Yearly Archives: 2011

The Jazz from Honda is the first car to truly bomb in the market place.  The car carried a high sticker price that brought it perilously close to the sedan City and that seems to have taken a toll on the sales of the Jazz.  Recently Honda dealers were offering as much as Rs.1.70 lakhs as discount on each car to clear the inventory.  Now some websites are saying that on the 18th of August, 2011 a facelifted version of the Jazz is being launched.  Carwale even has a couple of pictures on the facelift that is so subtle that only Honda can tell the difference between the old and the new (this comment is based on the pictures posted on Carwale.com).  It now seems that all variants of the Jazz will now come equipped with alloy wheels and that the car would come with beige interiors and roof lining.  We doubt very much if this much is sufficient to push the sales of the car.  In fact we ask this question again, does Honda need the Jazz after it launches the Brio?

Picture Courtesy: Carwale.com

The Nano continues to be a nightmare for Tata.  When the car was conceptualized it was believed that the car would take over the roads and make them choke with congestion.  In reality that has not happened.  The car continues to sell very sluggishly and is becoming a reason for concern.  The aggression that Tata showed in marketing the car yielded results once when it breached the 10,000 mark but after that it has slowed down again selling only 3,000+ units last month.  Tata is now banking on word of mouth publicity from the existing 1lakh owners of the car to push sales.  Apart from that it is also setting up 300 new dealerships in semi rural and rural areas to push the sales of the car.  Starting with Mamata Banerjee’s intervention at Singur in West Bengal which forced Tata Motors out and delayed the ramping up of production the car has been finding the hill too steep to climb.  A diesel engined variant with class leading fuel economy could be the panacea to the problems that the Nano is facing now.  It isn’t helping Tata Motors that they have another sales dud on their hands in the form of the Aria.  Therefore Tata is unable to focus on the marketing of any one of the two, perhaps leading to dismal sales of both the cars.

Yesterday was a very exciting day, since it was for the first time that the new Yamaha 1000cc MotoGP machine for next year was making its public debut and also because both the Honda RC213V (the official name for the 1000cc) and the Yamaha M1 (1000cc) were going to be ridden on the same track and on the same day.  Casey Stoner aboard the RC 213V finally went faster than Jorge Lorenzo did on the 1000cc Yamaha M1.  But these are early days yet and clearly a lot of development will happen over the next few months.  Equally interesting was the fact that the BMW powered Suter 1000cc MotoGP machine was two seconds quicker than it was last time by going only four seconds slower than the Honda as opposed to six seconds the last time out.  People believe that a rider better than Mika Kallio who was riding the Suter machine could easily knock of another second.  This is the first machine that is undergoing tests as a CRT machine.  FTR is supposed to be working on a Kawasaki powered CRT as well as an Aprilia powered CRT.

All pictures courtesy Crash.net

Stoner and the Honda RC 213 V

Pedrosa and the Honda RC 213 V

Lorenzo’s 1000cc Yamaha M1

Spies on the 1000cc Yamaha M1

Mika Kallio on the Suter BMW CRT machine

The coming Auto Expo in January, 2012 maybe when the new Vespa LX 125 scooter will be launched in India.  That is the industry grapevine and Motorbeam is carrying a story to that effect.  Motorbeam also says that sale and deliveries of the Vespa will start in the month of August.  The New Vespa LX125 scooter will be a twist and go like the market leader the Honda Activa but is expected to be priced around Rs. 60,000/-.  Piaggio’s ads soliciting dealers have already started positioning the Vespa brand as a premium brand by calling it something more than a scooter, they are calling it a way of life.  Piaggio need not work too hard to build the Vespa brand in India.  In the past the company had licence to manufacturing Vespa scooters and they built the brand quite well.  It was with Bajaj that Vespa’s innings in India began.  It started as the Vespa 150 and became the Bajaj 150 once the licence period was over.  All the subsequent scooters that Bajaj made such as the Priya 150, the Chetak, Super and Cub were all clones of the original. The second innings saw collaborations with LML and with Andhra Pradesh Scooters Ltd.  While the former manufactured the 100cc Vespa XE and subsequently the Vespa 150 as the 150 NV, Star and Supremo.  The Andhra Pradesh Scooters built vehicle was called the PL 170 where the 170 was the payload (and hence PL) in kilograms.  The scooter was of 100cc and of robust design though it looked tiny and sold well for a few years before the company folded up due to mismanagement (it was a State Govt Company, so what else does one expect).   So get ready to welcome for the first time Piaggio bringing Vespa all by itself.  This is the third time and usually the third time is supposed to bring luck, not that there was bad luck the first two times.

