It looks like folks in the US will have to wait a little longer before getting their hands on the Mahindra range of vehicles. Mahindra’s global managing director, Anand Mahindra, reportedly has plans to run a fleet of vehicles over 5 million kilometres of US roads, before he’ll allow sales to proceed.
Georgia-based Global Vehicles will be overseeing US sales, and has so far signed 324 dealers, though few of them have actually built the required facilities. Global Vehicles plan to continue signing up dealers, until they reach their target of 450 dealerships across the States. Automotive News reports that Global Vehicles’ CEO, John Perez, received the bad news from Anand Mahindra, who explained that no vehicle bearing his family name would fail in the US.
To compound issues, Mahindra intends to run a four cylinder diesel engine which has yet to be approved for US consumption by the EPA. Perez, however, is confident that their January application will be approved without incident.
With a sales goal of 50,000 vehicles, and a production capacity of 400,000 if demand requires it, Mahindra is justified in pursuing further testing, before debuting their product in North America. It may mean a delay for consumers, but the effort will go a long way in assisting the potential success of the entire range.
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So they tested their plans in Australia and things did not take off quite like they hoped so they are a bit worried about heading to the big city, the US.
The main problems for Australia were.
The power-too low, even those who don’t need it, want to say they have it. What they think all the 20 something year olds buying 4×4 utes are actually workers living on farms? Not even close, they are city slickers who probably get a work ute to put their tools in anyway, but want to say they have a big hulking dual cab anyway.
Second it looks silly. Unless it has a real heavy bar on it, the nose looks really strange. Our favoured 4×4 utes have profiles like mako sharks. The mahindra looks like some kind of wierd furry animal. There is not way you can look at it to bend it into shape.
Third was bad timing.At the risk of sounding racist Australia is just not that keen on indians right now.We had 300,000 immigrating in a year and regardless of who is tolerant of who any immigration that large bends people out of shape the first few years.Both the hosts and the immigrants-until we all get used to each other. So I think a bit of prejudice against the Mahindra exists.
Lastly the indian market here does not exist. Indians aren’t even interested in mahindra pickups, they either want something with fins or one of our big cheap family cars to roll around in, like they can’t do on their roads back home.