[findviru]

Such cheap marketing tactics will lead to negative publicity in the long term. Already sales person are using feature deletion saga as one more bad point about Tata vehicles.

[Kosfactor]

Toyota Prius also came with these things called structure wheels, looks like an alloy but not an alloy, lets not forget that car costs a bomb in India.

The cheaper version of Nexon also comes with similar looking wheel, another vehicle I can think of is Kwid Climber, Until I saw a broken one I thought it was a real aluminium alloy wheel.

One thing I do not get is this, why are we not sure of what we are getting?
Why are we bowing to sales tricks and booking vehicles without seeing what we are getting?

This is not online shopping, you have gone there, seen it and then bought it after going through a mountain of paper work and still..

[Kishen.padiyar]

Guys can we take a pause at the bashing and go back to the basics? Alloy is a term used to identify the material and not the design. If the mass market understanding of alloy wheels are different from what it actually means, it is not the company at fault here. Are the wheels on the cars in question made of 100% steel? if yes; then it is questionable. Has the quality/strength been compromised? Owners can comment here.

And if I recollect correctly; some versions of i20 features similar wheels back in 2016. What I am not sure here is what the brochure read in this case.

[GTO]

Originally Posted by Kosfactor

One thing I do not get is this, why are we not sure of what we are getting?

When I bought the Nissan Sunny, I bought it without even going to the showroom or seeing the car. It was entirely based on what I read on Team-BHP & the variant was chosen based on Nissan's website.

Now, if the website said my variant has climate control, I believed it had climate control. I didn't bother checking if it said var-climate control, or dur-climate control or cool-climate control. For me, climate control meant climate control.

That is where Tata is intentionally fooling its potential customers - as is clear from the owner's comments in the opening page of this thread. Technicalities aside, we will all agree that "alloy wheels" means "alloy wheels".

Such sly marketing doesn't suit a company with the stature of Tata Motors which is only beginning to win back respect from a lot of us. If a roadside accessory shop sold me such wheel caps packaged as alloy wheels, I'd be furious, but not surprised. With Tata, I am.

[CrAzY dRiVeR]

Damn! They fooled my eyes completely too. Excellent execution, pathetic dishonest marketing -

[blackasta]

What the market calls as 'steel' wheels may be whatever alloy of steel, but they are stamped + welded, versus 'alloy' alloys which are cast in a die.

What wikipedia says - 'Although steel, the most common material used in wheel production, is an alloy of iron and carbon, the term "alloy wheel" is usually reserved for wheels made from nonferrous alloys.'

That should clear the jargon around what can be termed as 'alloy' wheels vs 'steel' wheels.

P.S - Hyundai i20 and earlier Chevy Beat used to come with such wheels, but they were never advertised as alloys.

[Samba]

A clip type wheel cap with 4 holes from where one can even open the nuts/bolts to open the wheel without even removing the wheel cap! Cunning, very cunning!

They could have easily promoted it by saying - New stylish wheel cap or anything of that sort. There is no short cut, proved yet again. In today's date with such active social media sites how could they even take such a risk to fool people?!

If they can do this on an external part, i shudder to think what cost cuttings they do internally.

Such activities just simply takes away the trust from a brand.

This should have a mention in this thread!

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/india...ive-scene.html (The Biggest Blunders in the Indian Automotive Scene)

[amit_mechengg]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ugWZ7vg068

There is a patent for the duralloy. Its just what people are correlating a duralloy with. Metal comes in various forms, cast iron with carbon, SG iron with alloys to make it more tensile, steel rims and duralloy steel rims.

Tata should have clearly mentioned the meaning of duralloy in brochures. We rampantly see marketing gimmicks like smart hybrid, all new xx model when its just a sticker job etc. These are ways that complex Sci-Fi words are used by many manufacturers.

Customer either believes in fantasy words and blindly pays for it or rejects it if they are technically competent enough to understand what lies beneath.

[digitalnirvana]

This customer should get alloys for free or at a reduced price as a face saving measure. And going forward, remove the misleading marketing jargon and be honest about what you are selling!

What pains me is that TML were always thought of as honest people - they gave cars which were more spacious, more abuse friendly, and at times more feature laden .. and where they failed was their reliability, but even then they would generally come up with a v2 or a refresh that improved the product.

Yes people would berate them for their service attitude and overall finesse, but I'd rarely seen anyone saying Tata are unscrupulous (sorry this is probably a very harsh term to use). Perhaps this stemmed from the reputation of the top man at the helm of the group, that they always had a trust bonus in the minds of the common man.

