Tata Tiago Bags 50,000 Bookings In Five Months

Tata Motors, India’s largest automobile manufacturer, has always depended on its commercial vehicle business to get the money in, while the personal vehicles line of business has never been its ‘A’ game. With the Tiago hatchback, the home-grown automaker introduced its new design language and claimed that its future products for the personal vehicles segment will be built with the same mantra. The Tiago was launched in April 2016 and, since then, it has clocked 50,000 bookings across the country. Now that is an impressive figure, especially for a brand like Tata Motors, which hasn’t seen these kind of figures in its bookings register ever.

The waiting period, which was around two to three months in August 2016, has now extended to a whopping four months. This is really surprising, since the Tiago is only clocking monthly sales figures of close to 5,000 units. This figure, Tata Motors says, accounts for about 40 per cent of the total vehicles sold per month in its personal vehicles business. With multiple production facilities across the country, Tata Motors is more than capable of producing enough Tiagos per month to address all the outstanding bookings. 

Currently, the Tiago is built only in Tata Motor’s Sanand plant in Gujarat. The only other car that shares the same production facility is the Nano GenX. Since the GenX isn’t selling at the same pace as the Tiago, why not increase the production of the latter, whose demand is considerably more? If there are production constraints, why not use another facility to get the waiting period down?

The Tiago is an extremely well-priced product for the Indian market. It checks nearly all the right boxes and has the potential to become one of India’s best-selling cars. But if Tata Motors shows itself incapable of rolling out the ‘in-demand’ product fast enough, the company is bound to lose ground to its competitors, sooner or later.