Mahindra’s Big EV Bet: Rajesh Jejurikar Reveals Future Strategy | Brandverse | Business News

Thanks for coming here.

Yeah, so Shibani, the one thing we've kind of picked up over time is customers do want technology and the refinement of a car.

So while the brand stands for a very rugged SUV DNA and consumers do want that out of a Mahindra, that's who we stand for. What they were not comfortable with was the lack of sophistication in our vehicles earlier. And what we've seen over the last 5 years, and the Thar is a great example of that, is a vehicle which has retained its core DNA but it comes in a much more sophisticated, refined, tech-savvy avatar. And I think that's what's led this change and transformation: products which are leading the curve on technology and features now, which is what has made the product more mainstream. Although we were kind of playing on the periphery of people who like the form, but didn't give enough for them to be able to make it mainstream with their families as well.

Yeah, so there are different subsegments. The Thar three-door was always thought of as a niche because the going-in assumption is in India no one's going to want a three-door. That's a very specific niche. The older version of the Thar pre-2020 was selling just 600 a month. When we brought in the newer version in 2020, what we saw was because the engine had become much quieter, less vibrations, noise, it started bringing in a completely new set of customers who had always aspired for the brand but the product was not living up to their expectations. Once the product crossed the bar of 'yes, this is something I can drive to work in', it opened up a whole new stream, and we went on to doing as much as 6,000 a month of the Thar. So what was 600 a month went on to become 6,000, and now combined with the Rox, the Thar brand does about 10,000 a month. So it's a combination of product and tech. To your specific question on how did we use these learnings: what we learned was that the form is very important. That's the core of who we are. And the term we use for that is 'unmissable presence'. Mahindra must have two things: unmissable presence and head-turning designs. So these became the core. The products must have a certain level of safety, sophistication, refinement, and what we called technology as sci-fi today. So in all our products, we've tried to bring in technologies which customers don't expect to see at these price points.

Let's see the evolution of the brand and the price points. We launched in 2021, so we're now in close to 4 and a half years. We launched at a very attractive price starting around 12 lakhs and went up to 18-19. Then we saw huge commodity inflation which pushed the price points up. From 21 to 24, commodity prices went up something like 17%. So that did lead to an escalation in consumer prices. But when we saw that the product had crossed a price point which was reducing our opportunity to grow, we did something not normally done: we cut price by over a lakh at the top end. 70% of the volumes we get on XUV 700 were on the top two versions, and that started coming under pressure. As soon as we corrected that, we got the ratio back. Consumers still want to buy the higher-end versions because they're feature-packed and come at a good price, but we must always keep the sweet spot pricing. When we launched the XUV 3XO, we have the full three-screen look, same as EVs, and kept the pricing at the level of the XUV 700. So consumers continue to get huge value.

I think the one interesting thing about the brand Mahindra SUVs that we have today is a set of consumers who are very psychographically and demographically diverse. So if you look at our Bolero and Scorpio portfolio, they're very mid-size town rural products. Even within the Bolero portfolio, the Bolero Neo consumer is younger, the Bolero customer is more traditional and older. Now we have Scorpio and Scorpio N: Scorpio is a little older, the Scorpio N consumer is younger, which is a newer product. So even within our portfolio, we have that Thar three-door which we just spoke about, interestingly has a lot of women and very young profile of customers. A lot of kids use that to go to college. I have seen a lot of pink Thars and white Thars up north. North has a lot of black as well. Very popular in north.