In this Oct 2024 Mahindra car sales analysis, we’ll look at the car sales of Mahindra for the previous month. We’ll also compare the YoY and MoM change to find out which Mahindra cars’ sales improved and which ones declined. To support the trends, we’ll also provide our opinions where applicable. Lastly, the table with monthly sales for the last 6 months will give you an idea about the 6-month sales trend of all Mahindra cars.
Thar Roxx: Is The Hype Real?
Soon after Mahindra started accepting bookings for the Thar Roxx, they announced that ‘the SUV’ got 1.76 lakh reservations in just 60 minutes. Let’s get one thing straight: the Roxx is well priced. Not aggressively priced. Just well priced.
With a ‘well-priced’ car, it’s really difficult to achieve this kind of bookings in 60 minutes in such a slow market. When the regular 3-door Thar is getting discounts of Rs. 1.85 lakh. It makes you wonder how much of that 1.76 lakh bookings is real and how much is just a made-up number. Even the 1.5L diesel RWD variants are getting a lakh-plus discounts.
Among those that are really excited to book the Thar Roxx and made the reservation, how many actually intend to take delivery and how many just parked Rs. 21,000 token amount with Mahindra since it’s fully refundable? How many potential buyers have made the booking but haven’t really made up their minds about buying the Roxx?
If Mahindra really accumulated 1.76 lakh bookings in 1 hour, in the last 50+ days, we have to assume that we must have at least accumulated another 5 lakh bookings even if they came at a crawling rate of 10,000 per day. If 1,76,000 bookings in an hour is real and actually achieved from genuine buyers, then an average of 10,000 per day thereafter should be considered an underwhelming performance. After all, it’s barely 0.0023 part of the demand we saw in the first hour of booking — if you believe it to be true. But we haven’t heard from Mahindra about hitting the 5 lakh bookings figure yet.
We did learn that the expected delivery timeline for the Roxx is 18 months. It’s difficult to say how much of that is true and how much is a carefully orchestrated lie.
The Roxx bookings opened on October 3, 2024 and this rumour started flashing online around October 28, 2024. Assuming an even more modest pace of 5,000 bookings per day accumulating since the announcement of 1.76 lakh bookings, we should be at about 3 lakh bookings by the time the rumour started. That means a monthly production capacity of 16,667 per month.
Roxx Production Capacity
According to Autocar India, Mahindra intended to scale up production of the Thar and Thar Roxx to 9,500 by January 2025. At this rate, the Roxx should have had a waiting period of 27+ months just to satisfy the 1.76 lakh bookings. That’s assuming the Roxx manages to command double the demand of the smaller 3-door Thar. As in, ~6,400 Roxx per month and 3,200 for 3-door Thar. Regardless, even the total Thar production capacity of 9,500 is much lower than what it should be if the numbers were indeed realistic.
Now Comes The Kicker: Roxx Is Available With 87k Discounts
Acko Drive, who are in the business of selling cars, are suggesting a waiting period estimate of 1 year. That’s 6 months less than what the rumour mill is suggesting even if you’re booking the car today. That’s not even the spicy part about us referencing Acko Drive. On the top-spec, Roxx AX7 L diesel-automatic 4WD, Acko Drive are offering a discount of almost Rs. 90,000.
In fact, pretty much all variants of the Roxx are carrying at least Rs. 50,000 worth of discounts on Acko Drive:
That kind of discounts are not available on cars, which are able to organically achieve 1.76 lakh bookings in the first hour. Here’s what a realistic discount looks like on Acko Drive on a car, which is pretty much selling on autopilot:
On the Scorpio N Z4E diesel-manual, there’s a discount of only about Rs. 25,000. And it's readily available for delivery. Since Acko is backed by Amazon, spending money or letting go of the money to acquire more customers is pretty standard practice in the business. In technical terms, this is called customer acquisition cost or CAC. Even if you deduct their usual Rs. 23,000 discounts on a high demand car from the Rs. 87,000 discounts available on the Roxx, you end up with a clean discount of Rs. 64,000.
In another report, Cardekho published the waiting period for Thar and Thar Roxx. According to the article published November 6, 2024, the Roxx commands a maximum waiting period of just 3 months — that’s the upper limit.
PSA: It Ain’t Adding Up!
In this case, we only pushed our investigative minds to explore the Thar Roxx. But, you can extrapolate from here and start adding a healthy dose of doubt when you are reading about the manufacturer-declared waiting periods.
And You’ll Never Know What’s Missing!
Since Mahindra don’t declare separate sales figures of Thar and Thar Roxx, you probably will never find out the exact split of production for each car. They do this for many more cars in their portfolio.
Bolero and Bolero Neo
XUV 700 2-row and 3-row
Scorpio N and Scorpio Classic
While the XUV700 may have the same name for 2-row and 3-row versions, they both compete with different cars in their respective segments. The 2-row version competes with Hector and Harrier while the 3-row version competes with the Hector Plus and Safari. But at least they are both essentially one car. In the case of Bolero and Bolero Neo, you’re getting two vastly different cars. Similarly, the Scorpio N and Scorpio Classic are so different, that their numbers should be available separately. But, no! They never do that.
