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This Week's Driving - Jan
02nd, 2000 - Log 14
Happy
New Year, and here in the motoring world in India the big deal is that,
it seems, prices on smaller cars are going to go up (because they sell)
and prices on larger cars are going to go down (because they don't sell!).
Will this mean that soon bigger cars will be entry level and then once
people need to move on in life, they will but have to buy smaller cars?
Eventually moving back to, maybe, scooters? Strange but not exactly
unlikely, considering the fact that a car like the Maruti Wagon-R will
cost almost the same as a Maruti Esteem or Ford Ikon!
This
proves, once again, the famous marketing dictum by somebody or the other
they teach in b-school that price to customer of a product or service
has nothing to do with input costs but is, instead, a product of what
the customer can bear and what the seller can get. Perception beats
fact, once again. The tragedy of the Indian automobile scenario is that
this sort of a raw deal for the buyer has been a fact of life on Indian
roads for one century now . We take a look at the emerging. scenario
to try and see if it will continue.
It may.
Not to say that everything is going to be bleak and dreary, far from
it. The new millenium looks like being the age of the customer, and
even more so for the customer and product that can be linked electronically.
Automobiles being a prime example. Separate editorial and article on
that, but, in brief, more than one automobile manufacturer, Maruti and
Hyundai amongst them, have declared the year 2000 as one in which they
will try to do more for the customer. That is good news under any circumstances,
and let me assure you that cybersteering will be out there with its
thousands of correspondents cum readers, reporting back on actual conditions.
Here it is imperative to point out that almost all of our edit comments
and analysis at cybersteering.com are based on feedback from readers
of all sorts. Increasingly, quiet support also comes from senior management
who have finally started realising that we are not like many of the
other honourable motoring media; editorial content in one hand and advertisement
rate list in the other.
Sure, we do know you want to know about the new stuff coming your way,
too. But still, while we would like to and shall preview new initiatives
on the part of manufacturers, we would not like to shirk in our duties
of keeping you briefed on the more sordid side of life in the fast lane,
too. So, while we will get around to telling you about what the future
may or may not look like as far as Indian motoring is concerned, especially
with the big blast expected next week courtesy the Auto Expo, here is
a cybersteering special: famous motoring scams in India,
we may have missed some of them, so do let us know?
Aage
vaalaa baith jao, peeche vaalaa taalee bajao! Auto Expo special, read
all about it here! Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, will resound next week
to the joyous trills of Delhiites and others starved of entertainment.
The hordes will descend, mainly to collect "information material bags"
and to get a close-up look at and up the increasingly shorter skirts
worn by the ladies at the automobile stalls. Automobile hacks like yours
truly will get to put on even more weight (there are no thin motoring
journalists around in India anymore), there will be a dozen press conferences
every day and the favourite question, immortalised by an outspoken colleague
of ours from the print media, at the stage where the despairing MC wants
to know if we have any more questions of his client, will be "when can
we start on the chicken sandwiches, please?" Stand up and be counted
my good friend Don Ron, before the appertif's are gone!
So, to some extent, the quality of the review will be directly proportional
to the quality of the chicken sandwiches! Last time around, it was the
best at the Tata Indica launch! Saw what happened?
At such times does one realise that this, the most ancient of civilisations,
has reduced itself to making a status symbol out of the mere display
of automobiles, a better selection of which can often be found in the
parking lot of any half-way decent and self-respecting five-star hotel.
Senior VVIPs in Delhi, of which we have a few thousand, will insist
on driving into the mela in their VVIP vehicles while tacky and horribly
maintained Trade Fair Authority of India extended chassis Matador open
vehicles without licence plates will manouevere through the crowds.
We, meanwhile, take you through a similar and un-structured walk about
of old and existing motoring scams.
The latest being the one about the Bajaj Crore-pati. Buy any Bajaj vehicle
during the month of December '99, and win prizes, the top one being
a crore of rupees (down to about 55 lakhs, after the Income Tax takes
a chunk . . .) which was supposed to remain open throughout the month
of December '99. Scratch and sniff and win, what happened was that the
first prize, the grand crore less taxes, came out on the 6th of December
itself. Maybe there was a lack of communication, maybe Bajaj Auto did
it with an intention of making the most of it, or maybe it was simple
greed, but Bajaj Auto kept advertising the 1st prize of a crore. Thus
be-fooling many more buyers. Sampark, Bajaj's PR agency in Delhi, tried
their best to get us to write about this prize scheme, and then about
how their intentions were never wrong. Not worthy of our time either
way.
