TheEconomicTimes brings us a scintillating revelation this morning. The newspaper reports that Mahindra has christened the hatchback avatar of the Verito as ‘Vibe’. The automaker is ready to launch the Vibe next month with a starting price of 6 lakhs.
We would like to remind our audience that after the split with Renault, Mahindra managed to secure all the rights to the Logan sedan in India. Soon the Logan was rebadged as Verito and re-introduced in the Indian market as a Mahindra product.
As Mahindra got all the rights to the first generation Logan platform, the automaker started tinkering with it for some possible future products. The first idea was to slightly chop the boot off and create a sub-4 meter sedan to rival the likes of Swift Dzire and the Honda Amaze.
However, when we saw the first test mule of the shortened Verito, we were very surprised because it was more of a hatchback than a sedan. We finally understood that Mahindra decided to created a hatchback out of the Logan platform rather than a sedan with a stubby boot.
Mahindra will launch the Vibe hatchback with a 1.5 litre K9K diesel engine borrowed from Renault-Nissan. The Quanto’s 1.5L twin-scroll turbo-charged engine is also a strong possibility for the Vibe. Either ways, the Vibe will only have a diesel engine for now because small petrol engine from Mahindra is still under development.
Because the Vibe hatchback is under four meters long and has a diesel engine of 1.5L capacity, it will be blessed with sizable tax benefits from the government.
With the Vibe, Mahindra wants to target some premium offerings such as the Swift, i20 and Polo. Thus, we could see a lot of premium features borrowed from other Mahindra models such as touch screen navigation from XUV500 and voice activated commands from the Xylo E9 variant.
[Source: Economictimes.indiatimes.com]
