AIS 145 safety norms will be enforced by the government of India from the 1st of July, 2019. As part of these norms, manufacturers must offer a range of safety aids across all variants as standard. The list of safety features includes a driver side airbag, seat belt reminder for driver and co-driver, rear parking sensors and an over-speed alert as part of standard equipment, even from the base trim level. The cars will indeed benefit from these safety features, and leading Indian car manufacturer, Mahindra, is prepared to offer these features on all its cars from the first of July, 2019.
However, these safety aids will also be accompanied by a price hike. Mahindra will have to pass on the cost of these safety aids to the customers. While Mahindra does not tell us the exact amount that they will add to the price of their cars, however, the company says that prices will rise by up to INR 36,000 across models. SUVs like the Scorpio, Bolero, TUV300 and KUV100 NXT shall receive a steep rise. This is due to the fact that base models of these cars did not come equipped with even basic safety aids.
However, the XUV500 and the Marazzo MPV will get a marginal rise considering that even the base models of these cars come with many safety aids. There is no mention of the new XUV300, which is very likely to not get a price hike, considering it already comes with all these, and many more safety features in the base variant itself.
According to Rajan Wadhera, President – Automotive Sector, M&M Ltd., “At Mahindra safety has been at the core of our product development process and we welcome the regulatory requirements relating to safety upgrades. We value every road user’s life and have been effectively contributing to the evolving safety ecosystem. However, the safety regulatory requirement has led to some cost increases. Consequently, we are taking a price hike across some of our passenger vehicles, effective July 1, 2019.”
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Talking about Mahindra, we recently drove the AMT transmission equipped XUV300, which is about to be launched in the market by the end of this month. Linked below is our video which talks about the details of this transmission and our take on its performance, do have a look.