ground clearance is lowest than all.
The wheels/alloys used on all the Rapid measures 15-inch as well as on all the Vento, except for a base VW trim which drives 14-inch wheels. All of them are shod by disc brakes on front and drum on rear. The story with Verna is quite different than both of them. Hyundai seems to believe in quantity and hence the wheel-size of its entry-level sedan in India is 16-inch, which gets the halting from discs on all four sides.
- Overview
As on paper, there aren’t many differences between the Vento and Rapid, but Verna decided to stand a leap apart. Hence, from the said suggestion it can be taken note VW and Skoda stand hand-in-hand to beat down Hyundai, but in reality all three are largely different from each other.
