After spending billions of dollar on the development, marketing and on new plant in Gujarat just to facilitate Nano project which still didn’t turned out to be as successful as Tata motors anticipated. In order to recover the incurred cost in the all new facility of Gujarat Tata motors is developing is a slight bigger hatchback than Nano but on the same platform as Nano codenamed ‘Pelican’ to go head to head with World’s bestselling car Maruti Suzuki Alto.
Nano was a dream project for Tata especially for Tata’s chairman Ratan Tata; he worked many years on this project and kept his promise to deliver Nano with the price of Rs. 1 lakh. But even after such marketing techniques and hype at the time of its launch Nano became an extremely hard ca to sell. During April-November 2014 Nano sales stood at just 9919 units witnessed a decline of over 26% as compared to last year.
Tata Pelican will be sold under new brand name and will be powered by 1.0L petrol engine and 0.8L diesel engine, if reports to be believed diesel Pelican might be the cheapest diesel car in India when launched and will be exported to several other markets.
Tata is expecting monthly sales of 2500 units giving it a comeback status car in the market against world bestselling Alto which sells around 2 lakh units per year and another rival in the form of Hyundai EON which sells around 6000 units a month.
Tata will launch Bolt hatchback on 21st January 2015 followed by many car launches lining up this year like Tata kite compact sedan and hatchback, compact SUV and Tata safari Strome facelift.
The Pelican will be manufactured in Tata’s Sanand facility which was specifically built for Nano and it has a capacity of producing over 2, 50,000 lakh units per annum. However plant is underutilized producing only 1300 Nano a month due to lesser sales as expected.
In recent years Tata’s domestic passenger car sales volumes have declined stridently, During April-November 2014 Tata only sold 92,227 units registering 11 percent decline as compared to previous year. On the contrary, December 2014 brought some good news for the home grown car maker with 30% rise in sales which stood at 12,040 units in comparison to December 2013 due to overwhelming response of its compact sedan Zest.
