ASK THE COMMUNITY Kerala

Opened by Motorly Editorial · 07 Jul 2026 · 1 views

A genuinely common sequence: flat tyre, on the shoulder of some Kerala highway, sometimes in the rain, and the driver's pulling out the jack for maybe the second time ever, sliding it under whatever part of the sill looks roughly right, and hoping. Sometimes that guess is fine. Sometimes it dents the rocker panel, or the car slips off the jack because it was never resting on a structural point at all — worth checking once, calmly, in your own driveway, not for the first time under actual pressure. Jack points are specific, reinforced spots built into the underbody structure to handle a jack's concentrated load, not just anywhere along the sill that looks solid. Most cars have four, one near each wheel, recognisable as a small notch or slightly raised reinforced section a specific distance behind the front wheel arch and ahead of the rear. Jacking anywhere else along the sill risks it folding or denting, since that section was never engineered to bear a concentrated point-load. Finding yours takes two minutes without raising the car at all — look along the rocker panel for a notch or a subtly different-shaped section, and your owner's manual has an exact diagram in the flat-tyre section worth matching against the physical spot once. Towing hooks are a separate thing entirely, and this is where a lot of confusion happens, because people assume a jack point doubles as a tow point, or that anything metal and loop-shaped near the bumper is safe to tow from. Most modern cars have a dedicated tow hook or threaded eyelet, usually one at the front, less commonly one at the rear as standard. On a lot of current Maruti, Hyundai, and Tata models the front tow point isn't visible at all — it's a threaded socket behind a small plastic bumper cover, sized for a separate metal tow eye stored in the boot alongside the jack and spare wheel tools. If you've never opened that compartment, it's worth checking now rather than discovering you don't have the tool during an actual breakdown call, especially in the rain with a recovery truck waiting. Never use a random bumper point, a suspension arm, or anything that just looks strong enough as an improvised tow point — most bumpers are largely plastic cosmetic covers over a crash structure, not load-bearing, and pulling from the wrong spot risks tearing the bumper off or damaging suspension components never designed to take a towing load in that direction. This matters more here specifically because Kerala's monsoon flooding genuinely produces more stuck-vehicle situations than drier states, and it's exactly the moment an improvised tow point either fails under load or damages something the driver didn't realise wasn't structural. The homework is simple: pop the boot, find your jack and tow eye, confirm how they fit together, then walk around the car once and physically locate all four jack points and the tow covers using the manual as the guide.

No comments yet — be the first to say something.