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In my opinion the word "Options" in the title is a misnomer. From your description you seem to be referring to "customization from factory". This generally, from my experience is prevalent only in home markets or in uber luxury/super cars. So the Germans have it most for German or EU consumers, Americans for North America and Japanese for japan and so on. At most i would expect TATA or MAHINDRA to allow such things is India. Maruti is the only one realistically in any position to offer such variance. But Alas we know how they operate, hence they (Suzuki) are reduced to a few markets.


:OT For God sake Maruti just give us the Jimny 2 door already. Is that too much to ask for your cash cow market?

Disclaimer, there will be exceptions.

Forget features, we don’t even get options for colors for most cars in India. The higher end you go, the fewer the options. When I was buying my X3, I had choices of Deep Sea Blue with Beige or Saddle Brown Interiors, White with Mocha interiors and Black with Beige interiors (if I recall correctly). The GLC had Silver with Black interiors or 3 other colours with Beige interiors. You couldn’t get a GLC with memory seats or an X3 with a digital cluster (which was available on the 3GT). But that’s the price you pay for a stupid policy where people have to set up assembly plants which make no economic sense whatsoever to avoid onerous import duties - and where the locally assembled segments are so price sensitive that mass manufacturers can’t afford to make cars in “any colour but black”.

I agree! We as a market is still far away from being in a proper dilemma when it's time to buy cars.

The only confusion now is figuring out which among the shortlist forms a lesser compromise.

A related thread: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/india...tor-india.html

Some manufacturers really mess their variants up. First one that comes to mind is the Innova Crysta's base variant being launched without a head-unit :Shockked:! This, in a 15-lakh rupee car. On similar lines, some variants of more expensive cars don't have features that cars costing half-as-much from the same manufacturer do :Frustrati.

It's not just Compact SUVs - the dearth of Diesel ATs has always been a problem among the mass market cars. Reason = most of them are from Japan, USA or Korea where there is no demand for diesel automatics. Example, USA & Japan are predominantly petrol countries. No manufacturer is going to engineer a new Diesel AT gearbox for India where the volumes are very low. Of course, there are some exceptions like the Amaze Diesel CVT & they get rewarded by the market too.

Not counting the lame & jerky AMTs which you can slap onto any car.

None of Tata's current gen cars have Black as a colour option - it may not be a high selling colour, and maybe Tata wants to be the only manufacturer with that distinction :Frustrati

As opposed to Maruti Suzuki that sells around 15 models and controls over 50% of the passenger car market and still offers black as an option on a grand total of 1 model, namely the Ciaz? Let us try to be fair in our criticism!

Black, as good as it looks when kept shiny, unfortunately has gone out of fashion in our country. You can blame the buyer preferences for that. Car makers will sell only what sells.

They might be whatever in the market, but no offence, I have never considered a Maruti (yet).And considering the fact that this thread is about venting our frustration on lack of variant/ options in our market - I am frustrated that Tata does not offer Black - the biggest reason I am closing in on a XUV5OO instead of a Hexa or waiting for Harrier. Where does fairness come in here?

I might be a minority, but all my cars have been black (2005 - Indica DLX, 2008 - Getz GVS CRDi, 2013 - Verna SX (O) CRDi), and will remain so. And I am pissed off about the lack of option in a brand/ model that I could have considered - no need jump to conclusions popularity or fashion on a thread meant to vent frustation.

OT - is there a study on colour-wise car sales from our market? This old thread showed Black has a formidable market share.

EDIT - Something I found: https://www.axaltacs.com/content/dam...y%20Report.pdf

Not sure if this is a contributing factor to any significant levels, however here in Europe, pretty much all brands are offering customization to extreme levels in comparison - colors/wheels/different interior possibilities/suspension options/engines/transmissions/various styling possibilities and so on. Most of the cars can even be configured to a level where you can remove the brand/variant badges (I had the ‘D2’ badge removed from my Volvo V40) On the other hand, what is key is people are ready to wait months to get their cars built with their specs. I do not think we Indians are that patient as we want our cars to be always delivered as soon as possible. This could be a potential factor for companies forcing them to limit customization options but rather build variants/package deals and offer faster deliveries.

Feel free to continue venting your frustration. I mentioned fairness since you just jumped on Tata without acknowledging the fact that it is a market-trend, and being followed by most OEMs. Also, you neglected to mention that you were considering any Tata car. So there was no context to your post.

No one is jumping to conclusions. It seemed that you were unaware about the changing trends in the market. Therefore, just wanted to quote an example - 50% market share is relevant, whether you like it or not. Feel free to ignore. No one is bothered if you buy Maruti or Mercedes.

8% was the 'formidable' (in your own words) market share of Black 7 years ago. White + Silver was 57%.

Although share of Black is not clearly mentioned, White + Silver has increased to 62%.

