Tata launched the Tata Aria with a lot of hope but unfortunately the car didn’t do well. The car was quite pricy initially, all because of the its all-wheel drive system but as a solution the company launched a 4×2 rear wheel drive, cheaper variant model in 2011 but once again the crossover has not been able to attract much sales and is performance is still weak in the market.
The sales were further battered by the introduction of a much practical, value for money and feature rich SUV, the Mahindra XUV500. The current situation is that buyers flood to Mahindra & Mahindra dealerships as soon as XUV’s booking begin and on the other hand a considerably less number of buyers are there for the Aria.
image – Tata Aria
No doubt Tata wants to sell more Arias but the price band of Rs. 12.13 – Rs. 16.95 lakhs is on the expensive side and most buyers would like to shed that much money while other more affordable options are available. Speculation is that Tata may launch a new base variant of the car, Aria LX. At present the car comes with interesting features like ABS, dual AC, six speaker music system with USB and AUX-in connectivity as standard but the LX variant will not have any of the above mentioned features and will come with basic features like power windows and power steering.
image – Tata Aria
With minimal features and an affordable price, the car will not be targeted at individual buyers but premium fleet operators. So from the mainstream market where it was supposed to make its own identity, it will move to the commercial segment where the demand rises rapidly.
Aria is the first ever Indian crossover and is powered by 2.2 litre DICOR engine that can generate a max power of 138 BHP and an impressive 320 Nm of peak torque and is mated to a 5 speed manual transmission. It returns a good mileage of 13.5 KMPL for all wheel driver and 13.7 KMPL for rear wheel driver version. As we mentioned above the sales performance has not been very good over the past six months but with a new low cost variant in hand, Tata could extract more sales from the commercial market at least, if not from individual buyers.
Source – CarDekho