But what is even more interesting is how Lexicon, a PR agency which
works for LML, tried their best to get us to write about this scam.
From using the good offices of mutual friends to bombarding us with
unasked for information and dirt on Bajaj. They even sent a person to
attend the Bajaj press conference on this subject; she distributed more
proof of Bajaj's wrong-doings. Point here is, for years now we've been
trying to get replies from LML about what they intend doing about the
multi-crores they blocked up or swallowed in the great booking and non/delayed
refund scam when they first launched? No reply there. Should people
who live in glass-houses throw stones? Or should we see the deeper issue,
that almost all the manufacturers will and do make owls out of us, the
Indian customer? Sudden silence from the ranks of manufacturers, may
the rooster get your tongue if you lie!
It is our opinion that both companies are equally guilty of playing
around with customers, as equal as both of them make similar scooters
anyway! Cybersteering verdict: both Bajaj and LML are guilty of taking
the customer for a ride, sometimes on a two-wheeler and sometimes up
the garden path. Moreover, if your PR agencies are to be used for mud-slinging,
please don't try to use us as a wrestling pit. We may be "www. . . .
." but we are not WWF!!
Sitting
on money collected for booking seems to be a popular sport with automobile
manufacturers in India, incidentally. From the more recent Peugeot and
Fiat, courtesy Premier Automobiles Ltd., to the older memories of Sipani
with the Dolphin, everybody and his uncle thinks that they can come
to India and go ahead with collecting huge sums of money and more, thus
delaying repayment of both principal as well as interest. The courts
and the media are still running on large numbers of applications and
cases pertaining to non-repayment, but these companies go ahead with
plans to rake in more! Anywhere else in the world, their senior management
would have been in jail, but in post-liberalisation and post-Bhopal
India, these are the heroes and staple for our motoring media! Let nobody
forget that the fine food and raiment we get from the automobile manufacturers
is what makes the media tick. So be it, and that is why we take the
press handouts reaching us about car of the year/decade/month/millenium
as so much piffle . . .but then if the complete game is to be about
caveat emptor or let the buyer beware, then let us face it that way?
Which
is not to say that the others are less guilty, either. Maruti Udyog
Ltd. and their infamous "tatkal" scheme, where they took onto themselves
the right to pick up market premium on the grounds of instant delivery,
is a case in point. Mahindra and Mahindra were always at the receiving
end of stories about how they would 'lend' new jeeps to election campaigns
and then flog them as new all over again to unwary buyers, usually from
the government itself. Unconfirmed rumours, but no smoke without fire,
had HM Ambassador recycling used bodies while Daewoo were at the receiving
end of stories on excise fiddles pertaining to fiddling around with
chassis numbers and dates of manufacture towards, ostensibly, re-cycle
used Cielo cars as new.
Likewise,
the case history on new cars leaving factory premises without any sort
of excise payments, and cases of two cars having the same engine and
chassis number have been documented as well as reported in the past.
Like in the liquor trade, the high excise levels are an incentive to
push out a few "excise-free document-free" vehicles; the large number
of number-plate less 2-wheelers now plying the up-country roads is one
such indication.
And as for public transport, the less said the better. One reason the
majority of our trucks and buses have not changed in design or technology
over the last half-a-century is because the manufacturers never really
got around to upgrading it. More on that another day.
But as of now, as we go into the last lap prior to Auto Expo-2000, we
can see clearly . . . the mud about to fly between manufacturers . .
. as they scramble for the pie that is India.
Because they now know not, that we are not a market. We are a country.
And if you want to succeed with a country, you have to be fair to its
people. Year of the Customer? We watch, carefully . . . and that is
a promise. . . edit team/cybersteering
Drivers
Log
 Veeresh
Malik
The Edit Team
bluepencil@cybersteering.com
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