Boy oh boy, what a way to screw things up. At that too over literally pennies. The Maruti mentality is now in full swing in TML.

Edit after seeing Crazy Driver's post (Tata's "DurAlloy Wheel" is actually a steel rim with a plastic wheel cap!) - probably I shouldn't have gone on a rant, nevertheless their marketing term IS misleading - whether intentional or not. Most customers would think they are getting an alloy wheel when it clearly is not.

[Arjun Reddy]

So, we need to update our Team BHP PDI checklist.

It should now contain,

Check the alloy wheels to ensure that they are not plastic caps.

Remove the front bumpers and check if the cross member is a solid one.

Tow the car and check if it crumbles.

Check if the car has been fitted with the right sized airbags or it comes with small sized ones.

Check if the edition or variant is actually what it is supposed to be and is not a painted or stickered replica.

Get under the car and check if the K truss is missing.

The list goes on. :

[Kosfactor]

Originally Posted by GTO

When I bought the Nissan Sunny, I bought it without even going to the showroom or seeing the car. It was entirely based on what I read on Team-BHP & the variant was chosen based on Nissan's website.

Now, if the website said my variant has climate control, I believed it had climate control. I didn't bother checking if it said var-climate control, or dur-climate control or cool-climate control. For me, climate control meant climate control.

Now, that is where Tata is intentionally fooling its potential customers - as is clear from the owner's comments in the opening page of this thread. Technicalities aside, we will all agree that "alloy wheels" means "alloy wheels".

Such sly marketing doesn't suit a company with the stature of Tata Motors which is only beginning to win back respect from a lot of us. If a roadside accessory shop sold me such wheel caps packaged as alloy wheels, I'd be furious, but not surprised. With Tata, I am.

You can count me in on that GTO. I bought the Thar after going through multiple dealer yards and booking what I wanted BUT.... I never drove it, I declined everytime they asked me to take a test drive, I knew how it drives from T-BHP, I did not want to spoil the surprise. Because the driving experience is really the only surprise it has, in terms of features it has - None.

DurAlloy is deceptive marketing at its worst, their website is going to put them in a lot of trouble if this goes to court I think, and someone should take them to court as an example for the industry altogether.

Since we have seen manufacturers like Tata removing some features silently from their cars recently, i`m not one bit surprised. But I get it, the poor chap who got this (and many about to get this) may have been bedazzled by the overall looks of the vehicle and the fancy marketing.

Guess who else was furious? Cabbies - When Etios was released the model which cabbies buy had Stereo but no ABS \ Airbag, and then they introduced just the airbags by deleting the stereo, cabbies were not one bit happy as they had seen it with stereo at the time of booking and could care less about airbags which they cant see anyways.

The message is, manufacturers may change specification at any point without prior notice, they manufacture , dont they? Just assume changing the fuel injection system from Delphi to Bosch.

OR better yet , You`ve seen the vehicle with Bridgestones, driven the vehicle with Bridgestones and it comes home with a JK Tyre! Will it matter? oh yes, a whole lot and a bit more than this plastic duralloy contraption.

So Buyers beware, a car that is essentially the same Tiago with more plastic, has even more plastic where it is least expected, the wheels. Manufacturers are in this to make money, as easily as they can.

[CrAzY dRiVeR]

TATA had tweeted this sometime in September -

[arunphilip]

Originally Posted by CrAzY dRiVeR

TATA had tweeted this sometime in September -

Good spot. Good that they're clear when asked what it entails.

I only take objection to the name. Ask a common man what they think is meant by "DurAlloy" with respect to a car, and they'll probably guess "durable alloy". Nowhere does it give the impression that it is just looks.

Change the name to "PseudoAlloy", "AlloyLook", "VisualAlloy" or something similar, and I - for one - will not have a problem with it.

Originally Posted by CrAzY dRiVeR

"DurAlloy Wheels with Dual tone plastic caps" would have been technically correct and straight forward than 'Dual tone 4 spoke DurAlloy wheels'.

Agreed - while "DurAlloy Wheels" might still be a bit confusing, explicitly calling out the caps makes it clearer.

[CrAzY dRiVeR]

Originally Posted by arunphilip

Change the name to "PseudoAlloy", "AlloyLook", "VisualAlloy" or something similar, and I - for one - will not have a problem with it.

"DurAlloy Wheels with Dual tone plastic caps" would have been technically correct and straight forward than 'Dual tone 4 spoke DurAlloy wheels'.

[srishiva]

Its still not the wheel. Its a cap. Tata shouldn't have done this. The durable part in the DurAlloy then is that the cap is durable? Its great since I have seen wheel caps really breaking etc