After 4-year gap, Tata Motors unveils two cars

NEW DELHI: Putting up a brave face after the shocking death of its MD Karl Slym late last month, a struggling Tata Motors unveiled two new “global” cars as the company played catch-up to competitors in driving in modern vehicles in the market.
The new vehicles come after nearly four years and signal Tata’s intention to make a comeback in the highly-competitive domestic car market, where it has been edged past by companies like Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra, Toyota and Honda.
The event that saw the unveiling of the ‘Bolt’ hatchback and a sub-4 meter ‘Zest’ sedan began with a homage to Slym, who was credited with moving the company towards a new direction in a speech that remembered his contribution in the turnaround strategy.
After a minute’s silence, the company unveiled the two new products based on the company’s enhanced X1 platform, on which the existing Vista and Manza models are built.
“These are two world-class cars and based out of our next-gen DNA,” said Ranjit Yadav, president (passenger vehicles), Tata Motors. The company has been long struggling to shake off the “taxi” tag from its vehicles like Indica and Indigo that have found reasonable success in the commercial segment but little acceptance in the mainline market. With these cars — that sport a new design philosophy and modern features — the company looks to portray a young and energetic feel to its brand, something it has also been trying with the budget car Nano.
“These cars carry a new design philosophy to capture youthful energy. They have LEDs; Harman infotainment systems; a 5-inch touch screen to access music, apart from advanced Bluetooth, voice recognition, text to speech and phone-enabled navigation,” said Tim Leverton, head of R&D. They’ve been engineered for global markets by teams in India, UK and Korea. They are the result of collaborative design inputs from the three company design studios in Pune, Coventry (UK) and Turin (Italy).
Zest will be available in petrol and diesel versions, while Bolt will come only with a petrol option. Both will be powered by the turbo-charged, inter-cooled multi-point fuel-injected petrol engine, REVOTRON 1.2T. Zest’s diesel variant will have the F-Tronic technology-enabled, 5-speed automated manual transmission and powered by a 90PS engine with 200 Nm of torque.
Yadav said Tata Motors does not plan to phase out Indica and Indigo. Company officials said these would gradually be pitched towards the commercial (taxi) segment while the new cars are aimed at the mainline consumer market. The company is pinning hopes on the new models to revive its sagging fortunes. The failure of the Nano and poor run of the other models has seen company sales slide as its volumes fell by 37% in the first nine months of this fiscal (April-December’13-14) at 1.55 lakh units.