Maruti's Ertiga will blow you away with its low price

New Delhi: The shockingly affordable pricing of Maruti Suzuki’s first multi-purpose vehicle (MPV), the Ertiga, betrays the company’s anxiousness to succeed in a segment it has never played in before.

The base petrol version of the car is priced at just Rs 5.89 lakh, ex-Delhi. This is much lower than the Toyota Innova’s base price of Rs 8.7 lakh and Mahindra Xylo’s base price of Rs 7.44 lakh (Toyota and Mahindra prices as per www.carwale.com ).

Though Managing Executive Officer (Sales & marketing) Mayank Pareek was at pains to explain on Thursday that the Ertiga was in a segment by itself and cannot be compared to either the Innova or the Xylo or any other MUV available in the Indian market right now, Maruti’s cautious pricing shows the company has high hopes that the Ertiga will do in the MPV segment what the Swift did in the super hatch segment in 2005.

[caption id=“attachment_273924” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Maruti Ertiga. Image courtesy Maruti Suzuki India”] [/caption]

The Ertiga is coming when Maruti has closed 2011-12 battered and bruised - its market share has fallen below the 40 percent mark for the first time in memory. Though the decline (it was about 44 percent in the previous fiscal) was largely attributed to production constraints for much of the year, some of it is also because of sales remaining lukewarm in critical models such as the Alto.

Pareek denied the company had any plans to lower prices of its mini cars to boost sales and said Ertiga was launched keeping the growth of the MUV segment in mind. He said this segment accounts for 14 percent of the overall car market and has seen compounded annual growth rates of 20 percent for the last three years. For now, Maruti has also dismissed any suggestions that it is slowly expanding its portfolio away from small cars.

Maruti has spent Rs 410 crore in developing the Ertiga, which is based on the Swift platform. The 7-seater is a bit smaller in length than both Xylo and Innova, with a length of 4,265 mm and height of 1,685 mm. The car comes in three petrol and three diesel options and Maruti claims its fuel efficiency is the best in class - 16.02 kmpl for the petrol variant and 20.77 kmpl for the diesel variant. The K14 petrol engine has a displacement of 1,400 cc while the diesel is 1,300 cc. So the Ertiga is a bit shorter, a bit less wider than competitors and also boasts of a smaller turning radius of 5.2 metres.

The pricing is introductory for now and is likely to increase after some months, but by then Maruti would have tested the market and response of competitors to this offering. Pareek said Ertiga is anyway not targeted at the taxi segment - where a lot of sales for the Innova and the Xylo come from. It is meant for the urban family of 3-5 people, for use in daily commutes and for long weekend drives. This is the first Maruti car which has been developed keeping Indian customers and road conditions in mind.

In fact, India is the first launch market for the Ertiga and completely knocked down (CKD) kits manufactured here would be exported to South-East Asian countries - CKD exports have already begun with Indonesia.

Maruti said it has flexible manufacturing and, therefore, can handle volume fluctuations on account of domestic market vagaries as well as export demands.

The high-end variants ofErtiga come with featureslike electronic power steering, power windows, steering-mounted audio controls, a high-end stereo system,air conditioning and heating with blowers for the second row of seats as well and safety features such as ABS, EBD and two front airbags.