[sreejithkk]

Originally Posted by amalji

A hypothetical conversation.
The car will be ruthlessly tagged as over prized. And it will be a bummer. Don't you know what happened to the All new Ford Fiesta which was otherwise a well built car?
happened to Ford India as they kept cutting on features instead of safety to stay profitable ?

Yes, in India features/reliability/looks matters over safety. However I would not consider Fords as the example of safety unless it was proved by GNCAP. The only ford cars that are tested by GNCAP (first gen and 2nd gen Figo) just scored 0 and 3 stars. If once can gauge a car's safety by panel thickness, I would have never expected the Etios to score 4 star.

Also there are models from Mahindra and Tata and even Suzuki/Toyota that provides excellent (5 star) and reasonable (4 star) safety with out overpricing or cutting down too much features that too in more price sensitive CSUV segment.

The biggest issue is we have very few cars that are tested, and for the untested cars, people go by their rating in other markets and hence consider them safer, which is usually not applicable in India. This is already proved by rating of Creta, Seltos, Swift (4 star in ASEAN NCAP), Ertiga (4 star in ASEAN NCAP) albeit they sharing the identical kerb weight in these markets.

[AutoNoob]

Originally Posted by amalji

Engineer: The only thing we can do is on the steel quality. Maybe, we can save around 1 Lakh with it. Add tax on top of it and it is worth 2 Lakhs of savings. What do you think?

Small correction in this assumption. The savings for all such steel reduction (5star to 2 star) is just in range of 4000~8000 rupees for OEM. After adding taxes etc. it costs about 7000~15000 rupees to customer.

And this is where I hate all these manufacturers. Just to cater to the majority (uninformed) customers, OEMs are playing with lives of many.

Moral of the Story: We get what we deserve. What we prioritize as a market is what we get.

True. Some (like Mr. Bhargawa) may say, in India people don't want to pay even this much extra, don't even wear seat-belts, drive irrationally. So, OEMs don't have any moral responsibility.

And these top-shots are the very people sitting in SIAM, advisory bodies resisting push from government to make safety as mandatory aspect. Just ask them where is BNVSAP ? GNCAP is moving to updated evaluation method this year and mandatory BNVSAP rating is not even on horizon.

[Bhargav7]

Originally Posted by AutoNoob

True. Some (like Mr. Bhargawa) may say, in India people don't want to pay even this much extra, don't even wear seat-belts, drive irrationally. So, OEMs don't have any moral responsibility.

Wondered why I was pulled into this discussion, and then I realised

Originally Posted by AutoNoob

Small correction in this assumption. The savings for all such steel reduction (5star to 2 star) is just in range of 4000~8000 rupees for OEM. After adding taxes etc. it costs about 7000~15000 rupees to customer.

This is a laughably small amount to save. But again, I am not surprised as manufacturers omit seat belts for the rear center passengers which probably saves like 500 rupees.