Mumbai: Four years after phasing out its popular hatchback and its first car for India, the Santro, South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor India Ltd has decided to bring back its most popular brand along with a new hatchback codenamed AH2.
The compact car will be launched before Diwali and the company will start online bookings for the vehicle on Wednesday.
According to Hyundai Motor India managing director YK Koo, the company is expecting around 50,000 bookings for the new Santro before it is officially launched.
“The brand Santro has huge value in the Indian market and customers have fond memories of the vehicle. So now when Hyundai is again launching a family hatchback we have decided to bring back the brand,” said Koo.
The new hatchback will be manufactured only in India and will be exported to emerging and developed markets. Much of the vehicle’s development was done at the company’s research and development facility in Hyderabad, in tandem with development centres abroad.
Hyundai is looking at monthly sales of 8,000 to 10,000 units, with the automatic manual transmission (AMT) variant constituting a large chunk.
“We are launching this car with our in-house AMT technology. We are expecting almost 40% of the total sales in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru,” Koo added.
The relaunch of the Santro also indicates that building a brand in India is increasingly becoming tough in the domestic automobile market. Santro was the first car launched by Hyundai Motor India in 1998 and it was phased out in 2014.