Saturday, June 30, 2012
By Shilpa Chopra
BMW X1 – 3 lakh units sold since launch in 2009
The world welcomed the BMW X1 well despite of the initial criticism by the world press. They tagged the SUV as an attempt by the German car maker to dilute its brand. However, the X1 proved its might and had become one of the prominent BMW cars across globe. In India as well, the SUV has been the hot favorite of people. It has been just two and a half years time and there are over 3 lakh X1’s sold across globe. This has also made it the best car in the X Series of cars by BMW.
The other cars in the X range are the BMW X3, X5 and X6. All these three are bigger in size and mightier than the X1 but following the affordable nature of the later, it has sold even better than its seniors. India is where the BMW cars have managed to get the top slot in the luxury car space defeating Mercedes Benz and Audi. Besides, the X1 SUV has been the hot favorite of the young generation car buyers till recently when Audi has launched the Q3 SUV and has asked people to ‘Start Young’ with the SUV. This has recently swayed some of the car buyers towards Q3 as people considered Audi Q5 and Audi Q7 to be very expensive.
Meanwhile, where the Q3 is taking care of the over Rs 25 lakh SUV market, the under Rs 10 lakh SUV market is all set to hot up with the Renault Duster launch on this July 4. The SUV Duster is expected to be priced around Rs 7 lakh to Rs 8 lakh and as per the promotional program launched by Renault it will be the most affordable SUV in India. Even more affordable than a sedan. Thus if that comes out to be true, we can expect the Duster price to start at Rs 6.5 lakh or so as it is the price at which the reasonably premium sedan offerings start.
