General
Motors has agreed that it has learnt from its past mistakes but it seems
to have learnt even more from what others seem to have done right. They
took a successful product, ironed out its deficiencies, added value
and pronto, out came the Chevrolet Tavera. It helped to a great extent
that they already had Chevrolet Tavera/lsuzu Panther in their far eastern
product portfolio, says Yogendra Pratap as he examines the multi utility
vehicle that he feels will be a runaway success, till some other manufacturer
comes up with something better.
The Tavera has been a long time coming! I remember speaking to Rick
Wagoner nearly there years back about GM operations in India and he
had said that over the next few years there main aim would be to fully
utilise the capacity that they had built up at Halol and they were
looking at all possible ways and means of doing that. New variants
was one and we had a slew of the Corsas swinging and sailing and new
models was the other. Completely built up unit imports did not count
up to much in terms of facility utilization and speculation was rife
on which models. The Isuzu Panther was one of the first we had talked
about and then the long process of getting the car ready for India
started.
Unlike in the past, there is nearly a completely new team at GM
with the engineering department staffed totally by Indians. The
idea was to have a vehicle that was ready to take on Indian roads
from day one and at a price that would be competitive. Those are
perhaps the reason why it took so long to get the Tavera from on
the roads of the far east to the roads of India. Indigenisation
levels as launch are at 85 per cent, quite remarkable!
We had got a taste of what the Tavera promised at Halol last month
as not only did we visit the plant but also took one for a short
drive amongst the hills around Halol (May 2004 issue of OVERDRIVE),
but we were hungry for more. And when GM sent us a Tavera we buckled
down to the job to discover whether the Tavera really delivers on
all that it had promised. Read on for the ensuing road test reveals
all. |
June
2004