Car sales in City soar in March

Buyers flooded banks seeking urgent clearance of loans

With the prices likely to go up from April 1, the showrooms from across the brands claimed that sales during the month have gone up by almost 50 per cent compared to February.

With banks busy with financial year-end audits, car buyers flooded the banks on Tuesday seeking urgent clearance of their car loans. Banking personnel were under immense pressure, even as the buyers rushed through the paper work to take delivery of the cars.

Car prices are set to rise with the additional one per cent increase in VAT and the one per cent increase in excise duty coming into effect from April 1. According to the 2010 State budget the life time tax on motor cars and jeeps will go up to 13 per cent from 12 per cent on vehicles priced less than Rs 5 lakh; and from 13 per cent to 14 per cent on vehicles priced between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh , and to 17 per cent on vehicles priced between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 20 lakh.

“We are doing brisk business over the past 24-hours. We have almost 50-70 cars being registered on March 31,” informed a sales person from Mandovi Motors.

According to the sales representative, a basic Wagon R model will cost the consumer as much as Rs 10,000 extra from the coming financial year.

L Damodar, sales manager for Skoda Auto at St Marks Road said that there had been an increase in sales by 35 per cent in the past 10 days. He attributed this mainly to the increase in VAT and road tax that will be implemented from next month. 

“We usually sell about 70 to 80 cars in a month but sales have gone up to 120 this month. Further, on purchase of high end cars consumers would have to shell out Rs 17,000 to Rs 28,000 more depending on the model,” he said. Echoing similar views, a manger at Mitsubishi, Shreedhar pointed out that end of a financial year is usually associated with marginal increase in sales coming from depreciation of a firm’s capital. However, this year the sales seem to have zoomed beyond expectation resulting in a supply-demand gaap. “Car sales have zoomed to more than 8,000 compared to 5,000 last month,” he added.