Car manufacturers sitting on 800,000 pending orders

The semiconductor shortage might have eased but the waiting list for high-selling new cars continues to get longer. As on date, passenger vehicle manufacturers are sitting on around 800,000 bookings, which are yet to be delivered, as per industry sources. Till about mid-February, pending deliveries were 760,000 units. At the end of calendar year 2022, it was 700,000 units.

“Some new launches, such as the Maruti Suzuki Brezza, Grand Vitara, Toyota Hyryder, and the rising demand even of existing models such as the Baleno, Nexon, Creta and Punch, attracted a lot of people to car showrooms, and bookings and enquiries skyrocketed over the last few months,” said an automotive analyst. “Though capacity utilisation at car factories is high, carmakers are taking more bookings than they can deliver,” added the analyst.

“We haven’t faced any slowdown in bookings and enquiries,” Shashank Srivastava, senior executive officer, marketing & sales, Maruti Suzuki India, told FE. “Even bookings for the Jimny stand at about 22,000 units and for the Fronx at over 12,000 units, and the prices of these two cars aren’t even out as yet.”

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Certain models have very high pending orders.

For example, the Grand Vitara SUV launched in September 2022 has around 37,500 pending orders, the all-new Brezza SUV (launched in June 2022) has around 63,000 pending orders, and for the Ertiga these have reached a high of 96,000 units.

Gaurav Vangaal, associate director, Light Vehicle Forecasting, S&P Global Mobility, said the Ertiga doesn’t have direct competition, and that its CNG variants enjoy solid demand, especially from the fleet segment.

“As far as the Brezza is concerned, it’s a new-generation model and enjoys a novelty factor over traditional rivals such as the Tata Nexon, which was for many months India’s largest selling SUV, but was upstaged by the Brezza in February 2023,” he said.

As far as electric cars are concerned, whose sales are rising with every passing month — for the past couple of months these stood at more than 5,000 units and rising — most are on long waiting periods. India’s largest selling electric car, the Tata Nexon EV, for example, has a waiting period of five-six months. With the Nexon EV averaging about 3,000 unit sales every month, this implies pending orders of about 15,000 units.

Another Tata model that is on a long waiting period is the Tiago EV (priced `8.69 lakh onward, it is India’s most affordable electric car), whose waiting period ranges from 3.5 months to five months. Shailesh Chandra, managing director, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles and Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, said that the carmaker is scaling up supplies. “We have delivered more than 5,000 units of the Tiago EV, and supplies are getting better,” Chandra said.

In fact, the Tiago EV received over 20,000 bookings within a month of the carmaker opening bookings in October 2022, and the waiting period has now reduced from a high of six months.

Tata’s Tigor EV has a waiting period of about a month, and the MG ZS EV has a waiting period of about two weeks.

A silver lining of the pending orders is that the Indian passenger vehicle industry will definitely grow in 2023 over 2022.

Masakazu Yoshimura, MD & CEO, Toyota Kirloskar Motor, recently told FE that the global recession may impact the Indian passenger vehicle market, and yet the market will grow in 2023 over 2022 because of the pending orders. “There is a huge backorder of 2022 that will need to be fulfilled in 2023, and that will boost sales numbers,” he said.

Toyota Kirloskar Motor has pending orders of about 90,000 units, which is more or less the yearly sales volume for the carmaker.