Why Small Is Big, Once Again

As consumers downtrade and first-time buyers view cars as an antidote to public transport in a pandemic, Maruti gets back to what it would do best: Selling minis

- RAJIV SINGH

Mahesh Patel curbed his ‘desire’ at the right time. “I was keen to buy a sedan in March,” says the 27-year-old HR (human resource) manager at a shipping firm in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The plan was simple. Make a down payment of ₹1 lakh, and take an auto loan of ₹6 lakh to drive home in a gleaming blue Maruti Dzire. There was only one glitch. Though the loan got approved on March 21, the nation went into a lockdown two days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The plan got stalled for a month.

In May came another shocker. Hit by Covid-19, Patel’s firm cut his salary by 30 percent. Dejected, the HR executive bought a little S-Presso for over ₹4 lakh. “I downgraded my desire, not my dream,” he says. A small car, he adds, is the new normal.

Meanwhile, in Delhi last month, Saurabh Saxena too slashed his budget, and intent. The travel agent had been planning for a year to buy the S-Cross, an SUV from the Maruti stable. However, the 30-year-old ended up buying the Ignis, a compact SUV that’s almost half the price of the S-Cross. Reason: His business went for a toss because of the coronavirus and subsequent lockdowns, and dipping into the cash reserves to buy a car seemed outrageous. Covid, he says, has been devastating for travel and tourism. Saxena still mustered the courage to buy a car. “I needed one to commute. You can’t book a taxi and travel now,” he says, expressing his concerns about sharing a car and using public transport.

The First-Time Phenomenon

First-time buyer sales of total sales for Industry in 2019-20 42%

First-time buyer sales of total sales for Maruti in 2019-20 47%