The usually reliable Indian Autos Blog has reported that Volkswagen’s new Passat Blue Motion has sold 190 units in 30 days. That is amazing for a car that cost in excess of Rs. 25 lakhs. What does one put this down to? The Polo+Vento effect? Or is it that the case of Volkswagen’s marketing spiel going down well with customers? It could be a combination of both. We like to think the ads featuring the Passat parking itself may have actually caused people to buy it since most people in this country have all kinds of problems parking cars properly. Whatever it is, it is good for Volkswagen.
Yearly Archives: 2011
India Yamaha Motor recorded a growth of 53% in its domestic market in April 2011 with a sale of 25,817 units v/s 16,869 units sold last year. The export figures stood at 8,659 units in April, 2011 while 8,099 motorcycles were exported in April 2010. The overall sales recorded stood at 34,476 units in April, 2011 vs. 24,968 units in April, 2010, a growth of 38.1%.
Yamaha continues to follow a high growth trail
Records domestic sales growth of 53%N
New Delhi, 2nd May, 2011: Riding high on the growth momentum, India Yamaha Motor has maintained its sales growth momentum in April 2011 as well. The company recorded a growth of 53% in its domestic market in April 2011 with a sale of 25,817 units v/s 16,869 units sold last year. The export figures stood at 8,659 units in April, 2011 while 8,099 motorcycles were exported in April 2010. The overall sales recorded stood at 34,476 units in April, 2011 vs. 24,968 units in April, 2010, a growth of 38.1%.
Speaking on the results, Mr. Hiroyuki Suzuki, CEO & MD, India Yamaha Motor Pvt. Ltd., said, “We are delighted with the encouraging sales figures that we have been witnessing consistently this year. Our marketing & promotion activities are on track and we hope to sustain this growth for the rest of the year. Our models – YZF-R15, FZ series and SZ series continue to perform well and are playing an instrumental role in driving the sales. We are also strengthening our sales & service network in the tier II and tier III cities to further increase our reach to the customer base in the inner parts of the country”.
The company is making steadfast efforts to strengthen the Yamaha brand and enhance customer trust by conducting various marketing initiatives including the Kidz Yamaha Safe Riding Science (YSRS), R15 One Make Race Championship, Riding Clinic & various events at the regional level. This year, Yamaha has already successfully organized the second season of the Yamaha Riding clinic and the Yamaha Safe Riding Science for Kids in Delhi, Kolkata, Varanasi and Lucknow to teach them safe riding habits for the future and to create an accident free traffic environment.
About India Yamaha Motor Pvt. Ltd.Y
Yamaha made its initial foray into India in 1985. In August 2001, Yamaha India became a 100% subsidiary of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd, Japan (YMC). In 2008, Mitsui & Co., Ltd. entered into an agreement with YMC to become a joint-investor in the motorcycle manufacturing company “India Yamaha Motor Private Limited (IYM)”.
IYM operates from its state-of-the-art manufacturing units at Surajpur in Uttar Pradesh and Faridabad in Haryana and produces motorcycles both for domestic & export markets. With a strong workforce of more than 2,000 employees, IYM is highly customer-driven and has a countrywide network of over 400 dealers. Presently, its product portfolio includes VMAX (1,679cc), MT01 (1,670cc), YZF-R1 (998cc), FZ1 (998cc), Fazer (153cc), FZ-S (153cc), FZ16 (153cc), SZ, SZ-X & SZ-R (153cc), YZF-R15 (150cc), SS125 (123cc), YBR 125 (123cc), YBR 110 (106cc) and Crux (106cc).
The great Aldous Huxley wrote about this thing called “The Brave New World” where there will be some one to take care of all of us and where life would be secure and free. The Brave New World is the ultimate Utopia one that Huxley carefully put out to let the Western Civilization know its stupidities in thinking that it can control the destiny of this world. There have been many optimists who turned into cynics once they came to realize the idiocy of believing that somehow we are in control of ourselves and our destinies. One such person is George Orwell and another being Arthur Koestler. Orwell in his now celebrated book 1984 portrayed a bleak vision of a world taken over by the State which in turn is controlled by power hungry control freaks. The expressions Newspeak and Big Brother came into being in this work. Ironically Big Brother the TV show found its inspiration here. For motor racing fans newspeak is better known as Ronspeak an allusion to Ron Dennis who mastered the art of saying a lot without saying anything at all in effect. We digress here. To get back to the point about Western Civilization, its attitude is best exemplified by Allopathy in medicine where the humble doctor believes he can control the destiny of his patient. For years now this form of medicine has been saying prevention is better than cure and prescribing preventions that have neither prevented or cured complex diseases. Chemotherapy for cancer patients is an outstanding example of this.
