Will this Renault SUV make the dust fly in the segment?

Renault is betting big on the Duster SUV that will debut in India shortly.

“The launch of the Duster is undoubtedly the most important event in India since we re-established Renault here and, I daresay, also the most important at least for the next two years,” Mr Stephen Norman, Senior Vice-President, Global Marketing and Communications, told Business Line .

Though Renault will be launching other cars in India, he reiterated none of them would have the potential of the Duster. “For the price that we are going to be selling it, we will be offering a good looking, robust, modern and fully loaded SUV where, currently with the exception of the new XUV 500, the competition has absolutely nothing,” Mr Norman said.

Volume business

Even more important, given the company's volume plans, the Duster will be accessible to people who are buying ‘small sedans'. From Renault's point of view, in every other market (with one or two exceptions) where it has launched this ‘sector-breaker' vehicle, the numbers have exceeded its initial projections. This is precisely why the company believes that if it does not make a success of the Duster in India, its plans in this market will be compromised to that extent. This could have a direct bearing on vehicle volumes eventually.

“We would not recover these numbers from the Fluence, Koleos, Pulse and another car we will soon be announcing, however good those vehicles may be. This is because we are planning to break out of this typical percentage sector share and actually grow the SUV segment,” Mr Norman explained.

According to him, it is very rare in the motor industry for any manufacturer the size of Renault (other than in its home turf which, in this case, is France) to be able to actually change the ‘physiognomy of the market.' There are, of course, some world exceptions like the Volkswagen Golf which has done remarkably well outside Germany too.

Renault is banking on the Duster, likewise, to pull off something similar in India. The SUV has proved its potential in Europe and is on its way to becoming a success story in South America, with India and Russia being the next critical stopovers.

“What the Duster does extraordinarily well is that it absolutely soaks up uneven road surface whilst not being difficult to drive like a typical SUV. The results will show what Renault becomes in India,” Mr Norman said.

The French automaker wants to offer customers here more than the actual price point of the Duster. It is confident that it will be the first to do so even though there will soon be ‘serious competitors' like Ford which will launch its EcoSport towards the end of the year. “The Duster will offer a significantly superior package for the same price than anything else in India now. We are talking of prices right at the heart of the mainstream,” Mr Norman said.

While conceding that France and French products do not have a ‘precisely identified image' in India like German or Japanese (products), he said he would have no problem if the “Duster became better known than Renault” even though this is not part of the corporate strategy.

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