Quoting from the report: "Light colors dominate India: white is 32 percent while silver is 30 percent".

Common sense says that the share of Black has probably further decreased.

Do feel free to go through the following threads as well. Shows why most people are not interested to buy black cars anymore.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/india...urers-too.html

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/india...-colour-8.html

Guess there is lot more frustration in the pipeline for you.

Not really, I'm going with black still lol: Thanks for pointing out the threads though.

Hyundai, while a great manufacturer, whose products I really like, is also the king of variant blunders.

I do not understand why they believe that an automatic transmission purchaser will want to let go off features being offered on a top end manual. If you want an automatic you get a mid variant across most of their model lines. I understand cost implications, but shouldn't that choice be that of the consumers ?

I so completely agree. After i abandoned the Octavia as the choice for my next car i zeroed in on the Creta - helps to have a SUV when one's hometown is in the hills . I was flabbergasted when i went to the showroom and was told that the Creta Automatic does not have the same features as the manual top end.

Upon asking why the salesperson ofcourse told me "demand" , which i do not believe. I settled for the Verna eventually.

Actually, it is all about keeping the costs low. Every product that gets launched is targeted at a segment and that to a large extent also gets defined by a price window. So if a manufacturer launches a C seg sedan and decides the price window to be between 13 lakhs and 16 lakhs, on road, then they have to strive to keep their calculations within that margin.

Typically adding a CVT or TC automatically shoots up the price by a lakh or more (depending on the manufacturer). So when an otherwise top-end variant with all the possible bells and whistles minus the autobox is already touching the price ceiling they have set for themselves the only way a product manager can bring in an auto variant is by cutting down on some other features.

Now this may or may not be the right strategy in terms of customer choice. However, this is probably the safest for them. Manufacturers do not want to take a chance with launching a variant that's priced too high and hence does not move much. Most have figured that Indian consumers who go for an autobox are pretty focused in terms of their need of an automatic variant. They are often ok to give up on a feature or two to get the auto variant of the model. As opposed to that the consumers who were looking for auto but find the price too high will definitely walk away.

Is there a way out? May be there is one. Mahindra followed that strategy with its XUV range. For almost every variant of their XUV they have an equivalent AT as well. So AT instead of being yet another variant in the list of variants basically ends being a transmission choice across variants. But most other manufacturers may not want to maintain such a huge inventory!

I remember from my childhood the 800 that only had 2 variants, std and dlx where the dlx variant had AC. Fast forward to today, some of the cars launched have nearly 6 variants not including engine and transmission options. Nexon has 6 variants. At what point is the number of variants too many?

Now most of the cars that we buy in India are made and dispatched to dealer and they are sold to us, i.e, they are not made to order. The pressure is on the manufacturer to get the variants right when they are manufacturing. And if the market chooses a variant other than what the manufacturer anticipated, then it will also become an issue where the variant ratio needs to be changed and that will further increase waiting time for consumers.

One more issue is the variant naming. Taking the same Nexon example, it has 6 variants. XE, XM, XZ, XZ+, XZ+(S), XZ+(O). How is an average consumer expected to make sense of these variants. There are 4 XZ variants when XZ is meant to signify the topmost variant. There can only be one 1st prize, right? Tata had it simple when it started this X? series, with XE, XM, XT being entry, mid and top. Somewhere down the line they started XZ. And now with this pluses and brackets. At some point, it just feels like a maths lesson with all the symbols and brackets. If they want everyone to feel like they are buying a top end variant with, you know, XZ, why not replace XE and XM with XZ- and XZ--. :Frustrati

I completely agree with you on this point, messing up the naming conventions and having a plethora of variants do no good for Car's image and neither for the consumer.

I recall when we bough an Esteem in the mid 90s, it was straightforward, LX and VX and on a rare occasion the AX to signify the automatic trim. But everyone knew LX was the entry point to the car and VX was the one with the bells and whistles like power windows etc.

Tata too could have easily kept things as XE, XM, XT and XZ, so that the badge at the back.of the car actually holds some value. Even take Kia for example, nearly 30 variants of the Seltos, while I am all for offering an option to a consumer at every price point, so many variants are just confusing for the buyer as well as the dealer who usually have no idea about every particular variant in detail.

Back in the day the Optional Cars (O) were the ones which were just personally customized options of the top variants, which only those people bought who wanted some level of personalization, Today it's the O variant which most people have to get if they wants features like a touch screen or a sun room.

Though IMO MSIL has still kept things fairly on the right track be it with the Arena or even Nexa, although they have added the ZXI plus as top of the line but that's about it.

Though what makes matters worse in cases like Tata is the sheer price differential in the different sub variants of the XZ moniker, starts around 10L and goes up to 14L, which is huge for a car of this segment, not that it's very important but nobody wants their neighbour thinking they went for 10L car when they actually spent nearly 1.5 millions rupees.