Limitless Limited Editions

Yes, it is a competitive market, margins are thin, customers are hard to come by, a few players dominate ruthlessly and all that jazz. But what exactly tells GM that 'Limited Editions' are the way to go?

GM and Ford are the manufacturers most guilty of churning out unlimited limited editions for their (perhaps slow-moving) models. At various points during its lifecycle, I recollect having seen the Optra in its various avatars - Royale, Elite, Max, Platinum. At one point of time, if my memory does not fail me, there were two limited edition Optras on sale at the same time :)

Ford is equally guilty of burdening customers with an endless array of 'Anniversary Editions'. The story goes back to the good ole days of the Ford Escort. I was still a teenager in shorts and an 'Anniversary Edition' with plasticky wood on the dash instead of cheap plastic baffled me even then. More so now. Fresh in my mind is the thoroughly tacky job that they did with the Fiesta 1.6 - the go-faster 'Le Mans Stripes' across the length of the car, et al. Ha-ah!

The charm (and efficacy) of a 'Limited Edition' (lets just call them LEs for convenience sake) is derived directly out of its exclusivity and desirability. In that case, LEs must ideally be born out of events of some significance, rather than at the whims of over-worked (and overtly desperate) marketing professional. Obviously, a little too much is a little too bad. Which means that a little more thought must go into designing an LE.

Ford and GM are (for now, at least) making it look like a simple job. Slap a commemorative (commemorating the first anniversary of the CEO's wife, for instance) plate and add a dash of jazz (tacky will do just as well, thank you). That's 'Slapdash', just in case.

I wonder why Honda is not doing LE Accords with cream leather instead of black and shiny alloy wheels instead of the factory-equipped ones. Perhaps because they sell enough units without resorting to these tactics?

So why does GM launch an LE Optra every month? Perhaps because it can't sell enough Optras otherwise? Essentially then, GM is trying to be pushy with a product that is not as good as its competition.

Most of those men who are spending Rs 8 lac on a brand new car are smarter than you and I would like to believe, Mr General Sir. Get that fact stamped in your mind, and we'd be doing far bigger numbers without changing the colour of the trim from 'Ebony Black' to 'Mahogany Brown'.

Mid-sizers slow down

Mid-life Crisis

India is a big hatchback market. But India has never been a ‘big’ hatchback market. Big hatchbacks that mustered up enough courage to tread into territory dominated by three-boxes have never had it easy. The Getz, for instance, has found the going extremely tough because it is priced very close to the Ford Ikon and the Hyundai Accent. Because no one buys a ‘small’ car for more than five lac rupees when one can buy a ‘big’ car with a ‘big’ boot.

Big boots, of course, translate into ‘prestige’, ‘position’ and ‘oh-he’s-got-somewhere-in-life’ (I wear size 13 boots, but it does not seem to help). Anyway, big hatchbacks translate into ‘oh-look-the-fool-went-and-bought-a-small-car-for-six-lac-rupees’.

A recent story in the Economic Times, however, points out that the mid-size segment is bearing the brunt of changing consumer preferences.

In this new segment are the likes of Swift and Getz, plus the relaunched versions of Indica, Wagon R Duo, Alto and the new Zen Estillo. These are now serious alternatives for buyers of the A3, or mid-size cars who appear to find greater value in the top-end compact cars than the bottom-end mid-size cars like Indigo, Esteem and Accent.

Well yes, the mid-size segment has moved slower than both the A+ and the C- (if I may) segment this year. But I’d rather attribute it to two major reasons, rather than shifting buyer preferences.

One, one segment either side of the mid-size segment has witnessed a flurry of activity in the past year, while the mid-size segment models struggle with technology and styling a generation old. There are fully-loaded variants of contemporary hatches like the Swift and the Getz priced very close to the entry-level mid-size segment. And there are stripped-out, bare-basic variants of the Fiesta and the Aveo waiting to nibble into the Accent’s and Esteem’s market.

Two, last year’s budget was kind to small cars (hatchbacks, for all practical purposes). Import duties slashed on small cars meant that there was a mild rush amongst manufacturers to hatch their hatchback plans earlier than they had initially planned. Mid-sizers seem to be the ones to bear the brunt. The segment is on auto-pilot; it has seen almost no activity in the last year or so. The Esteem, Accent, Indigo and Ikon dog along. To live one more day.

Will things change? It depends on what the FM does this year in the budget, really. If the differential duty regime in favour of small cars is abolished, we’ll see a dash of contemporariness added to the mid-size segment, and us Indians will be back to our old love affair with cars with boots.

Rollover Airbags

Rollover and Sleep

It’s the old ‘strategic’ decision that needs to be taken – build rollover test facilities, or invest in technology to prevent rollovers in the first place.

GM seems to be doing the former. Millions of dollars have just been pumped into a new state-of-the-art rollover crash testing facility at Milford, Michigan. By 2012, GM intends to have rollover-enabled airbags standard on every vehicle sold at its dealerships. Not ever model, mind you. Every single vehicle.

