Indian Autos blog

The day has finally dawned upon us. Honda has been dethroned from its last dominant segment. No longer is Honda-Siel a leader in any segment of the Indian car market.

It all started with 3 major products from Honda dominating the 3 respective segments. The Honda City was the king of the C+ Sedan Segment. The Honda Civic ruled the D Segment and the Honda Accord dominated in a segment above.

But slowly and steadily the competition crept up and Honda started losing pole position in all segment. The Toyota Corolla and Chevy Cruze dethroned the Civic. The Superb overtook the Accord. And finally, in the month of March 2011, the VW Vento has managed to outsell the segment leader – the Honda City by a margin of over 1,000 units. And Honda City isn’t even the the 2nd best selling sedan in that segment because the SX4 takes that title for the month of March.

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Pushed to the back foot after the Jazz failed to pick itself up, Honda is in a tight spot. There has been a sunroof here and a variant there but no real launches since the Jazz bowed in back in mid 2009. The new Civic is behind schedule, the Brio is also taking its time. Honda’s been hit hard in every segment and diesel’s absence is one of the reasons.  [ Read More ]

India’s largest carmaker – Maruti Suzuki has yet again hiked the prices (since its last hike in October’08) of its cars by Rs 5,000-10,000 with effect from January 28, attributing it to higher input prices and foreign currency movement, which affects prices of imported components.

While prices of all variants of SX4 sedan has been hiked by Rs 9,000, the price of Swift Petrol LXi has now been revised upwards by Rs 5,000.