Mahindra readies base ‘W4’ XUV500 variant

Sales of the Mahindra XUV500, the carmaker's golden goose, are not what they used to be some months ago. The SUV famously flew off the shelves and overshot Mahindra’s production capacity for the first few months after its launch, and even after that managed to hold steady at roughly 3,500-4,500 units a month – a really impressive figure for such an expensive SUV. However, lately, the company has only managed to find about 2,000 new XUV customers each month.

Mahindra says a big reason for this was the government’s new SUV tax, announced at the 2013 Union Budget, which instantly raised the price of the XUV500 and indeed Mahindra’s other mainstay SUV models. Also, the launch of the Renault Duster and, more recently, the Ford EcoSport will have certainly had an impact on the XUV’s sales. An As we reported earlier Mahindra has found a way around the SUV tax by lowering the ground clearance rating of the XUV500, but to further boost sales, it is also evaluating a lower-spec version of the popular SUV.