Known among customers for reliability and long life of its products, Honda became the lone car manufacturer in the country to register a growth rate of 23% in the first month of this very year. A large part of this success can be attributed to the fact that the Japanese car maker’s newly launched sub-compact was a major success among the customers. With Honda Brio set to exit the market soon, the company has stated that it has no plans to launch a vehicle cheaper than its Amaze.
Explaining the reason behind this decision of the Japanese giant, its president of Indian car division Gaku Nakanishi stated that Brio is set to go out of production shortly. He further said that in order to keep Honda distinct from the other car makers, the brand is not trying to emulate the mass movement of sales like Maruti in India, or aiming to challenge it like Hyundai. Neither is it trying to enter the luxury segment like Mercedes, BMW, or Audi. Instead the brand is focusing on adding to its customer experience, through cars, service, and dealership experience. With Amaze the brand targeted novel car customers in the market. Nearly a third the sales for the sub-compact sedan came from that very category of customers. He said that in order to cut a different image among the customers, the brand has decided to not launch any products below the Amaze sedan.
With the SUV segments in India flourishing recently, the Japanese brand too is mulling about launching a product in the sub-compact SUV in order to capture a share of market in the segment. The top Honda honcho stated that Indian market is in a state of contant flux, and as the wind currently bloes in favour of SUVs, the brand too would like to sail in the wind.
Taking a look at Honda’s products in category, the brand offers WR-V. It has been pulling in good number of units for the company. The longer BR-V as well as the recently updated CR-V also adore Japanese brand’s SUV line-up in India. While the Jazz is brand’s lone hatchback offering as of now, the sedan line of Honda has a product in every category, right from sub-compact sedan Amaze to top-end Accord.
However, what is true of the sedan line-up, does not hold true for the SUV models of the brand. With other brands fast filling up the empty segments in their SUV line-ups the Japanese brand too is buckling up to do the same. This could be good news for prospective SUV buyers as Honda could bring in a sub-4 meter compact SUV to fill in the void of their SUV models.