About 80% buyers are now in personal segment, says Tata Motors

The electric vehicle segment in India has a new player in the form of Tata Nexon electric vehicle. Unveiled earlier this month, the new Nexon EV, termed the country's first made-for-India electric SUV, will be launched in the country in January 2020.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Pratap Bose, VP-Global Design at Tata Motors, who is credited for designing the Nexon EV, speaks on the company's new design strategy and the influence of Jaguar-LandRover’s (JLR) design process on Tata Motors.

“Our UK studio is within 20 minutes of the JLR facility. We have a very regular exchange with both the teams. Being the third brand within that triangle, we have some common processes that we go through in the development that gives us – in the end – a better quality product, which emerges both in engineering and design. Our new product development process is based on this. We have adapted it for our company, the New Product Introduction-Gen3 (NPI) process. It has drawn very heavily from JLR process but that is all below the line backend process stuff. It is not ever for the customer-facing side. You have to be very careful there,” he said.

Speaking about Tata Motors’ Turnaround 2.0 strategy, he added, “When we announced Turnaround, sales was one of its pillars. That is what we would do on the customer-facing side. There are some internal actions as well, cost optimisation, etc. More than 80 percent of our products used to go to commercial fleets and the personal buyer was 10-15 percent of volume. Now it has literally switched the other way around in the last five years,” he added.

“One of the issues we have had with the company in the past is our response to emerging market needs and market segments and with these architectures now we are able to do this much faster,” said Bose.