[vishwaschettri]

Hi Everyone,

Writing this on behalf of a close friend who is in the process of buying a Mahindra Thar LX RWD Diesel and has been denied price protection for his booking. Lets call him A for rest of this post.

Request if anyone can share contacts of some higher ups in Mahindra, the conversation so far with dealership and Mahindra team has been extremely unprofessional and frustrating.

A had booked the vehicle immediately at the time of launch in January 2023 and was within the first initial lot who got the price protection - 10.99 Lakh (confirmed over email by dealership with Mahindra customer care in copy). Now that his vehicle is finally allotted and he has paid up the full money to the dealer, the dealer and Mahindra are saying that price protection was upto May 2024 (arbitrary and no intimation provided) and demanding additional 1.85 Lakh as per the current ex-showroom cost.

I am listing down the sequence of events below, any help in this regard would be appreciated.
Disclaimer - I am invested in this deal as I would have unrestricted access to the vehicle

• 09th Jan 2023 - A makes the booking within few minutes of launch and manages to make the payment. He gets a prompt automated acknowledgement as well.
• 10th Feb 2023 - Dealership offers the vehicle. Full marks to them for the promptness, since A was travelling abroad they even sent an email as his phone was not reachable. He converses with dealership over email to close but it unable due to lack of time. Dealership stops following up, I assume he was skipped over.
• 25th June 2023 - A shoots an email to Mahindra customer care requesting update of his booking and reconfirmation of price protection. [b]He is promptly connected to dealership who confirm a tentative date in October 2023 and reconfirm that vehicle is under price protection (Mail screenshot below)
• 14th May 2024 - A reinitiates the conversation on the same email as there has been no update all this time regarding the delivery of the vehicle. He is promptly confirmed that vehicle is available and he can take delivery
• 29th May 2024 - Dealership shares the corrected PI of 10.99 lakh ex-showroom (screenshot below) after A reminds them of the price protection
• 13th June 2024 - A makes 100% of the payment and is assured delivery in coming days

From here on everything goes downhill. He get a reply same evening that system is capturing full price and please contact Mahindra. Over the course of next few days he converses with multiple people at Mahindra and Dealership and below is the gist

Mahindra - Sir the price protection was till may 2024 only.
A - Was any intimation done regarding this? No answer
Dealership - Sir you were offered a vehicle in Feb 2023 you did not take it
A - Precisely the reason I requested for re confirmation in June 2023 which you did
Dealership - Sir you did not do enough follow up for the vehicle with us! If you had called us up regularly we would have allotted vehicle earlier.
A - No answers to that

My friend is fed up with attitude of Mahindra and Dealership of take it or leave it and planning to cancel the booking and take the refund. I have requested him to wait for a few days and offered to help.

Look forward to some suggestions on how to go about it.

Cheers
Vishwas

[commander.sri]

Oh my God! Looks like this dealer has reached new heights of idiocy. This is ridiculously pathetic customer service!

Not sure how far our laws for consumer rights would help Mr.A but I sincerely hope he finds solace soon.

[Turbanator]

Originally Posted by vishwaschettri

was within the first initial lot who got the price protection - 10.99 Lakh
Dealership offers the vehicle. Full marks to them for the promptness, since A was travelling abroad they even sent an email as his phone was not reachable. He converses with dealership over email to close but it unable due to lack of time. Dealership stops following up, I assume he was skipped over.

I think the price protection is only one time, once you skip the allocation or do any change in the booking, you lose the same. I won't fault the dealer entirely. At best, the dealership could have sent a formal Email at that time.

Your friend can try sending email to Mahindra customer care, or press a bit more at dealership, given the lacklustre month, they may budge or come somewhere in-between.

[akhil_007]

What happened from October 2023 till 14th May 2024?

I am trying to understand if there was no communication between your friend and the dealership during this 7 month window

Did your friend reach out to dealer via phone/whatsapp/email checking about his delivery status as on October 2023? Or is the waiting period for Thar generally so long that dealers reach to customers as and when their turn comes up.

[rajeevsulu]

Price protection is for the first 10,000 units only, if I remember right. Moreover, on refusal to take the vehicle when first offered, he has forfeited price protection and his allotment would have passed on to the person next in line.

I booked a vehicle similarly and took delivery on March 17th, 2023.

