India, Dec. 22 -- I spent a few hours driving the new petrol version of the Tata safari to answer a simple question a lot of prospective buyers have been asking: what kind of real-world mileage does this big petrol SUV actually deliver?

This was not a lab test or a claimed figure run. I took the car out on public roads, drove it the way I normally would, and measured fuel consumption using a proper tank-to-tank method.

We started the drive at around 7:45 am with a full tank. The plan was simple: drive for a few hours, cover a mix of city and highway conditions, then refill the tank and calculate consumption. I could not reset the trip meter because of a low battery alert on the instrument cluster, so I noted the odometer reading instead...