Mahindra launches Furio truck range starting at Rs 17.45 lakh

Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M), the country’s second largest commercial vehicle maker, has launched the Furio range of intermediate trucks, with prices starting at Rs 17.45 lakh (ex-showroom Pune).

Designed by Italian design house Pininfarina (a M&M owned company), these trucks will play in the 9-14 tonne segment. The 14-tonne truck was also launched on January 29 at Rs 18.10 lakh.

Five products will be launched under Bharat Stage IV (BS-IV), while the balance 16 will be launched under the same version after April 2020.

Pawan Goenka, Managing Director, M&M, said, “The intermediate commercial vehicle segment has grown at a healthy 17% CAGR over the last five years. The market size of such trucks is 1.1 lakh units per annum. The segment has become very competitive, with the top three dominating the segment.”

First showcased in July last year, the Furio was test marketed to 30 customers, who collectively clocked 13 lakh kms on the vehicles, higher than what M&M clocked during the testing and development phase.

The platform, built at a cost of Rs 600 crore, allows the company to cover the segment starting from 5 tonne to 18.2 tonne, catering to buyers who run vegetable transport, e-commerce deliveries, auto parts shipments, and such other businesses.

The 12-14 tonne segment has the biggest demand at present. The bigger gross vehicle weight (GVW) segment is covered by the company’s Blazo range of heavy duty trucks.

This is the first major launch of a range of trucks by the company since introducing the heavy commercial vehicle range in 2011. It spent four years developing the model using 500 employees and 180 vendors. Around 500 transporters were also part of the development process.

The ICV segment generates volumes of 1.5 lakh units a year. Tata Motors and Eicher Motors are the segment leaders with around 37 percent share each, followed by Ashok Leyland and Daimler India Commercial Vehicles.

This commercial launch was initially scheduled for December but was pushed back by a month due to poor market conditions. M&M also tweaked the launch pipeline. Instead of going ahead with seven launches, the company will launch only five products under BS-IV. The Furio will have a choice of five engines (four diesel and one CNG).

The percentage of owned driver in this category of CVs is around 22 percent, where the driver of the vehicle is the owner of the vehicle itself. This percentage is just two in the case of a heavy commercial vehicles.

This is the reason why the company has added a lot of driver comfort features such as air conditioning, music system, car-like cabin features to name a few.