Background
A life long Maruti and Hyundai owner decides to upgrade his lifestyle. The budget is slightly comfortable and the love for Make In India products is at all time high. The two of the obvious choices are Tata & Mahindra.
TATA vs Mahindra Dilemma
Middle class people are highly influential, we listen to feedbacks and just retains the worst of them. Tata cars are also the victim of selective retention.
No one remembers how great Tata cars were or how the actual owners of these cars only praise highly of them. People only remembered how terrible they sound and how less was their mileage when compared to their Japanese counterparts. The Tata service centre experience furthermore affected decision making of the buyers.
The two obvious questions at the time were, “KITNA DETI HAI”, “KHARCHA KITNA HAI” and sadly Tata lacked just in these two questions. Mahindra on the other hand was not accessible to most of the urban middle class, also the goon image didn’t helped the cause any further. Since the redesign and gorilla marketing tactics ,Mahindra seems like an obvious choice for the most of the people in the “Actual SUV” segment.
Test drive
Now we have made a decision to buy a Mahindra, what are the next steps? take a test drive, right?; if life would’ve been that simple then I might not be writing this story. Tried visiting multiple times to the same showroom hoping for a test drive, but got the same answer every time; “test drive cars are not available”.
On 3rd attempt the salespeople were not even discreet about it, with test drive cars parked in the front of their gates. The only thing the salespeople were consistent was their recalcitrance in giving test drives. By third attempt any sane human will switch the showroom and we did then same. To our surprise the lack of servicing customers is commendably consistent everywhere.
The decision
Somehow I got the test drive on a friend’s car and the sheer driving experience made me forget all the negative experiences so far. Maybe it was the worst of it and maybe the salesperson will take you seriously when you go to the showroom with a downpayment cheque and a good credit score.
Oh boy! never been so wrong before.
Once you take your documents and try to buy the car, they will then inform you about outrageous waiting times. 2 years for a middle variant car or 2 months for top of the line variant, and they will look at you with disgust if you even talk about the base variant. Now the question arise, who plans a car 2 years in advance? why would anyone wait for 2 whole years for a car; are we still in “Chetak” scooter era? Your outraging response to these absurd waiting times would be handled by the scripted response, “These are estimated times, and the actual time will be shorter”.
The Waiting
They got your consent on 2 years waiting time with a price. THE PRICE WILL RISE BEFORE YOU GET THE CAR, waiting time will not move so much. This entire experience is very alien for a lifelong Maruti or a Hyundai Owner.
Even at its prime, Maruti cars were always available in one showroom or the other, or maybe at worst you might have to wait for a month or two for the most demanded car and variant. This is not true anymore, maybe Mahindra is the trendsetter in this aspect as well, followed by almost all automakers.
Like a normal middle class human, you will have a limited budget. Despite having other EMIs, you will happily stretch a little more to get a better car. Mahindra doesn’t care about that, the 16lakh on road price might go upwards of 18 by the time you actually get it (if you get it at all).
Maybe that is the reason why they have high waiting times, they will keep on increasing prices in regular intervals with no answer to you. Gathering all the headlines with their exgressive pricing, but no one knows, hoe much of their customers are actually getting the car that the price or even close.
The showroom will keep on saying, they can not do anything it is company’s decision to allocate cars and the customer care will keep on saying, the stock availability is only monitored at dealer’s end. At the end when all the motivation and happiness of buying a new car is crumpled and all the faith in Mahindra is lost, the only way forward is to get your registration cancelled. I have never seen Mahindra sales person, so happy and lively when you are talking to them about cancellations. Maybe the real conspiracy is, that the sales people are getting incentivised only on the number of cancellation their showroom can get. Because even if you are cancelling because of unavailability of car, you will have to bear the cancellation cost as you signed on 2 years waiting period.
Conclusion
The buying experience with Mahindra is the worst, while TATA provides the opposite. Don’t get me wrong, by God’s grace, I was eventually able to get a Mahindra car from another showroom. The cars are excellent, and every time I drive mine, I have a smile on my face.
I would’ve easily switched to TATA if the Safari were available in a petrol variant. Given the strict pollution norms, buying a diesel car doesn’t make much sense if you live in Delhi or the NCR.
TATA showrooms are modern and upscale, but their service stations are still stuck in the past. Mahindra, on the other hand, offers decent support during servicing, sales not so much. Perhaps time will be the equalizer for these two companies. Ideally, TATA will replace their service staff with some of the enthusiastic people from their showrooms, and Mahindra will replace some of their lazy salespeople with helpful staff from their service centers.