Mahindra has added a six-speed auto to its funky Pik Up.  Sean Willmot takes a close look at Mahindra’s new offering.

The Pik Up has however, had one significant stumbling block, which has probably done quite a bit to hamper its success. That stumbling block is the lack of an automatic transmission until now.

Lack of a self-shifter is not a problem Mahindra has had in isolation – there have been other manufacturers in the past who have fallen into this pit, including Volkswagen’s gen 1 Amarok, a vehicle which arrived late and didn’t have an auto for almost two years, costing the German ute more sales than it anticipated.

Mahindra obviously felt the need for a self-shifter was a luxury its little truck-lette didn’t need, and perhaps in its native India this was true, but when you export to other markets – especially markets where a stick shift is something of a novelty – the automatic is pretty much a mandatory requirement.

In fact, Mahindra Australia has already acknowledged a lack of sales due to this weak spot in Mahindra’s value-for-money armour.

It’s something of a shame that it took the automatic transmissions two years to find the Mahindra Pik Ups at the end of the world, but now th ey’re here, in both Australia and our own slice of 4WD paradise paved with potholed highways.

The auto transmissions lead a wave of new Mahindra product set to land soon, including the extremely well appointed XUV700 and the more adventurously inclined Scorpio N, but we’ll look at these worthy vehicles in a later edition.

For now, the news is all about the Pik Up, a vehicle which fits right into the NZ4WD Magazine market in much the same way as does a Suzuki SJ jeep-lette, Daihatsu Rocky or Lada Niva – all vehicles which have proven their off-road mettle and indeed, likely started some of our readers on their 4WD adventures.

NZ4WD Magazine touched on the Pik Up back in 2019, shortly after the ute arrived in this country in its S10 guise (we covered it with the S6 in 2014 before that) where we took it through its paces in the Off Road 4WD park in Rotorua.

To say the Mahindra’s off-road abilities impressed everyone there is putting it mildly. The Mahindra may look a little weird, but man oh man, does it have the kit to get the job – of going where you want it to – done.

We put the S10 Pik Up to the test: up slippery grass slopes, through clay, puddles, dirt, gravel and sand; all terrains which any 4WD can tackle, but the Mahindra coped with it all with equal degrees of excellent performance, surprising and delighting drivers with its abilities.

What’s the secret to Mahindra’s success? A combination of quality components packaged together in an intelligent – if distinctive – package, which today is available as the S11 model.

The engine remains the 2.2-litre turbo diesel which is Mahindra-made. This is the mHawk – a variable turbine geometry turbocharged and intercooled four-cylinder, delivering 103 kW and 320 Nm of torque, which Mahindra has been producing since 2009.

The mHawk is found in a variety of Mahindra product and is held in high regard for its drivability, efficiency, smoothness, torque delivery from low in the rev range and its reliability.

We can’t speak to the last, but as to the rest, it’s all kosher. Despite the obvious off-road environment the Pik Up calls home, it can just as equally hoof it on the highway and will even let you do those little dashes of acceleration at highway speeds (you know what we mean, but we couldn’t possibly comment – our testing was done on closed roads).

To be blunt, we weren’t expecting this as our test vehicle was running Kumho Road Venture MT51 tyres and sat highly on those thanks to the long travel suspension.

Add to that the conning tower height of the cabin and high-speed highway running was not something we entered into lightly, but, just as it did on the Jimny-sized trails in the Roto-Vegas off road park, the Pik Up surprised us with its open-road plus prowess.

But it is in the mud and the sand where the Mahindra Pik Up likes to play.

The Eaton self-locking differential and 4WD system with its in-cabin dial up accessibility for the BorgWarner transfer case between 2H, 4H, and 4L answer the needs of the most enthusiastic 4W driver.

If you need to use 4L in a Mahindra, you should have gone into wherever you ended up with a tank or a tractor. 4H gets you through most anything including extreme sand hill-climbs, which would stop lighter 4WDs (as admitted by the drivers of those lighter 4WDs) in their tracks.

The last piece of the puzzle is the regular transmissions. The six manual shifter is a collaboration between BorgWarner and Mahindra.

For the automatic, Mahindra turned to specialist automatic transmission builder Aisin, which has partnered with the Indian automaker to develop the answer to the Pik Up’s Achilles Heel.

We have read overseas reports (mostly from South Africa, where the Pik Up is widely appreciated) which have been a little critical of the auto box, especially from cold start.

In our week with the Pik Up self-shifter, we found no issues with its smoothness, and it would seem Mahindra’s admirable rep for matching combustion units to cogs remains untarnished.