They say that numbers don’t lie. But, it’s certainly possible to put together vastly different narratives with the same numbers. Bundling numbers like this would help anyone with a wider array of narratives to choose from when supporting whatever stance they’d like to promote.
Oct 2024 — Mahindra Car Sales Figures - YoY Change
Rank | Model | Segment | Oct 2024 | Oct 2023 | Change | %Change |
1 | Scorpio N + Classic | D1 | 15,677 | 13,578 | 2,099 | 15.46% |
2 | XUV700 | D1 | 10,435 | 9,297 | 1,138 | 12.24% |
3 | Bolero + Neo | B2 | 9,849 | 9,647 | 202 | 2.09% |
4 | XUV 3XO | B2 | 9,562 | 4,865 | 4,697 | 96.55% |
5 | Thar + Roxx | B2 | 7,944 | 5,593 | 2,351 | 42.03% |
6 | XUV400 | B2 | 1,000 | 639 | 361 | 56.49% |
7 | Marazzo | C2 | 37 | 89 | -52 | -58.43% |
Oct 2024 — Mahindra Car Sales Figures - MoM Change
The table presents the month-over-month (MOM) sales data of Mahindra models for October 2024 compared to September 2024, including the change in units sold, percentage change, and trends.
Rank | Model | Segment | Oct 2024 | Sep 2024 | Change | %Change |
1 | Scorpio N + Classic | D1 | 15,677 | 14,438 | 1,239 | 8.58% |
2 | XUV700 | D1 | 10,435 | 9,646 | 789 | 8.18% |
3 | Bolero + Neo | B2 | 9,849 | 8,180 | 1,669 | 20.4% |
4 | XUV 3XO | B2 | 9,562 | 9,000 | 562 | 6.24% |
5 | Thar + Roxx | B2 | 7,944 | 8,843 | -899 | -10.17% |
6 | XUV400 | B2 | 1,000 | 948 | 52 | 5.49% |
7 | Marazzo | C2 | 37 | 7 | 30 | 428.57% |
Performance-Based Insights
The hype aside, they are on a rampage. The fact that they managed to come within an arm's length of Hyundai to claim the 2nd spot in monthly dispatches in September is a remarkable achievement. The fact that this news came out just days before the IPO announcement only adds more spice to the story.
Even in October 2024, they are a stone-throw away from moving up the ladder. It’s all the more remarkable since Mahindra sell more expensive cars and have a much larger revenue from passenger car sales than Hyundai. The Korean top shot, Hyundai, meanwhile, have a lot of affordable options in their portfolio for a rainy day.
Top Performers (Oct 2024 Sales)
Scorpio-N and Scorpio Classic (15,677)
XUV700 (10,435)
Bolero (9,849)
Top Gainers (YoY % Change)
Here are the top 3 YoY gainers of Oct 2024 in the Mahindra portfolio:
XUV 3XO (+96.55%)
XUV400 (+56.49%)
Thar + Roxx (+42.03%)
Top Losers (YoY % Change)
Among the top losers, the Marazzo is the only one looking like it’s down considerably from a year ago.
Marazzo (-58.43%)
Top Gainers (MoM % Change)
Marazzo (+428.57%)
Bolero (+20.40%)
Scorpio-N and Scorpio Classic (+8.58%)
Top Losers (MoM % Change)
Thar and Thar Roxx (-10.17%): While the Roxx is in its honeymoon period, the MoM drop can be attributed to the scaling up, which often causes some slow downs before it can ramp up again.
Body-Type Based
The following chart shows the YoY comparison of Mahindra’s production for various body styles:
Mahindra — 6-Month Sales Trend (May 2024 - Oct 2024)
Model | May 2024 | Jun 2024 | Jul 2024 | Aug 2024 | Sep 2024 | Oct 2024 | 6M Avg |
Scorpio N + Classic | 13,717 | 12,307 | 12,237 | 13,787 | 14,438 | 15,677 | 13,694 |
XUV 3XO | 10,000 | 8,500 | 10,000 | 9,000 | 9,000 | 9,562 | 9,344 |
XUV700 | 5,008 | 5,928 | 7,769 | 9,007 | 9,646 | 10,435 | 7,966 |
Bolero + Neo | 8,026 | 7,365 | 6,930 | 6,494 | 8,180 | 9,849 | 7,807 |
Thar + Roxx | 5,750 | 5,376 | 4,385 | 4,268 | 8,843 | 7,944 | 6,094 |
XUV400 | 701 | 534 | 288 | 713 | 948 | 1,000 | 697 |
Marazzo | 16 | 12 | 14 | 8 | 7 | 37 | 16 |
Disclaimer: This post was written by our guest author (V3Cars). Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Autopunditz.com. The data presented in this article is the property of Autopunditz.com.