Even if Bollywood stars would actually find it easier to be chauffeured around in a big luxury saloon or the upcoming ones in a smaller hatchback, their publicity managers would throw a fit. A super image needs super things to go with it including clothes, watches, pens, bags, and shoes to cars. The older stars may settle for a sedate saloon, but the younger ones must have sporty, even sexy, wheels — and what can be sportier than a trendy SUV?
It is therefore no surprise that Sunil Shetty has a Hummer H3 and a Toyota Land Cruiser. Sanjay Dutt has a Lexus 470, a Mercedes M Class as well as a Land Cruiser. Salman Khan also has a gleaming Land Cruiser. Shah Rukh Khan has a Pajero Sport, Shahid Kapur has a Range Rover. And, this is just a list of the S’s. But if the male stars want SUVs to enhance their urban cowboy ‘Macho’ image can the female stars lag behind. They too want to look commanding in powerful and aggressive looking SUVs. If Katrina looks stunning in her humongous Audi Q7, Sushmita even slicker in her Land Cruiser.
SUVs are big but their image surpasses their actual size. SUVs burnish the corporate image of the companies that make them. BMW went beyond the rugged off-roaders like the old Land Rover and Land Cruiser and made their X5 a greatly sexed up SUV. It may be a fairly small part of BMW’s annual production but it has a much bigger impact on BMW’s carefully polished image of cars for the younger, sportier rich. Its success quickly invited furious competition from Audi, Toyota, Mercedes, Mitsubishi, Porsche, Volvo and others. Even the older utility vehicles quickly became sporty. Jostling for position many variants were produced to reach larger markets. After BMW added a smaller X3 to their range Audi added a smaller Q5 so now BMW will soon come out with an even more compact X1, which is priced very competitively.
If trend graphs are any indication, this coming year Indian buyers will pick up over 2 million cars of which about 76% will be small hatchbacks. All the Scorpios, Safaris and imported SUVs will account for hardly 100,000 or just 5% of the sales.
The writer is an automotive
analyst