DaimlerChrysler, on the other hand, is going all out to get to the root of the problem. It is investing heavily in technology that will make sure that silicon chips are buzzing away under the hood, ensuring that you don’t crash in the first place. In come Night Vision (started off as standard on the S-Class, and now standard on the E-Class as well), and a peculiar device that will help drivers combat something called ‘microsleep’. (Obviously, Mercedes’ marketing department is taking its job beyond giving fancy names to future-spec technology – now they have human sleep patterns on their radar)

On the one hand, then, a cash-strapped GM is pumping millions into devising technology that will get to work once a crash has occurred. On the other hand, a somewhat crisis-facing DaimlerChrysler is pumping millions into fine-tuning silicon wizardry that won’t let crashes happen in the first place.

Make no mistake, though: GM most definitely also has concurrent programs under which its R&D scientists pore over reams of data to ensure that your car does not crash, and DaimlerChrysler’s R&D ‘Herr’s are doing their bit to put air balloons everywhere in your car. It is just that on a broad level, the approaches that both manufacturers are following with respect to developing gadgets related to safety are very different from each other.

What works in the good old world then? A little bit of both, I’d say. Till we come to a point where DC’s technology is suitably affordable, and rollovers (and crashes) are a thing of the past, we’ll have to make do with what is churned out of GM’s labs. Short term bets on GM, long term ones on DC.

Then, of course, there are the ‘fringe’ issues. Will GM be selling any cars all in 2012? Will DC have recovered from its quality nightmares then? Will there be any cars at all? Will they be traveling fast enough to rollover? Then again, when cynicism starts to creep in, it knows no heights (or depths, rather).

Satellite Radio - In-car Entertainment

Satellite at the End of the Tunnel

In the hoo-ha about in-car entertainment systems (that sometimes cost as much as the car itself) are we forgetting a cheap, reliable and effective entertainment medium? Radio? Think ‘Satellite Radio’ and it will start to make some sense.

WorldSpace Satellite Radio set up shop in India a couple of years back. Their start was dull, and customer response was cold, to say the least. Since then, of course, they’ve pulled up their socks, understood the way the Indian market works, put their product/service package through a couple of price corrections. Bingo! WorldSpace is flying off the shelves. A basic receiver costs about Rs 1500, and subscription to the service is pegged at a reasonable Rs 135 per month – for a bouquet of 40 channels.

The catch is that WorldSpace in its current form can’t be used in your car. Even if you decide to carry the receiver around with you – not the best idea then, but for penny pinchers, everything goes. The problem is that the receiver needs to be in the ‘line-of-sight’ of one of three WorldSpace broadcast satellites up there in the sky. Which means that as the car moves, the antenna would need continuous reorientation to ‘see’ the satellites. Perhaps someone could design a little motor-driven system that would reorient the antenna as your car swooshes through the city. I am not sure that that is feasible, though.

The other alternative is to tweak the transmission-reception technology itself. Which is what XM Satellite Radio in the US has done. And that makes it very popular amongst the car-set (a younger kin of the jet-set)! No wonder then, that this year American Honda will now be bolting in XM Satellite Radios into over 650,000 Model 2007 Hondas.

American Honda and General Motors had pumped in funds into XM when it was just starting off. For good reason too. Today, Honda and GM own significant stakes in XM Satellite Radio (which itself was owned by WorldSpace till a few years back). That gives them access to XM’s latest technology as well as the option of blocking use of XM’s latest technology in competitor’s cars. Bear in mind that GM and Honda together sell command a market share of close to 38% of the US market. Moreover, XM is one of just two satellite radio service providers in the US. The numbers start to make some sense now (this has been my traditional ‘grey’ area).

The Satellite-Radio-Trend has just about started catching on here in India. WorldSpace is managing to keep its head above the water, while tweaking its strategies to penetrate the market more effectively. They have plans for an automobile receiver, which they say is under development. Our manufacturers would do well to look at pumping the spare cash they are sitting on WorldSpace Satellite Radio.

Manufacturers would want to assist WorldSpace with the R&D of the automobile receiver, bringing their own domain-specific know-how to the table. The benefits as I see them are manifold. Exclusive access to cutting-edge satellite technology, to start off with – manufacturers with a stake in WorldSpace could start off maintaining the exclusivity of the product/service bundle, turning it into a significant point of difference in a market that is turning hyper-competitive by the passing minute.

The second step in the evolution would be to make the receiver available (under license, perhaps) to other manufacturers as well. This would give WorldSpace the required numbers to drive down costs – the stakeholding manufacturers continue to source the receivers at a mighty discount, mind you.

Eventually, of course, prices (of the receiver, and more importantly, the service) will be driven down by volumes to a point where it will become feasible to let customers buy the receiver off the shelf (at their local Reliance Retail Megastore).

Effectively, this little differentiator will, in a few years after launch, turn into a feature that might become indispensable in an automobile – allow me a bout of conceited jargon-brandishing – a ‘Point-of-Parity’.

