Indian car sales for February 2016: Winners and Losers

The Indian passenger car market grew marginally in February 2016. The industry reported wholesales of over 2,30,000 units last month, continuing to perform in the same range that we have seen in the last few months. Here are the key takeaways based on all the sales reports for February 2016.

Winners:

Mahindra’s entrant to the hatchback segment seems to be doing well. The KUV100 registered sales of 3,413 units in January, when the launch happened in the middle on the month. The numbers for the last month are higher at 4,486 units, breaking into the top 20 highest sold vehicles for the month. 

Nissan India sales in India have been spiraling downwards for a while; neither of their cars or even the cars from their budget brand, the Datsun, are doing well. The sudden jump in wholesales of the GO, then is a welcome change. The company has sold 1,414 units in February, which is significantly higher than the sales for the last few months. 

While we would want to keep a watch for few more months, to be able to ascertain this, the growth of the A-segment seems to be on the revival. The Renault Kwid is doing very well, clocking over 7,500 units a month, now that the production capacity has increased. But the sales have not come at the cost of any other model, nor against the higher segment. The Alto continues to sell over 20,000 units, the Eon isn’t doing too bad either, the Nano sales are consistent and along with the Kwid even the GO has performed well. This tells us that the segment that was stagnant for a while is once again growing. We only hope to see carmakers add more safety features to their entry-level cars.

Losers:

Renault showed the new Duster with diesel AMT transmission at the expo and launched it at the start of this month. While, there is no doubt that the SUV is the expected to do well, in anticipation of a new launch and possibly because the dealers started running out of stock, the sales plummeted to 461 units in February.

The Ford Figo Aspire hasn’t been a success story as expected. It is a very competent product with a great engine and sorted dynamics, unfortunately, these characteristics haven’t really turned to sales numbers for Ford. The numbers have been gradually declining for the compact sedan since the launch; from over 3,500 units last, the wholesales of this car have now dropped to 855 units in February.

The budget didn’t bring any good news for the auto industry, in fact, the additional infrastructure cess and luxury tax is going to be a burden for car buyers. The effect of the price hike will be seen starting this month, but since the announcement was made in February, we have added it to the list. Here are exact details of the additional taxes levied in the Union Budget 2016-17.