Tata Revotron / Revotorq

Tata's own engine families — Revotron petrol and Revotorq diesel — in the Nexon, Punch, Tiago and Altroz.

The two names are the fuel, which is the first thing to establish because they are otherwise used interchangeably in listings and advertising: Revotron is petrol, Revotorq is diesel, and a search that ignores the distinction returns the wrong engine half the time.

⚑ A third name belongs to this family and a fourth does not. The Curvv's diesel is badged Kryojet, which is the same 1,497 cc unit — Wikipedia calls it a 1.5 Revotorq while carwale names the variants themselves 1.5 Kryojet Diesel. It is not the Kryotec, which is the 2.0 of the Harrier and Safari and has a page of its own. Two letters separate two engines of different sizes, and searching the wrong one returns a 2.0 fault tree for a 1.5.

These are Tata's first fully in-house modern engines, and their significance is regional: they are among the commonest engines on Indian roads and are barely documented in English outside India. Specialist knowledge is genuinely thin, which changes what advice is worth trusting.

What can be said from the design is that the 1.2 turbo petrol and the 1.5 diesel are conventional modern engines with the conventional modern items — timing belt or chain by variant, a turbocharger whose oil feed matters, and a DPF on the diesel that short journeys will block.

On the diesel particularly, the regeneration story is the ordinary one and worth stating because it is the commonest cause of a car being brought in: short urban journeys never let the filter reach temperature, and the fuel used trying puts diesel into the sump.