While the year 2016 promises to take forward the significant activity witnessed in the automotive space this year – with as many as 65 cars lined up for launch across platforms, segments and price brackets – it will several carmakers gear up to hike prices of their vehicles.
Carmakers attribute the price hike, which is set to spread across all segments, mainly to the rising input costs and depreciation of the rupee.
India's second largest carmaker by sales, Hyundai, announced a price hike across its entire range of cars by up to Rs 30,000 over the December prices. Rakesh Srivastava, Senior Vice President-Sales and Marketing, HMIL, has stated challenging market conditions caused by increasing component costs along with the weakening rupee as reasons for the year-end announcement of the price hike. The carmaker last hiked its price, except for the Creta, in August this year, while the Creta saw a hike in October 2015.
Honda Cars India is also planning to increase prices of all its models from January 2016, a company spokesperson told Autocar India adding that the price rise would be in the range of Rs 10,000-16,000 per vehicle. A price hike of 3 percent was announced by Nissan India on all of its Nissan and Datsun models, and also by Toyota.
Skoda Auto India also announced plans to hike prices of its entire model range by around 2-3 percent from 1st January, 2016. The carmaker decided to go for the price increase, which will translate to around Rs 14,000-50,000 per vehicle depending on model range, in order to balance out the increasing cost of manufacturing and changing market conditions, according to an official statement.
Luxury carmakers too got aboard the price hike bandwagon. While BMW announced an increase of 3 percent for all models currently on sale in India under the BMW and Mini brand, prices of Mercedes-Benz vehicles are set to go up by 2 percent from January, 1, 2016.
Rivan RS 
Viraaj Bhatnagar
Uday Singh
Suraj Viswanathan
