This is the story of a 1,50,000km-old Mahindra Scorpio Getaway that has lived the life it was designed for.

My name is Ouseph Chacko, and I am part-owner of this Getaway because it is my company car. As a partner of an off-road motorcycle school and adventure touring company, I can tell you that if we didn’t have the Getaway from when we started out, it would have taken us a lot longer to get here. We would have been a fair bit lighter of wallet too.

To tell this story properly, I need to rewind a bit – pickup trucks by their very nature are designed to be versatile, and that’s the story of this Getaway. Back in 2016, my business partner Rish was big into long-distance cycling, kayaking and camping tours and needed a vehicle that could accommodate his expensive cycles, carry a couple of kayaks and have the ability to lug around enough gear to make camping, glamping.

The Getaway offered power steering, power windows, power mirrors, air conditioning, front seat armrests and a rear defogger! It also had the electronic shift-on-the-fly four-wheel-drive system and was the most powerful pickup truck on offer.

First things first

While the Getaway looked as lifestyle as could be for pickup trucks back then, it still looked more BRO than Special Forces (no disrespect to the BRO but you get the picture), it needed upgrades.

To ensure Rish got stuck further down the trail, a Lamda cable-operated locking differential found its way into the rear axle, while the front axle got manual locking hubs (the factory-fitted auto-locking hubs were prone to breaking under heavy load). The engine was left untouched, but to allow adequate wheel arch clearance for the planned high-profile fat tyres, a two-inch body-lift kit was installed. When you lift it, you need to stance it, and so, the vanilla factory wheels made way for off-road -30 off-set steel wheels and faux wheel arch extensions that muscled up the looks but also let us squeeze in fatter tyres without alerting the RTO.

A canopy was added to cover the pickup bed, custom bicycle mounts were welded onto the floor of the bed, a roof-mounted tent, a side awning, solar panels on the roof, an AC-to-DC converter to run devices off the solar panels, a roof carrier, a snorkel, the legendary Warn M8000 winch, metal off-road bumpers, nine auxiliary lamps. Kitchen sink? Pah! There was no space left!

Life has other plans

For reasons beyond the scope of this story, the Getaway spent most of its first two years parked up with no place to go. It preened, posed, went for the occasional camping trip and lent itself to all the mall crawler memes you can think of.

Then came August 2018. The skies over Kerala opened up. Rivers breached banks, houses were flooded up to the first floor in some places, and parts of middle Kerala were unreachable unless you had a boat or a vehicle with a snorkel. The official rescue teams quickly found themselves overwhelmed, so the Getaway, along with all of Kerala’s 4×4 community, stepped in to assist. The need of the hour was clean bedsheets, towels, underwear, drinking water, easy-to-reheat food and a way to get these supplies to people stranded in homes surrounded by flood waters or cut off by landslides. We loaded the Getaway’s pickup bed to the sky and drove through bonnet-deep water for about three days, handing out generously donated essentials. We stopped only when the rains subsided and when one of the people we thought needed help asked if we were carrying blue underwear. His favourite colour apparently!

Soon after the rains subsided, the Motor Vehicles Department in Kerala started a serious clampdown run on modified vehicles, and we figured it was time to strip the Getaway of everything but the essentials. The School Of Dirt  – our off-road motorcycling school – was in full swing by then, and the Getaway was the backup car because it could carry a mechanic, medic and two broken motorcycles at a go. We kept the winch, the snorkel and the mud-terrain tyres. We added new features like the comprehensive tool kit for off-road trail fixes and an exhaustive medical kit for when things go wrong far from a hospital. This thing can carry a lot!

The next eight years were when the Getaway really pulled its own weight in gold. Most notably, the two 8,000km Kottayam-to-Kohima round trips, mostly with a 250kg Tiger 1200 strapped to its back, and about 1,10,000km criss-crossing South India with us and paraphernalia in it. It has been our hotel room and our home away from home when the adventure motorcycle thrill started booming. More than anything, it has been as reliable as a hammer and didn’t need much more than a full tank of diesel and some duct tape to get to the next destination.

We figured a long time ago that using its ‘certified’ 600kg payload capacity to carry a motorcycle is a huge cost saving for a startup business. Ever since all nice and fast things became sin goods in the eyes of the government, carrying the bike to the start of the trip and using it only at the event became a much more economical proposition than riding it all the way. An example? A proper load- and speed-rated rear tyre on the Tiger 1200 costs Rs 25,000, and with the way I ride the bike, I obliterate that poor tyre in just 3,500km. That and the expensive mechanical wear and tear on these big bikes ultimately meant it was cheaper to load the bike on the back of the Getaway and transport it to the event.

Spare a thought

This being a Mahindra and based largely on the Scorpio, parts are available everywhere in India, and mechanics know their way around the Getaway’s Scorpio bloodline despite the pickup’s rarity. We run the car on a preventive maintenance schedule because we really work it hard, and no matter what, it gets fresh air, oil and diesel filters every 5,000km. The engine and transmission oil get changed at the same time, the leaf springs at the back are realigned and reshaped every 15,000km and the torsion bar front suspension gets re-adjusted every time we notice it starting to sag. We don’t have a bed liner for the pickup bed, so once a year, we check it in to a paint spa for a fresh coat to prevent rusting from all the scratches. That’s it.

The engine has never needed an overhaul, and it is helpful that the bomb-proof 2.6 CRDe engine will run on anything that resembles diesel. The weak link in the mechanical package is the clutch – if you’re not reasonably careful every time you start off on a slope, it’ll vaporise fast. Still, the clutch pack along with the clutch release bearing works out to something like Rs 6,000, so apart from the inconvenience of being stranded, it really doesn’t hurt the wallet.

Also, because of our carelessness, we’ve chewed through three rear differentials in the course of the last decade (sometimes the cable-operated Lamda differential doesn’t fully disengage thanks to a corroded cable, and if you are not careful, you end up driving with a partially locked differential on the road). The rear differential turned out to be one of the most expensive spares on the Getaway, working out to around Rs 40,000 a pop, and even that is not too bad considering a broken tail-lamp on a Hilux will set you back Rs 30,000. We’ve since discarded the locking differential and keep fingers crossed that the winch will yank us out when the time comes. Also, don’t break the rear windshield – it is harder to source than a Ferrari 250 GTO!

With a full load, the Getaway still runs around 10 kilometres for every litre of diesel consumed, and that, along with its 60-litre fuel tank, gives it a useful range of 600km.

The Getaway doesn’t seem to lose much on resale value either. Back in 2016, Rish bought it for Rs 11 lakh and some spare change (on road!). Because every other new lifestyle pickup truck in the market is considerably more expensive, I think people are coming around to the sweet spot of utility, value and comfort that the Getaway hits. It is a reasonably simple vehicle with zero electronics (no ABS even!) and so lends itself to hard work and easy fixes happily. Still, well-maintained Getaways are few and far between and their owners (like us) are loathe to let them go. The ones you find on used-car portals are bad. Trust me, I’ve looked.

What next?

No one is more excited about the launch of the Getaway’s replacement than I am. The new Lifestyler (weird name) looks very cool, and the more powerful engines will definitely make fully loaded cross-country trips effortless. The expected base price is positively tasty, and I hope it will come with maintenance costs to match.

It does seem a bit too fancy, though, and I worry about the interiors that are no longer the hose-down kind. I hope Mahindra will offer a more pared-down version that will allow people like me to use it with dirty boots and greasy gloves guilt-free. 
In the mountaineering world, when someone successfully summits a peak, you ask, “Who’s your sherpa” The Getaway has been The School Of Dirt’s unfailing sherpa. The Lifestyler has its work cut out.