That would mean that the time is ripe for our original stakeholding heroes to roll out the next evolution of the satellite radio application – a satellite based navigation-cum-rescue system (which they had been developing with WorldSpace through these past few years). And then follow the same cycle with this one as well – maintain exclusivity, license to other manufacturers, drive costs down, sell it off-the-shelf. The possibilities, like the evolution, can be endless.

Satellite applications for cars are big money in the US and Europe (primarily radio and navigation-cum-rescue systems). India, like in most other aspects, holds immense potential for something of this nature. But like almost everything else that sells well in India, these applications have to be simple, elegant and most important of all, phenomenal value.

Those who have their finger on India’s pulse invariably make it big. Let’s see Indian manufacturers put their money where their finger is!

PS: One man who would know whether the Indian satellite industry’s evolution is at a stage where it can support the kind of explosive growth that is waiting to happen, is here.

The New Zen Estilo

It’s not a Steal. Oh!

So the new Zen, now known as the Zen Estilo is ‘All Systems Go’. At Rs 4.02 lac for the loaded VXi with ABS, Maruti has pulled one out of the hat once again. Like it had done with the Swift a year and half ago. The Swift went on to be a smashing success. Eighteen months later, it continues to show robust sales. No upgrades, no special editions – the car is selling on style.

Evidently, that is what Maruti-Suzuki aims to achieve with the Estilo. The similarities with the Swift’s strategy are, of course, deeper than just building a head-turning car. The Swift is essentially an old car in new clothes. The engine and chassis components are from the Esteem. And while we love the Esteem’s drive-train package, there is no escaping from the fact that in the end, it’s the customer who is being conned into buying a car that is, let’s just say, rather old, to be polite.

The Zen Estilo, meanwhile, is the Suzuki MR-Wagon. I am tempted to use ‘under the skin’. But I couldn’t be more wrong. Under the skin, the Estilo and the MR-Wagon are hugely different. While the MR-Wagon buzzed in Japan powered by a turbo-charged 660cc engine, the Estilo gets a heart implant off the Wagon-R. Daft names Suzuki has got for its cars – the Wagon-R, the MR-Wagon – but we’ll keep that for another day (perhaps a rainy one). So, for all practical purposes, the Estilo is the Wagon-R in different garb. Same platform, same engine, shared components, and – I am presuming – same instrument panel. Forgive me, but the difference is only skin deep.

Which is not surprising. Considering that the MR-Wagon was discontinued in Japan over a year ago. Suzuki did well to ship the dies that were dying a slow death in Hamamatsu, over to Gurgaon. Boink, Maruti-Suzuki has a new car to play around with. What have we here then. A Wagon-R that is cheaper and looks worse, if I may add a dash of personal prejudice to the picture.

The fact that something has finally succeeded in looking worse than the Wagon-R is not the only thing that hurts though. It’s the blatant abuse of the ‘Zen’ nameplate that moves me. In its heyday, the Zen stood for everything that was young, aggressive, fast and sporty. Its aluminum engine was smaller in capacity than most of the competition. But did it have character in good measure. The engine-gearbox-chassis combination came together in perfect harmony to teach Indians what a hot-hatch ‘could’ be. I liked the way it looked before the botched up ‘New Look’ job. I liked the way it went. And I liked the fact that it was like clay in a modder’s able hands. And that the engine was like clay in a tuner’s hands.

Now we have just another tall-boy that oozes practicality at the cost of looking like a camel on four wheels. In yellow. Small tyres, desperately flared wheel arches and a thoroughly uninspiring monoform design make it just another commuter. Just another car that will have lots of space (above the head, albeit), will return 14 kilometers to a litre and will handle like a camel on four wheels. In yellow. The Estilo is everything that the Zen was not. And then some. It has been positioned differently from the Zen. While the Zen was a premium hatch, the Estilo is a cheap run-of-the-mill hatchback which is positioned between the Alto and the Wagon-R. Below the Wagon-R mind you.

That makes Maruti-Suzuki’s decision to go with the ‘Zen’ name astounding. Sacrilegious, even. In effect, everyone who owned, liked, cherished and is attached to the Zen is going to end up forming a huge pool of potential customers who are antagonistic to the new Zen. That’s the enthusiast in me.

I also happen to be a wannabe MBA. It’s a magnificent culture clash, a fabulous conflict of identities. From a purely business point of view, cold, clinical decisions are based on positive Net Present Values and not what a few meaningless enthusiasts think. The Zen’s brand equity must have been too much for Maruti-Suzuki to give up. They’ve built it up over the last decade, and to just give it up would be nothing short of foolishness. Or would it? Honda did it successfully with the New City – then again, that was the ‘New’ City. I am not sure it will work with the new Wagon-R in new clothes.

Perhaps they should have just let the Zen rest in peace. In the Indian Hall of Automotive Fame. It had done its bit for the market. Lived its fifteen years of fame to the fullest. Why pick up a name that has to do with agile, lithe performance and jolly good looks and slap it on the back of a camel on four wheels. In yellow!

Picture courtesy - Business Standard Motoring