I got price protection and I never got any confirmation mail from the dealer or Mahindra but it was honoured.

All the best.

[aravind.anand]

Honestly, after not being able to take delivery when the car was being offered, and with no communication over such a long period, I cannot fault the dealer here. At the end of the day, it is one among a thousand bookings for the dealer, but your friend could have followed up with them regularly as it was his only booking.

M&M and the dealer already have a huge list of people in the waiting list, and even legally, there is little one can do to challenge them in this case. So I think it is better to pay the current price and start enjoying his Thar at least from now.

[BrakeDancer]

I don't understand why your friend didn't follow up from June 2023 to May 2024. That's a long time frame of 11 months. Price protection is not absolute, and the dealership might have internal restrictions on the time period for which they can offer this.That's just a guess on my part. This clarification could have been sought from your friends side much earlier in the process.

M&M dealerships are shoddy and pathetic in general, in my experience, with their long drawn out, artificial waiting periods, lack of test drives, poor customer service etc. Expecting them to act in good faith and to test the boundaries of that is a pretty good way to be disappointed! It's also why I never recommend my close friends and family to go that route for their hard earned money.

[wooka]

This happened with me and I've taken MnM to court for it.
I'd booked an AX5 700 D AT on the first day of the booking (albeit, offline, as I got a call from the dealer stating that people who had added to the carry but couldn't check out on time, before the limit of 25k booking for the day were reached, are getting price protection on offline payment.

Went to the showroom. Didn't like the smell of it. Got it signed and stamped, that current prices will be protected, on the booking sheet. Koncept Mahindra Noida was happy to take my 21,000 rupees against this promise.

Fast forwards 1.5 years. They said no, flat out, to the price protection. There was some dodge ball over the perhaps not communicating my booking to MnM in the 'special window', to no avail. It took over ten emails to finally get them to say no in writing over email. They then blamed MnM while MnM blamed the dealership.

End result? Frustration. A lawsuit. We'll see what comes of it. Hard to ignore money sat on, multiple emails dodging the price protection, and a signed and stamped statement. I call it breach of contract.

[Hayek]

Frankly I find your friend’s behaviour truly mystifying. He was offered a car and didn’t take it. He then didn’t follow up for one more year. And then expects the old price to hold. It is obvious that this would not work. When there is a huge waitlist and people are following up every day, it is perfectly reasonable for a dealer to assume that someone who did not follow up had merely booked for option value, and perhaps has already bought the car from someone else or bought another car. There are plenty of folks on this forum itself who have booked the same car from multiple dealers - which is why no one believes these huge wait lists and sets up additional capacity to fill them.

[vishwaschettri]

Thanks everyone for your input. My beef with Mahindra is that A specifically confirmed with Mahindra if his price protection is still valid post inability to take the delivery which they confirmed in writing.

Beef with dealership is that they even took the final 100% amount (which is still lying with them) confirming the price protection and sharing PI for same.

Originally Posted by commander.sri

Oh my God! Looks like this dealer has reached new heights of idiocy. Not sure how far our laws for consumer rights would help Mr.A but I sincerely hope he finds solace soon.

He wont have the energy for this but glad you share my sentiment on the poor handling of this by Mahindra and Dealer

Originally Posted by Turbanator

I think the price protection is only one time, once you skip the allocation or do any change in the booking, you lose the same.

Thanks, from what I know Mahindra does allows once to pass over the booking based on my discussion with a few people but it is not in black and white anywhere. It is unfair to expect someone to be ready with money, time and resources to take the delivery immediately whenever Mahindra calls. However this discussion is moot in this particular case as A did check if his price protection was still valid after passing on the first offer and same was confirmed in writing.

Originally Posted by akhil_007

What happened from October 2023 till 14th May 2024?
Or is the waiting period for Thar generally so long that dealers reach to customers as and when their turn comes up.

Thar RWD diesel waiting periods are 24 months as of today. A did reach out to dealership but did not get a favorable response in between. He is a simple person and cannot push people. Even now I made him write a mail to Mahindra which led to allotment.

Originally Posted by rajeevsulu

Moreover,on refusal to take the vehicle when first offered,he has forefieted price protection and his allotment would have passed on to the person next in line.
I got price protection and I never got any confirmation mail from the dealer or Mahindra but it was honoured.

