Mahindra Alturas G4

Interior

To begin with, you really have to lift your foot up high, and climb inside the cabin of the Alturas. We wholeheartedly recommend you invest in a pair of side steps, because it will be well worth it. Once in, you’re treated to a cabin that oozes quality, and packs in a serious amount of kit. The dual-tone upholstery with quilted tan Nappa leather is delightfully classy. Everything is laid out rather well, and every little control falls to hand very easily. Speaking of which, buttons and controls have a reassuring, positive click to them and seem built to last. It does make a solid first impression.

As far as room is concerned, you should have no issue in the front row. For the largest of people, there’s more than adequate room. The driver’s seat is electrically adjustable, and comes with three memory settings too, which helps you fine tune that driving position easily. An oversight here is that the passenger has to make do with manual adjust for their seat.

Hop into the second row, and there’s enough room for you to get comfortable. There’s enough kneeroom for a six-footer to sit behind their own driving position, and there should be complaints on the width front either. Headroom is just about adequate too, but the sunroof mechanism does eat into some room. This will pinch you only if you’re taller than 6.5ft. The backrest also reclines, but it does not slide back to help you carve out some extra room when the third row is not in use. They also sport a 60:40 split but the 60 per cent is on the left (passenger side) and not on the right as is the convention in right-hand drive countries. You can choose to tumble forward the whole row to access to the third row. But, it requires you to pull two levers and lift the seat forward, and that cannot be done with just one hand.

And that brings us to the third row. It’s practically bolted to the floor so the seat height is set too low for adults. We can't imagine full sized people being comfortable for even short journeys with their knees bent at a sharp angle and barely any wiggle room to get comfortable. The good news is that the seats fold down flat (and also get a 50:50 split) freeing up a fairly large boot for loading luggage.

Safety

The Alturas G4 comes with nine airbags as standard, ESP, ABS with EBD, high-strength steel ultra rigid quad frame, rear glass defogger and ISOFIX mounts for child seats.