Tata Motors aims for 3rd slot in passenger car segment by 2019

But, having achieved the third position in TN, the company is confident of reaching its goal in two years, Mayank Pareek, President, Passenger Vehicles Business Unit, Tata Motors, who was in the city to launch Tigor (Rs 4.82 lakh ex-showroom onwards), the new sedan, said here. This, incidentally, is the third vehicle after Tiago and Hexa, based on “impact design” philosophy. 

It is confident that Tigor sales could be “better than Tiago.” Bookings for Tiago had already crossed 83,000 mark and 50,000 plus vehicles of this model were already on the road, Pareek said. From a monthly production of 3,000 Tiago cars, it had doubled it to meet the increasing demand. Pareek said fiscal 2015-16 had been “extremely good” with the company’s 22 per cent growth outpacing the industry’s figure of 9 per cent. 

As Tata Motors feels the need to be present in all passenger vehicle segments, it has lined up new launches including a compact sports utility vehicle (SUV) for Deepavali. To a question on the performance of models such as Indica, Indigo and Nano, he said the first two were doing well especially in the aggregator segment while the Nano was finding pockets of acceptance in places such as Kerala. Shared economy is a phenomenon to be closely watched. For now, rural regions contribute 35 pc of its sales. 

“The industry forecast is 9 to 10 per cent next year and we are confident of doing better than that,” he said, noting that it would like to be present in all the 720 districts of the country. For now, its footprints are in 350 districts. 

On the total cost of ownership, he said there was a reduction by about 7 pc as Tata unlike some of the auto players believed in changing the “child parts” instead of the whole unit. He also said as its major portfolio were BS4 compliant, Tata Motors did not have an inventory to be worried about.