SUV Segment To See Intense Competition Among Players: Tata Motors

Tata Motors on Tuesday said it plans to keep updating its SUV range as it expects the robustly growing segment to remain highly competitive with presence of all leading players.

Sports utility vehicles are driving the overall growth of the domestic passenger vehicle segment.

As per the latest SIAM data, SUV sales account for 60 per cent of the overall passenger vehicle sales in the country.

In an interaction with PTI, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Managing Director Shailesh Chandra said the company has a leadership position in some of the SUV sub-segments and is looking to consolidate in others.

"The SUV segment is going to be an intensely fought segment. The top three-four players will have just a few thousand (units) here and there. At some point someone will be number one, sometimes somebody else will become number two," he said.

He noted that in such scenarios it is more important to focus on the individual products and whether they are in the top two consideration for buyers.

Chandra said Punch and Nexon are market leaders in their respective segments while Harrier Safari combo was number two in its vertical.

Tata Motors on Tuesday rolled out new versions of Harrier and Safari with price starting at Rs 15.49 lakh and Rs 16.19 lakh, respectively.

"Going beyond this, we are coming with two more models -- Curvv and Sierra -- in 2024 and 2025, respectively," he stated.

So the company's SUV portfolio is going to further strengthen from where it is now, Chandra noted.

"We have been number one for quite some time. There have been few new launches by other players. The ranking will keep changing... there is no clear number one here.

"Important thing is that we are doing excellent in all these four SUVs that we have. More importantly, we are adding to this portfolio, so our strength in SUV is going to always remain very strong going forward," he added.

The updated versions of both Harrier and Safari have received top safety ratings from the vehicle safety group Global NCAP.

"With their 5-star GNCAP rating and highest scores by any Indian vehicle to date, our SUVs are the safest spaces on Indian roads," Chandra said.

In a separate statement, Global NCAP said it has given five-star safety ratings to the new versions of Tata Safari and Harrier SUVs.

Both models have achieved the highest ever score for adult and child occupant safety in the crash tests done by Global NCAP on Indian cars so far, it stated. Global NCAP rates vehicles from zero to five based on their safety features and automobiles with a higher rating are considered safer for occupants.

"This is a very strong result... the top adult and child safety score in our testing to date confirms the manufacturer's strong commitment to developing safer vehicles, which we warmly welcome and applaud," Global NCAP Secretary General Alejandro Furas said in a statement.  

Global NCAP's crash test protocols assess frontal and side impact protection for all models, as well as electronic stability control.