Latest Car News in India

Petrol car sales unwilling to pick up despite big offers

The car makers in India have doled out highly attractive offers on their petrol cars but car sales in India is not willing to improve much, it seems. Where Maruti is offering Rs 50k off on Maruti Alto and Maruti Wagon R petrol models, after its overall sales plunged by 6 percent recently and Maruti Alto sales took a downtrend by 18 percent. Meanwhile, Hyundai is offering Rs 52,000 discount on its flagship car Hyundai Santro and small car Hyundai i10. Besides these two car makers, other car makers, Honda needs a special mention here, have also offered big discount on petrol cars in order to clear the stock of already produced cars.

Despite of the offers to lure the car buyers, there was only a slight improvement in sales as the car buying trend in India seems to have shifted towards diesel cars. Tata Motors is giving a discount of over Rs 60k on Tata Indica and Rs 40k on Tata Indica Vista but the petrol variants are still struggling and the 6.7 percent sales increase that Tata witnessed in May is largely dominated by diesel variants of these cars. Nissan India on the other hand is offering Rs 3999 EMI on the Nissan Micra models. Similarly VW is offering Volkswagen Polo at an attractive interest rate of only 5.99 percent when the car loan interest rates are somewhere around 11-12 percent.

Meanwhile, following the low demand for petrol cars in India, car companies have stopped producing petrol models and are in the process of strengthening the diesel model production. Toyota has recently stopped production of all its petrol car models while Maruti India has also set its plants in maintenance mode to decrease the output of petrol models. As per the information available from various sources, there has been a significant decline in petrol car sales by over 15 percent this year.

However, despite this slowdown, the auto companies are launching new cars in India. But car makers make sure to launch the diesel version of any new car along with the petrol version. The soon to be launched Renault Duster compact SUV will also be launched in both petrol and diesel versions. Hopefully the SUV will be priced low as claimed by the company. Launch date in India for Renault Duster has been set for July 4th, 2012, therefore all the details will be revealed during the launch event. Stay tuned to know all the updates related to Renault Duster launch on Carkhabri.com.