You do notice shifts from first through to third, but in an off-road situation, this is not a bad thing. From third to top, the shifts are smoother and slicker than some other utes with longer established credentials.

Speaking of credentials, now is probably a good time to start talking in numbers, specifically those pertaining to off roading ability.

Ground clearance is standard 4WD fare at 210mm and the Pik Up has a 34-degree approach, 15-degree departure and an 18-degree break over angle.

What we can’t give you in numbers is the amount of cross articulation the little Pik Up has at its disposal, but we will refer you back to our earlier comment regarding the surprise and delight seen at the Rotorua Off Road Park.

Hand in glove with excellent cross articulation comes wheel placement accuracy and this was something that surprised us in a positive way.

While the on-road handling is generally good, those Kumho tyres don’t lend themselves to Porsche-like handling on tarmac. off-road however, it’s a very different story.

Slow traveling delivers the best results, but it is easy to ‘feel’ where the wheels are going – something we found useful when negotiating rutted tracks or less defined trails.

And here is where some of the Mahindra’s quirky appearance comes to the fore. The Pik Up is tall and skinny (not like me) although it is surprisingly in proportion.

The width – at 1820mm – is somewhat more critical to the Pik Up’s driveability in all terrains/situations.

Comparable SUVs typically run between 1840 and 1860mm, while utes start at the 1860mm width. This means the Mahindra can go places these wider vehicles can’t.

It also means parking the Pik Up in a city’s concrete canyons with ever-decreasing parking space sizes is a breeze and it’s just as well, because the Pik Up is a 4x4 with the all the limitations on turning circles which this implies.

Speaking to the known issues of 4WD ownership, fuel consumption is likely to be high on the list. The mHawk diesel is an efficient little oil burner and – given the vertical slab design of the front of the Mahindra, working against it – returns a surprisingly comfortable posted fuel figure of 8.8 litres per 100km.

Considered driving can bring this down into the high sevens which is OK, but the Mahindra also has an 80 litre tank, which means in the final analysis, an approximate fuel range of around 1000kms between refuels.

Alright, so how does the in-cabin experience stack up? We’ll look at this in two bites, starting with the back. This is home to seating for three, though you won’t want any of them to be on the generous size for any great length of time.

We managed three husky blokes in the back, but there wasn’t much room to breathe due to the inner cabin width. Legroom was fine and headroom of course, is spectacular; in the immortal words of Joe Cocker, you can leave your hat on.

Up the front it’s a very different spatial setup. There’s room up here in all dimensions, so much so that the two front seats have fold down armrests.

Furthermore, the seats don’t seem to have much in the way of side bolster support and yet, if you are 5’11 and a tad on the excitingly chunky side when it comes to clothing, you’ll find you stay surprisingly in place, regardless of the terrain you happen to be traversing.

As to the rest, the cabin ergonomics are relatively unsophisticated inasmuch as things have ben positioned where they are accessible – another advantage of a narrow cabin – and practically if not artistically laid out.

The Pik Up does have some modern contrivances, including a seven-inch colour touchscreen accommodating navigation, reversing camera with guidelines, media interface including BlueTooth and phone connectivity. Directly under this is the AC and below that, hazard lights, hill descent control and ESP deactivation switch for off road use.  

Pik Ups now offer cruise control and steering wheel mounted phone controls along with rain and light sensing wipers, ABS brakes, dual front airbags and crumple zone crash protection. Cornering lights are another contemporary safety feature.

The Mahindra Pik Up’s towing capacity is 2500kg on a braked trailer which is a little light compared to some of the contemporary utes but is still quite respectable and to further endear the Pik Up to the hard core 4x4 user, the Mahindra sits on a ladder frame chassis with an independent, torsion bar type front and leaf spring rear suspension setup.

With the factory tub measuring 1489mm x 1520mm, the Pik Up’s payload is 995kg and as a cab chassis with an anticipated tray weight of 207kg, the payload reduces to 928kg.

Summarised, the Mahindra Pik Up is a solid, practical workhorse of a truck.

It has a very characteristic look to set it apart from its peers, thus it doesn’t need exotic colours to draw attention to itself – the colours then are a basic quartet of red, white, silver, and black.

However, there are accessories which can ‘bling up’ your Mahindra and, given the purchase price of the vehicle itself, a little bit of customisation won’t break the bank.

And this is pretty much all you need to know about the Mahindra Pik Up (now with automatic transmission), the 4WD market’s best kept secret, which comes with a three-year roadside assist, three-year limited (two year or 100,000km powertrain) warranty.