Hyundai India offers a path to upgrade to bigger cars

Hyundai Motor India has launched a new scheme which is designed to entice the owners of their small car products to bigger models.

The company is inviting customers who want to move on to a higher model. This is applicable to customers paying an EMI on their small car.

Customer can get his existing model evaluated which can be put in as the down payment for a bigger model.

The company then recalculates the EMI for the customer which in most cases can turn out to be lower than the original one.

Arvind Saxena, Senior V-P, marketing & sales, Hyundai Motor India spoke about this offer: “We want to see people upgrade to bigger compact cars and sedans which would be more compatible with the lifestyle of our current customers and hence we have tailor-made these scheme for all the owners of smaller hatches who were so far forced to use a smaller car because of budgetary constraints.”

Hyundai looks set to be latest challenger in the ultra low cost car ranks in India with their announcement of a new model targeted for that market. Tata Motors kicked things off with the introduction of the Nano earlier this year with its starting base price of only $2,500 U.S. It doesn’t look like Hyundai plans to go quite that low, instead coming in a little higher at $3,500. Development of the new model is only now beginning with a target launch date of 2012. According to Hyundai’s Indian boss H.S. Lim, the new car is not meant to be a direct competitor to the Nano (a thousand dollars might not be a big deal on a $50,000 SUV, but since that amount is almost half the cost of the Nano, people will notice), even though better-equipped versions of the Nano can exceed the Hyundai’s price point. In the meantime, Hyundai is launching natural gas and propane versions of several models, including the Accent and Santro this year.