The first Citroen car will hit Indian roads by the end of 2021. It will in all probability be the C5 Aircross SUV that has been spotted undergoing testing in India. The C5 Aircross will compete with the likes of the Hyundai Tucson and Jeep Compass when it comes to India.
While the carmaker is yet to announce its product lineup for India, or even the car body type, CarDekho can now confirm that Citroen is not developing an India-specific car. The confirmation comes from Linda Jackson, CEO of Citroen: “I will say this, I don’t want to make a model for India. I want to make international models that will be relevant for the Indian market.”
But that doesn’t mean that Citroen will bring a car from one of its overseas markets to India as is. The approach will be more like MG’s, which revealed in 2018 that it would bring a car based on an existing platform, but with India-specific additions. And India is not the first market where Citroen will have this approach.
Talking to CarDekho about Citroen’s India strategy, Linda said, “C4 is very, very popular in the Europe but it’s a C-segment saloon and we decided that in South America that we would take the C4. But when you look at the market there is no segment, the C-segment, it really doesn’t exist, but SUV does. So what we decided to do was that we would take the C4 Cactus, as the platform, the body, and redesign it to be an SUV and put all of the SUV markers that were relevant for the South American market. So.. we’ve taken a model that is a world model, but we’ve adapted it slightly to be able to be relevant to the market and that’s exactly what we will do with India.”
While Citroen plans to launch its global models developed specifically for India, possibly an SUV, the carmaker will have local manufacturing to remain relevant in India price-wise.
(Source: www.cardekho.com)