The all-new Mahindra Thar is going great guns. The 2020 Thar, whose bookings opened on the 2nd of October, has raced past 15,000 bookings in just a couple of weeks of launch. Interest for the 2020 Mahindra Thar has been incredibly high with the automaker receiving over 65,000 enquiries in the past couple of weeks. The 2020 Thar’s website has seen over 8 lakh visitors as well. Mahindra notes that nearly 57 % of all-new Thar buyers are first time car buyers. Also, the company adds that the automatic variants of the Thar in petrol and diesel trims are seeing big demand.
Veejay Nakra, Chief Executive Officer, Automotive Division, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. had this to say about the Thar’s superlative bookings performance,
We are delighted with this overwhelming response received for the All-New Thar, having crossed 15,000 bookings as on date. What is particularly interesting is that there is an acceptance of the All-New Thar amongst a larger base of lifestyle seekers, beyond the traditional lovers of this iconic brand. Given this overwhelming response, we are substantially ramping up our capacity.
Also read: Buying a pre-owned Mahindra Thar is better than buying a new one: 5 reasons
While Mahindra is quite excited about the massive interest for the all-new Thar, the automaker is also ramping up production capacity to meet the big demand. In fact, waiting periods for certain variants of the new Thar, in specific locations of India are said to have hit the 5 months mark. This means, someone booking the 2020 Thar today will get the vehicle delivered sometime in March 2021 or April 2021. We hope that Mahindra gets a handle on the Thar’s waiting times as a lot of people don’t like very long waiting periods. In fact, the last time that Mahindra faced such demand was at the launch of the first-generation XUV500 in 2011, when the automaker had to resort to a lottery for initial batches of the SUV, which witnessed huge demand back then.
Coming back to the all-new Thar, prices of the off roader start from Rs. 9.8 lakh. The Thar is available in soft top, convertible (removable soft top) and hard top trims. There are two key variant options: AX and LX. There are 2 engines on offer: a 2 liter-4 cylinder mStallion turbo petrol with 150 Bhp-300 Nm and a 2.2 liter-4 cylinder mHawk turbo diesel with 130 Bhp-300 Nm. Both engines get 6 speed manual and torque converter automatic gearbox options. A four wheel drive transfer case with shift-on-the-fly system is standard across all variants. The new Thar gets a boatload of safety features in the top-end trims while even the base trims get basic safety features such as airbags, ABS, parking sensors and seat belt reminders.