From the Apex · Axle to Grind · 2026-06-04

Every car in India should have these. Most still don't.

Sunroofs sell cars. They don't make them good ones.

• Six airbags are the floor, not a feature. Nine in ten variants have them, ESC is on 96%, ISOFIX on 93%.
• The kit that actually avoids a crash is rare. Automatic emergency braking is on just over a quarter of cars.
• Panoramic sunroofs are on four in ten cars. They heat the cabin, add weight high up, and leak as they age.
• The features worth paying for don't photograph well, which is why the brochure skips them.

The features that win the showroom are rarely the ones you'd miss after a year.

Walk into any showroom in 2026 and the pitch is a list. Bigger touchscreen than the rival. Panoramic sunroof. Ambient lighting in 64 colours. A "first-in-segment" something. Every new launch is a spec-sheet shouting match, and the brochure is built to win it on the day you visit, not on the thousandth day you own the thing.

The trouble is that the spec sheet measures the wrong things. There are two kinds of feature marketing in India, and both are sleight of hand. One sells you kit that's already standard as if it were premium. The other sells you theatre as if it were substance. Learn to spot both, and most of the sales pitch stops working on you.

The safety number that stopped being enough

For three years the rallying cry of Indian car safety was "six airbags". It was a genuinely good fight to win, and the industry has now won it. On the cars on sale today, six or more airbags isn't a premium feature, it's the floor: nine in ten variants we score already have them. Electronic stability control, one of the most effective safety systems ever fitted to a car, is on 96% of them. ISOFIX child-seat anchors, 93%. The safety features the ads still brag about, as proof a car is "safe", are now on practically every car anyway.

Yet the marketing still points at the airbag count, because a number is easy to advertise. The things that actually separate a safe car from an unsafe one are harder to photograph and far rarer. A genuine 5-star crash rating covers only about three in five cars on sale, and a fifth haven't been tested at all. Autonomous emergency braking, the system that actually brakes when you don't, is real crash-avoidance and sits on just over a quarter of cars; blind-spot monitoring, on about the same. Adaptive cruise, the backbone of the Level-2 suites every brand now advertises as safety, is really a convenience, and it reaches only a fifth. When a brochure shouts "6 airbags", it's bragging about the floor: 2 front airbags became the legal minimum by 2022, and the leap to 6 was proposed, delayed, and then left to Bharat NCAP, buyer pressure and competitive fear. The market did what the rulebook didn't. The questions that actually sort a safe car, the strength of the structure and whether anything stops you hitting the car ahead, are the ones the brochure never asks.

The sunroof, and other theatre

The other con is gentler, because nobody's hiding anything, and in fairness these features aren't useless. A sunroof is lovely on a cool hill drive; a powered tailgate comes into its own when your hands are full. The trouble is the brochure sells an occasional treat as an everyday essential, and the features that win a test drive are rarely the ones you would miss a year later.

Exhibit A is the panoramic sunroof, now on four in ten cars on sale and still climbing. It is magnificent for the ten minutes you spend parked in the showroom and a liability for most of the Indian year. It bakes the cabin, loads the air-conditioning, adds weight up high and eats a little headroom, and unless it comes with a proper solid cover you end up paying again for an aftermarket heat film just to make it bearable. It also gives the car one more thing to go wrong: the beading that seals it perishes in our sun, and a leaky sunroof is a miserable thing to chase. There is a safety cost nobody prints, too. The open glass invites children to stand up through it, and enough adults do the same that you can't pretend it's only the kids. The less said about the kind of trouble that invites, the better. For a lot of Indian owners, the sunroof's most-used feature after April is the shade. It is the purest example of a feature that wins the sale and then quietly stops earning its keep.

Then there's the screen, and the war on the humble button. The race to the biggest possible touchscreen has buried the controls you adjust without looking: the volume reduced to a touch-sensitive strip, the climate two menus deep, and, the newest sin, the gear selector itself shrunk to a row of toggles or a flimsy, plasticky little stalk. Ferrari, of all companies, used its first electric car to argue the opposite, that physical controls and eyes-on-road ergonomics beat another slab of glass. They were right, and most of the mass market is cheerfully walking the wrong way. A control you use on the move should never need your eyes.

The same pattern runs through the rest of the brochure's greatest hits. "LED headlamps" now sit on the spec sheet of seven cars in ten, but the badge says nothing about how far they actually throw, and a cheap LED reflector lights up less road than a good projector does. The built-in satellite navigation nobody has opened since their phone learned the way. The piano-black trim that looks like jewellery in the photo and a scratched, fingerprinted mess within a week, when a textured panel costs the same and ages far better. The ambient lighting you set once, the voice assistant you ask for the weather and never again. None of it is bad. It is just there to pad the list, so a brochure stuffed with features leaves you feeling you got your money's worth.

What actually earns its keep

The features that matter most barely feature in the pitch, because they don't reduce to a checkbox and they don't photograph well. They fall into three quiet groups.

First, the controls you can work without looking: physical volume and climate buttons, a gear lever with proper slots, a wheel that adjusts for reach and not just rake. The tell is the passenger seat that adjusts for height, so the person beside you isn't filed near the floor. Just one car in four bothers.

Second, the cheap conveniences India loves to delete, led by front parking sensors, missing from nearly two cars in three and more use in a tight lane than a grainy reversing camera. A good 360-degree view earns its place; a laggy one is worse than the sensor it replaced. The rest is small and unglamorous: rain-sensing wipers, lit one-touch windows, a full-size spare rather than the skinny, 80km/h space-saver that just about limps you to the next tyre shop.

Third, the features that exist because of where we drive: a cabin air filter for a Delhi winter, remote start on the key, auto-hold for stop-go traffic. Ventilated seats are the giveaway, the one piece of "luxury" that pays its way every single day in our heat, and still on only a third of cars.

Here is the spec sheet a brochure would never run.

Even this list isn't the whole story. The biggest things of all, a suspension sorted for broken roads, an air-conditioner that truly cools a black dashboard at 45°C, a service centre genuinely near you, don't fit on any checklist.

axler8's take

The spec sheet is a sales document, not a measure of a good car. It counts boxes, and counting rewards the features that are cheapest to add and easiest to advertise, which is exactly why the touchscreen keeps growing while the crash structure goes unmentioned, and the sunroof spreads while the suspension goes unfixed.

The axler8 recommendation engine is built to do the opposite. It doesn't care how a feature photographs; it weighs whether it will actually matter to the way you live with a car, and it treats the things that have become standard, the airbags, the ABS, the stability control, as the floor they now are rather than the headline a brochure pretends they are. Flash is free to advertise. Function has to be lived with.

The features worth paying for are the ones you'll still be glad of a year from now, on a broken road, in peak heat, in stop-go traffic. The little conveniences that make a car feel like an extension of you. Shop for that feeling, not the flash.