Mahindra XEV 9e and BE 6 | Booking and Delivery Details | Veejay Nakra Interview | NDTV Auto

You know, as you rightly mentioned when you started that, on 26th, 27th of November when we brought these two products to market and we launched these two next Indian icons, in the last 45-50 days the kind of response we've seen, whether it is from the journalist fraternity, whether it is from the heroes from different walks of life, the who's who, and the customers at large, by and large what we've picked up, and on top of that you know there has been this whole movement towards premiumization and sophistication where customers want the best today. So as we took all of this input in, we just thought what made sense was to go to the market with what we call the Pack 3, which is the top variants which are fully loaded in terms of features. One, two, it comes with a larger battery pack of 79 kWh, so that addresses one of the biggest barriers in the category which is range anxiety. So the objective was democratize technology, remove range anxiety, and that's what drove our strategy to say that we want to take the top-end variant to market. Now as we did that, we also were mindful to say if we want to democratize this and get maximum customers to own it, then we need to make it affordable even in terms of purchase, and hence the pricing. And number two, equally important, when 85-90% of vehicles today are bought on finance, what we ensured is we came up with a fantastic finance package offering from Mahindra Finance that allows the customer to buy these products, the Pack 3, at the same EMI as you would pay to buy the entry-level Pack 1. So you get the high-end product with all the features, the best range, but at a very affordable EMI which you would pay for Pack 1. That has been our objective: to bring Pack 3 to market to begin with. And then as we will open bookings, we start test drives for the Pack 3 starting from 14th of January in the top six cities, we add another 15 cities on 24th of Jan, pan India 7th of February, and we open bookings on 14th of Feb. And in March we will put out the schedule for the remaining variants which we will bring to market. And when we do that, the pricing that we had announced in Chennai for Pack 1, those prices will hold when we open those bookings.

I think it's a little early for us to put numbers out there. But like I said, if I just look at the last 40-45 days, a good gauge of interest is conversations that happen. And I gave you the anecdotes of the kind of conversations where people from all walks of life have spoken about how an Indian multinational automobile company has created global beaters. The pride that comes with what we have done in terms of talking about unlimit India through these two iconic brands that we are launching. That's the qualitative side. And even if I look at quantitative, I think the day we webcasted our launch at Chennai, we broke all records on X (formerly Twitter) in terms of concurrent viewing of the launch video. And in terms of the digital assets that have gone viral and the viewership that we've seen, I mean the numbers are very, very encouraging. And I think there are new records that we've created where the digital assets have got video views of 1.4 billion views of the digital assets that are out there. So these are all very positive indications where there is pride, there is excitement. And I think as we take these products out to market now for test drives, we'll be very happy to see all of this culminate finally into what happens on ground.

So we start deliveries of these products in March. And we will start, as I said, with the booking of Pack 3 on 14th of February. Deliveries will start in early March for the Pack 3.

Well, let's put it this way. With what we are trying to achieve through democratization of technology, take care of range anxiety, move the ownership to say EVs are bought on total cost of ownership, largely a second vehicle or a third vehicle in the family to primary ownership, the task that we are setting for ourselves through the strategy is we would want to achieve a volume of 5,000 vehicles per month in the initial phase of launch.