If we are to understand the Western obsession with controlling things we have to go back to the Reformation which unleashed the Protestant Ethic. The Protestant Ethic nearly created a Godless world which broke the human being’s already tenuous links with the rest of the Universe and leading him to believe that nature can be manipulated in order to satisfy the ever increasing greed of the human race. The scientific method and the industrial revolution unleashed an unprecedented rapacious consumption that led to the emergence of things such as chemical waste and environmental degradation. Nature has been programmed (by whoever) to not have anything that goes waste. But the new civilization unleashed toxins that have started destroying soils, ambient air and even the ozone layer. So the Western Civilization wakes up to “control” this process as well. But there is a slight problem here.
Colonialism which started four hundred years ago took Western practices and beliefs to all parts of the world and strenuously worked to replace other systems of thought. Capitalism took consumerism and consumption to new levels by “opening” new markets and encouraging the locals into greater consumption. While capitalism grew intrinsically from within Western Civilization, thereby giving scope for better planning and a possibility of problem fixing, it went into other parts as an import. The Western impatience to introduce new products and exploit market potentials meant that in most instances first the products were introduced and then planning took place. The same is the case with the auto industry, the thing of consequence for this website.
In most parts of the world the auto industry went into a market where there were takers for products of independent self mobility but with little infrastructure to support that. The Indian scenario is the epitome of this. Too many people, too many vehicles, no traffic sense, no sense of cost of life and no proper public transport. So when the Green brigade in India (yes, Green Peace is here and how) starts parrotting what their Western counter parts are saying, they are saying things which are completely irrelevant here. Like in the West, automobiles are a ready and soft target. While no attempts are made to cut down on airconditioning and heating at homes and offices which demand big consumption of electricity, the Greens want the automobile industry to encourage electric cars. To find electricity for all these cars, there will be additional pressure on electricity grinds which already burn copious amounts of fossil fuels and unleash environmental pollution.
When this point was brought to the notice of the Green brigade they have started attacking power consumption as well with idiotic calls for Earth hours which nobody with any sense follows. The Greens also attack nuclear energy and cite instances such as Chernobyl nuclear reactor melt down and the latest Fukushima incident. There is a point there, but try telling that to people who only just started to find wealth and the ways in which to spend it on luxuries. So rapacious consumption is now a global phenomenon and the non-Western parts of the world have told the West that it was not correct for them to have enjoyed everything and now deny that to the rest of the world. In countries such as ours where we do not value life anyway the babble of the Greens is just that. But even in the context of the Western world do the Greens actually believe that they can create these urban Utopias with clean air and no sound thanks to non polluting vehicles? Are they really so naive that they cannot see the futility of this exercise? Isn’t it akin to the carnivore who advocates compassion towards all life forms and animal welfare by choosing certain animals, such as dogs and cats only to fit into that ambit? You decide as to how you will characterize what the Greens are doing.
Mitsubishi of Japan the maker of the evocative Evo series of cars has been in financial trouble for a very long time now. While the Lancer Evolution cars have a cult following and while Mitsubishi also makes the very capable Pajero/Montero series of SUVs its sales have not been putting it back firmly in black. The car maker has been evolving strategies for the future to retrieve lost ground. It seems to be betting on electric vehicles and plug in hybrids and has announced small cars in this segment. Mitsubishi probably wants to be the first mover into the segment. In what seems to be a strategy consistent with this, Mitsubishi announced that the Lancer EvoX was the last of the series since the company no longer wanted to be environmentally and politically incorrect by making petrol guzzling cars. This lead to an outrage in the community of Evo afficianados forcing Mitsubishi to say that the Evo tradition will be continued but with electric cars or hybrids. Now Mitsubishi says it wants F1 style racing with electric cars. We suppose the sound for this would come from a sound system installed around racing tracks which would play a recorded tape of petrol engine sounds. Ridiculous as this is, it is scary that this may eventually be the fate of motor racing, with car manufacturers falling over each other to please the green brigade, whose perspective of pollution is totally screwed up. But that is subject for another debate.
