The Indian market is truly growing, if not in sales, but certainly in maturity! Even though the automobile sector is seeing bad days, there are certain cars which are doing well despite the downturn. The New Honda City is one of them.
The City has always been an aspirational model and one of the significant contributors to Honda’s tally. Prior to the new City, the only gripe it faced was the absence of a diesel option. The present iteration has solved this limitation. The 1.5L i-DTEC with a six speed transmission with 100PS of power might not tick the ‘power’ box but the bumper response it has received is a testimony to the fact that Indians love ‘City’!
The cheapest variant of the petrol powered City starts at 7.19lacs, the VX variant is for 9.85lacs. The automatic transmission variants include the SV and VX for 9.36 and 10.9 lacs respectively (all prices ex-showroom, Delhi). The top of the line diesel goes for 10.99lacs with a manual transmission.
The question then is – Which variant do you think sells the most? If you said the entry or the mid, I would have to request you to think again. Surprisingly, unlike most cars (where mid is the largest selling variant), Honda is shipping more top of the line variants according to Zigwheels.com. They say out of all the shipments, Honda is shipping nearly 50% of top end models.
The company officials say that they expected 20 percent of customers to go for the top variant but the huge demand has compelled the company to modify their production plans. The automatic variant has also been garnering a lot of sales. Honda’s Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) has always been a pleasure to drive and has seen a spurt in demand with each new generation of the City. This time round, even though it is available only in the petrol version, the CVT has a share of 30 per cent of the top variant sales.
The top automatic variant of Honda City gets keyless boot operation, push button start/stop, leather upholstery, and a sunroof. To top it all the paddle shifts add to the coolness, or let’s say the convenience quotient.
Related: Next-Gen Honda Jazz Spotted in India
