Just a few months after hitting roads, new utility vehicles (UV) have managed to dethrone the old established ones from the best selling list. According to data available, as many as three new vehicles entered the top five selling UV list in August 2019 compared to the list in August last year.
The three new UVs are – Hyundai Venue, Maruti Suzuki Ertiga and Kia Seltos. The Hyundai Venue, which was launched in May, continues to hold its top-selling position and saw despatches of 9,342 units in August 2019. The first position was held by Maruti Suzuki India Ltd’s Vitara Brezza in the same month last year. It now slipped to the third position.
Brezza’s sale fell from 13,271 units in August 2018 to 7,109 units last month as it continues to face competition from new launches, especially from Mahindra XUV 300 and Hyundai Venue. Non-availability of petrol engines is also said to have impacted Brezza’s sales as it comes only in diesel variant.
Venue, the sub-compact SUV is expected to hold its pole position in the coming months as the company on July 30 had announced that it had crossed the 50,000-unit bookings mark for the vehicle, which is more than what it has delivered so far. The company has recently said it will escalate early deliveries of new launches like Venue and Grand i10 Nios.
The other vehicle which made a big stride is Kia Motor’s first vehicle in India – Seltos. The vehicle was officially launched in India on August 22 and in its first month, it sold a total of 6,326 units. This helped Seltos to grab the fourth position in the best selling UV list.
In coming days, Seltos is expected to give tough competition to other best sellers as the firm is ramping up its production in its Anantpur facility. Kia had received 6,046 bookings on a single day when online bookings for Seltos opened on July 17 and managed to receive over 32,000 bookings within six weeks of its launch.
The other launch that entered the top list is Maruti’s Ertiga. Maruti introduced the Ertiga in November 2018. The model reported 139 per cent growth in sales with 8,391 units sold in August 2019 compared to 3,515 units sold in the same period last year. This helped the car to become the second-largest selling UV and the only model in the multi-utility vehicle segment to witness a positive sales growth last month.
Only two old horses, which were present in the list are Creta and Brezza. Hyundai Creta with 6,001 units in August 2019 was at the bottom of the list.