Renault hopes its new model will push up its laggardly India sales

MUMBAI: Renault has lined up its premium SUV Captur for launch this festival season, hoping to push up the French automaker’s India sales that have faltered this year with falling volume of the Kwid compact crossover.

Renault, which developed strong SUV credentials in India with the Duster, is expecting the Captur to bring in incremental volume of 20,000-25,000 units in 2018, people with knowledge of the company’s plans said.

Renault India managing director Sumit Sawhney declined to forecast any numbers for the Captur, but said the company would likely match last year’s sales of a little over 1 lakh units this year, and post strong doubledigit growth in 2018.

“We are a young company in the midst of product portfolio development. We are in the process of setting up a runway for faster growth in the future. With a three-car portfolio (excluding the Captur) and the volumes we do with our network, it is a good showing,” he said.

Built on the Duster platform, the Captur is engineered significantly at the company’s R&D centre in Chennai. The model is likely to be priced between Rs 11lakh and Rs 15 lakh and will be positioned a little above the Duster, putting it in direct competition with the Hyundai Creta, Tata Hexa and Mahindra XUV 500.

On Monday, the company started taking bookings. Renault India is likely to bring in one new model every year from now on its common module family platform. The next in line is the RBC — a compact seven seater cross over planned for 2018 — followed by an SUV in the following year-.Sawhney said the future portfolio would target Renault owners to upgrade to the next level of vehicles.