Its no secret that General Motors is not having a good time here in India with continuous falling sales and increasing losses. The condition here has been getting bad to worse. The only hope which Chevrolet, GM’s arm which operates in India, has is to digress into other segments which are growing rapidly in the market. And the first thing which comes to everyone’s mind is the compact sedan segment.
As per a report in Economic Times, General Motors will soon begin work on a compact sedan. The project codenamed MCM, will be using the M300 platform, the same one on which the present generation Beat is based. This may not mean that they would just add a boot into the rear of the Beat (like what Maruti did with the Swift to form the Dzire) as doing that would result in a very ugly looking disproportional car!
The compact sedan segment in the country sees a movement of nearly 3.5 lakh units per year, growing with each passing day. Manufacturers, who are fighting a hard battle of trying to increase their market share, are all shifting their focus on the sub 4m compact segment. Ford and Volkswagen are two auto majors who will also be attempting to try their luck in this segment soon. Even Tata Motors, the homebred auto major started its revival strategy with a compact sedan, Zest and has plans of another car lower down.
The company will most probably be launching the compact sedan before the arrival of products under the Amber Project, which is now being called as the upcoming Global Emerging Market (GEM) platform cars. The proposed Amber Project is rumoured to comprise of a premium hatchback, a compact sedan and a compact SUV. This project though will take a good 3-4 years to hit the roads as developing a new platform takes a lot of time and resources. Till then a compact sedan makes complete sense.
The company is also working on the next generation Beat which is due in 2017. They also aim to make India a major export hub to Latin America in order to expand the utilisation of their assembly lines. Amidst all this, we wonder why is the Adra compact SUV project, which had all the chances of being a success, not being considered earlier!
Related: Get Chevy Beat at a Whooping Discount of 95,000