Many websites are reporting that Hero Motors will be supplying gear boxes to BMW Motorrad, which is the motorcycle making arm of the BMW company. These gearboxes will be used on all BMW motorcycles. In the last decade of the 20th Century, Hero Motors had entered into a collaboration with BMW for the manufacture of the entry level BMW F-650 Funduro which was an endurance style or trailie bike and introduced this motorcycle in the Indian market for Rs. 5 lakhs. The F-650 was a very capable motorcycle which won the Paris Dakar Rally by beating bigger capacity machines from KTM and Yamaha. The then very high price and the absence of life style motorcycling community meant that the product bombed in the market. Hero Motors finally cleared the stock after selling the bikes for half of the original price. BMW had in fact designed a scooter of 125cc with a canopy for Escorts in India (then makers of Rajdoot and Yamaha motorcycles who sold their motorcycle business to Yamaha) but the scooter was considered to be too avant garde for the Indian market and so never made it here or for that matter anywhere since at that time there was no market for such small capacity machines in Europe.
The Indian Autos Blog is speculating the possibility of the launch of the Lupo in India by Volkswagen. The latest generation Lupo started life as the UP! concept and IAB believes that a stripped down version of this car could make into India with an Auto Expo 2012 launch since the plan to launched rebadged versions of Maruti cars such as the A-Star which is already rebadged and reskinned and sold as the Nissan Pixo. VW is keen to be the world’s largest seller of cars and sees the Indian market as crucial in this scheme of things. So it is unsurprising that Volkswagen would want to be a part of every segment of the Indian car market.
According to a report in the Economic Times sales of the Tata Nano have exceeded 10,000 units for the first time since it launch. The Nano has had a baptism of fire, literally, with a few Nanos having caught fire. Before that Tata’s plans for the Nano were derailed when Mamata Banerjee led a rebellion at Singur (where the plant for the manufacture of Nano was more than half built) leading the car maker move from the east to the west when it finally found a home in Sanand in Gujarat. This chequered history meant that the Nano did not drive into the homes of people in droves, as was widely anticipated. In November of 2010 Nano sales reached a nadir of 505 units, making Tata Motors take cognizance of things, which they did. Since then the sales of the Nano have been on the rise. A 700 cc twin cylinder direct injection diesel is likely to be introduced into the Nano by the end of this year. Stories doing the round point to a 40 kmpl consumption by the diesel Nano, though the price of the car itself is likely to go up. There are rumours of a CVT Nano coming in next year. While Tata may have found a little to cheer about the Nano, they have a great reason to grieve the sales of the Indica and the Indigo range which have nose dived, with neither car making it into the top ten selling vehicles for two months in a row now. Over and above this the Aria continues to be white elephant with hardly any sales. Tata Motors has an unenviable job on hand if it has to make lost ground.
Mercedes GP team Principal Ross Brawn believes that the fundamentals of this years Mercedes car are sound and that with constant and little improvements the car can be consistently fast and challenge for podium positions. His believes that the form shown by Mercedes in China last time out is genuine and that he expects the car to go well in the upcoming race at Istanbul. Nico Rosberg is also optimistic of Mercedes’ chances after having looked like he could win the race in China.
Marco Simoncelli was mortified after his first lap crash and the usually exuberant Italian was subdued and looked embarrassed as he made his way back to the pit lane. He has blamed cold tyres for his crash. It is well known that Super Sic has a style of riding which is usually on the razor’s edge irrespective of his dicing with someone for position or not. He will have to produce results consistently for him to keep the contract that he has with Honda. Honda will look at him differently this year since he is no longer a rookie. Valentino Rossi was philosophical about his fifth place and declared that he is quite happy finishing there. He credited Andrea Dovizioso with superior race craft and claimed that was why his fellow Italian could beat him to the line for fourth place. Rossi believes that his shoulder is healing and though he does not have full strength yet be believes things will be 100% for the Catalunya race in a month’s time. He is more concerned about the bike and hopes some work gets done for better racing in two weeks time at Le Mans. Dani Pedrosa declared that he was happy with how his own shoulder is shaping up.
Nico Terol is trying to keep his tryst with a possible world championship in the final season of two stroke 125cc racing. He beat back the field to take victory at Estoril. Sandro Cortese and Johann Zarco took the second and third places to complete the podium. It was a disappointing day for Mahindra Racing with Danny Webb managing only a 16th place after he had reached 12th place at one point in the race. The other Mahindra rider Marcel Schrotter who scored points for Mahindra last time out at Jerez, could only manage P18. India’s Sarath Kumar riding an Aprilia for WTR – Ten10 racing managed to get into the main race after failing to qualify in the first two races at Qatar and Jerez. He finished last in the race.