Friday, July 22, 2011
By Pranjal Gera
Drive your dream Car at half price
The car on lease idea is very popular in Western countries, but is rare thought in India. Now Daimler, manufacturer of the brand Mercedes Benz offers one of the most flexible options to Indian customers “The Car on lease”. Sidhartha Nair MD of Daimler Financial services India (DFS) said that this option is very flexible for its customers as the customer doesn’t have to pay the full price of the car. According to this technique the customer purchasing the car will be given lease for about 3 years and the company works out a value where the customer doesn’t have to pay at least 50 percent of the price of the car and has to just pay the remainder value which is almost 50 percent of the cost of the car.
This is one of the major ways of purchase in the developed car markets. In US 40 percent of car sales are through leasing options and 15 percent purchase are through finance according to said Klaus Entenmann, global chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler Financial Services AG.
Purchasing the car through lease is not the only advantage of this type of purchase. The maintenance, Insurance fee is all the company’s problem and not the customers.DFS is giving 2 options for their customers to buy the car one being the finance method and the other being through the lease method. In case the customer goes for the lease option he will have to pay only 15 lakh and the rest will be paid after 3 years when the car is being taken back.
Industrial experts believe that the lease option is ideal for the Indian market as the customers of the Indian market being mostly young want to buy luxuries cars like Mercedes and through the lease option they can break the cost by paying only half the price of the vehicle during the initial purchase.
Also according to the statistical data most Indians change cars in the span of 3-4 years which might be due to different reasons like the coming of a new model of the same segment in the market with better features and advanced look hence the lease option is ideal for such customers as they can change to a new car after 3 years.
So far these options aren’t very popular in India having seeing them in the corporate world as well. But the leasing option now introduced in the car market is soon going to see the numbers going up.
Some of the popular hatchback models in the Indian auto market are Toyota Etios Liva, Ford Figo, Maruti Swift, Hyundai i10, Chevrolet Beat and Volkswagen Polo. Apart from these popular models, cars going to hit the Indian roads this year are Chevrolet Beat Diesel, Maruti Cervo and Honda Brio.
