Auto India, Car India

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd has decided to stop taking any further bookings of XUV 500, as it received an overwhelming number of bookings for the vehicle in the first ten days of its launch.

The president of Mahindra & Mahindra’s automotive business, Pawan Goenka has said that there is a waiting period of about 17 weeks and “We will have to delay the launch in other markets, both in the country and overseas, by not more than three months. We are overwhelmed by the response we have got in just seven days of the launch”. The company had earlier announced to export the vehicle in other countries in the next three months. Now, the plans to launch the vehicle in South and Central Africa, Australia, SAARC countries and Western Europe have been postponed.

Looking at the overwhelming demand of the vehicle in the domestic market, the company has decided to postpone its plans to export the vehicle and also to delay the launch of this hot car in other cities.

Prior to its launch, the company had initiated a ‘guess the price’ contest, which had received a staggering 1.15 lakh entries. This contest was a hit and the car became well known to people in the market. The number of test drives requests that were received after this contest was about 35,000! People queued in the showrooms to take a glimpse of the vehicle and take a test drive.

It impressed people so much that those who had already booked a Scorpio, which is cheaper than XUV, cancelled their bookings and booked the new model instead. Although the bookings of the car had been opened only in five cities across India, the company reported that more than 6,000 people have already booked the vehicle till date.

The price of XUV 500 starts at around Rs. 10.89 lakh (ex showroom Delhi price of W8 model). The models at the top end like W 6 can go up to 13 lakh. Although the prices for the newly launched vehicle are more than that of Scorpio, people are willing to pay the price and wait for a car that has more luxury and is more spacious.

Just two days after the launch of XUV 500, all the vehicles in the showrooms had been booked, and those who wanted to buy Scorpios cancelled their bookings. As many as 40 Scorpios in one showroom were cancelled within two days of the launch of XUV 500. The manager of the showroom was quite concerned with trend. The sales executives are concerned that they would not get any incentives for the month as the bookings for Scorpio had gone down.

Mahindra & Mahindra has hinted that the price of the car would be increased marginally in the next three months. This was hinted as soon as the car was launched. The company would prefer that its models like Scorpio and Xylo should not suffer because its new launch. We will have to wait and watch for sometime what happens to these two models.