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| In India the Mahindra Thar is pimped to go off-road |
AT the recent Delhi Auto Show, Mahindra and Mahindra confirmed its
engineers are working hard to develop a small SUV that can seat five passengers,
with very aggressive pricing to take on world markets.
Executive director and president of Mahindra’s automotive and farm
equipment sectors, Dr Pawan Goenka, repeated his message at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, saying it was important for the company to produce a downsized
SUV, rather than making something above the popular Scorpio and XUV 500 models.
With 56 dealers in South Africa and still taking franchise
requests, India’s largest automotive company seems set to grow across southern
Africa — an aim that was boosted by the success of the Mahindra XUV500 in
endurance rallies like the Raid-De-Himalaya, Desert Storm, Mughal Rally and the
Dakshin Darethe.
Moving away from the leisure market to its core business — that of
transport in general — Goenka said the company was also investing more than
R500 million to develop a new range of light, intermediate and medium commercial
vehicles.
Two-thirds of this amount is being spent in bringing an all-new
range of trucks, with payload capacities between seven and 14 tons, to market in
the next two years.
Mahindra is the only company in India which produces an entire
range of mobility solutions from boats and aircraft to motorcycles,
three-wheelers, passenger vehicles and a wide range of commercial vehicles,
including big trucks and buses.
Mahindra underlined its display at Delhi with the slogan: “Advanced
Mobility Solutions” and apart from the Halo car reported in Witness
Wheels last week, the company also showed its Formula E electric sports
car, hybrid diesel motorcycle and the XUV 500 Hybrid
— the first conventional turbo diesel engine
electric hybrid with a manual transmission.