Picture Courtesy: Motorbeam.com

Hero Honda formally became Hero MotoCorp towards the end of last month and its website had changed to Hero MotoCorp by the 1st of August.  Hero MotoCorp unveiled their new logo and the first two products that will come branded as just Hero without the Honda suffix (even though the off road motorcycle and a bigger scooter are pure Honda machines) on the 9th of August at the O2 Arena in London.  The Hero Group have always been very patriotic and so it was no surprise that they used the 15th of August, the day of Indian Independence to reveal their new identity to the general public.   Every major newspaper carried a full first page advertisement announcing the change and the new logo while every TV channel carried ads of the newly renamed company announcing the rise of a new Hero.  All commercials had a catchy song whose music had been penned down by the great A R Rahman and song by the great man himself. The chorus of the song goes “hum mein hein Hero”.  The number of times the ad was repeated on all channels is an indication of how serious Hero MotoCorp is in its endeavour of establishing itself as the entity that is as good as Hero Honda without the Honda name.  Obviously truck loads of money have gone into the whole process and one wishes the world’s top motorcycle company the best of luck in its new avatar.  Hero MotoCorp has shown good business acumen by taking on the new identity very much before it was required to.  It could have continued as Hero Honda till 2014.  That it chose not to is indication of how serious it is about reinventing itself as a credible alternative to not just itself (Hero Honda) but also to Honda and the rest of manufacturers who will be seeing this as an opportunity to dethrone the leader.  However, this is just the beginning.  Honda still holds the right to the nomenclature of CD and CBZ.  By 2014 Hero will have to either surrender the rights to use the CD and CBZ monikers on their bikes or pay huge royalties to Honda.  This is obviously a situation loaded in favour of Honda and Hero will have to find ways to deal with that.  That they have given themselves good time to find alternatives or to deal with problems such as that is indeed very good thinking.  The future maybe very exciting.

Motorbeam.com has reported that General Motors India which is part owned by SAIC of China will be launching an MPV based on a Wuling vehicle.  This vehicle will be launched by the end of the year and will be launched as the Chevrolet CN 100.

Picture Courtesy: Motorbeam.com

Casey Stoner on a Repsol Honda rode away into the distance at Brno in the Czech Republic enroute  to an emphatic win in the MotoGP race.  The start of the race saw Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo dice for the lead with Andrea Dovizioso biting at their heels and relegating Casey Stoner to fourth place on the track.  Dani Pedrosa on the second of the Repsol Hondas soon got the better of Jorge Lorenzo on the Yamaha only to low side and crash out of the race.  This put Lorenzo in the lead for a while but an apparently failed gamble on the front tyre led to his race pace degenerating rapidly and he was overtaken first by Casey Stoner and later by Andrea Dovizioso on the third of the Repsol Hondas.  Marco Simoncelli on the factory spec San Carlo Gresini Honda also overtook Lorenzo to take his first ever podium in MotoGP since his debut last season.  Lorenzo was almost overtaken by his teammate Ben Spies on the other Yamaha but managed to hold on to the fourth place.  Spies finished fifth and Valentino Rossi finished in the position in which he started, sixth.  His teammate Nicky Hayden on the second of the Marlboro Ducatis finished in seventh ahead of Colin Edwards who finished in eighth position.  Alvaro Bautista on the lone Rizla Suzuki was riding a good race and managed to get ahead of Nicky Hayden and was closing in on Rossi when he too low sided out of the race.  That is a pity for Suzuki who have not had a decent race for a long time.

Skoda’s upcoming sedan the Rapid based on the Fabia, just like the Volkswagen Vento is based on the Volkswagen Polo, has been caught testing again.  Carwale.com has posted interesting pictures of the Rapid Sedan in camouflage.  Skoda is Volkswagen’s sister company and the Fabia is based on the platform of the previous generation Polo.  Post VW’s entry into India Skoda products have been pushed beneath the VW brand and going by that one has seen that the Fabia has become cheaper than the Polo.  By extending the same logic one can assume that the Rapid will be priced below the Vento and with a diesel heart the Rapid could become a competition killer.

Picture Courtesy: Carwale.com

Hyundai India has apparently taken the decision to make the gearbox of the i20 diesel with only five cogs rather the six that it had been upgraded to sometime ago.  The reason cited is that the engine and gearbox of the i20 are the ones that do duty in the new Verna that has been recently launched and  Hyundai believes that there should be better differentiation between the two products since the Verna is significantly more expensive than the i20.

Maruti Suzuki has revealed that it is cutting down the production of the A Star, Alto, Estilo, Wagon R and the Ritz citing sluggish demand and inventory pile up.  The surprise here is the Ritz.  The A Star has not been doing what was expected of it with number of vehicles sold steadily dwindling to less than thousand units last month.  That therefore is no surprise.  The Estilo also has a lukewarm demand and the absence of a diesel engine has seen its sales also dip though not to the extent of the A Star.  The Wagon R also must be hurting due to the lack of diesel engine option when petrol prices gone up through the stratosphere.  The same could be be true of the Alto as well.  The surprise is the Ritz which has a diesel engine option and is built on the same platform as the old Swift.  One would have thought the demand for the diesel Ritz would have picked up in the absence of the Swift (the old model is no longer made and the new one is yet to be launched).  However, it is well known that Maruti has taken bookings of more than 40,000 for the new Swift and may concentrate on its production to clear the backlogs quickly and not lose out to competition.