Congratulation on your vehicle, IIRC reading on other thread you are making the most of it. In this case Mahindra did clarify that price protection was still valid post passing over the first offer in writing. Mahindra has been very opaque about the price protection and does not even confirms the same as corroborated by you. In contrast my booking with TATA of Tiago EV came with clear communication of price protection and with details of validity of same. It is a different matter that TATA ended up reducing the price

Originally Posted by aravind.anand

M&M and the dealer already have a huge list of people in the waiting list, and even legally, there is little one can do to challenge them in this case. So I think it is better to pay the current price and start enjoying his Thar at least from now.

Thanks but I do not agree with you on this. We have reached a point where we accept such low standard of service. We have been conditioned to accept that as a customer paying through their noses for a highly over priced vehicle and waiting for it for years post paying the booking amount, it is our job to keep a follow up with dealer. The snobbishness I have seen in attitude of sales executives in last couple of years is astonishing. Thankfully the tide is changing and sense is coming back to the industry. It is tuning from a sellers market back to a buyers market.
Thar was anyways way over priced at initial price. At 2L additional it will simply not make sense to A.

Originally Posted by BrakeDancer

M&M dealerships are shoddy and pathetic in general, in my experience, with their long drawn out, artificial waiting periods, lack of test drives, poor customer service etc. Expecting them to act in good faith and to test the boundaries of that is a pretty good way to be disappointed! It's also why I never recommend my close friends and family to go that route for their hard earned money.

Yeah, I guess the onus of diligent follow up is on customer in current scenarios. Agree on your comment on dealership experience. Mahindra dealers are drunk on the recent success of one after other block buster launches.

Originally Posted by wooka

End result? Frustration. A lawsuit. We'll see what comes of it. Hard to ignore money sat on, multiple emails dodging the price protection, and a signed and stamped statement. I call it breach of contract.

More power to you Sir. I hope you take them to the cleaners. Do keep us updated on how it goes.

Cheers

[venukrithish]

What was A doing since October? Also denying the vehicle at the first time offering means letting go of price protection. I'm not sure how A managed a confirmation in June but is he even serious about the purchase? I can't fault the dealer entirely here though bringing up may 2024 as expiry is stupid.

[samitjain]

Believe both are at fault. Expecting a person to refuse delivery and without diligent follow up and asking price protection almost 18 months is too much. Dealer was wrong by taking full money and then refusing to honour the price. Why is the person taking so much time to make payments is also very curious. If he had taken loan then it is understandable, but when person is waiting for car last 18 months, but still taking 15 days to make payment is something very strange.

Unless you can hear both sides it’s very difficult to make any judgment.

[Grr7]

For the members who are saying price protection ends if delivery is refused (and rolled over).

I got a Mahindra Thar RWD on price protection after refusing delivery twice.

At the time of booking, my tentative.delivery was shown in July-August and I had it planned accordingly on a birthday occassion.

Dealer offered me delivery in March and May, but I refused both time, my priority was rolled over to the lowest in the list. But I got price protected delivery as per original tenatative delivery schedule.

[SixPistons]

Respectfully to all other BHPians here, I tend to disagree with most of the points. E.g. For the dealership it is one of 1000s of bookings, is not a valid rebuttal and I don’t see how any dealership can make a case basis that statement. They finally gave a Price Protected Proforma Invoice too, didn’t they?

There is also no clarity I can see about Mahindra’s rules for validity for price protection for this or any other cars on two factors: Number of Refusals; Expiry date for Price Protection.

The arguments about 7 month delay, 1 year delay, what the owner was doing, what the dealer was doing, price protection forfeiting after n refusals of delivery get thrown out the window when at the end of May, before finalising the purchase, the dealership provided a Proforma Invoice highlighting price protection compatible pricing and the fact that price protection was still in play was confirmed.

The dealership did not tell him on 29th of May that the price is only valid for next two days, until the buyer made the transfer. Why? Was the Proforma Invoice prepared by an Intern? And it is completely normal to expect a 7-15 day turn around to transactions this size; it could be a company lease/loan approval etc that can take lot of time.

They gave a PI basis which buyer decided to proceed with the purchase, made the transfer of money and then came back asking for more money citing something they did not communicate earlier. This is pure breach of contract, and dealer is definitely liable for (intentionally/unintentionally) misleading the buyer into this transaction.