Volvo Cars To Get Costlier From April

Prices will increase by up to 2.5 per cent

The Indian arm of the Swedish carmaker Volvo has announced that from April 2017, its entire fleet of cars on sale in India will get hiked price tags. The ex-showroom prices will undergo an upward revision of up to 2.5 per cent. The company says that this change is directly linked to the rise of input costs, which affects all models sold in India.

Volvo Cars currently sells eight luxury models, that poke their cases into the German dominated world of Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, in India. The Swedish automaker currently retails the S60, S60 Cross Country, V40, V40 Cross Country, XC60, XC90, XC90 Excellence and the S90. At the 2017 Geneva International Motor Show, Volvo unveiled the new XC60 which will also go on sale in India in 2018.

We heard of a similar announcement from Honda Cars India recently that it too will hike prices at the start of the next fiscal year. While what automakers claim that they are losing money because of high input costs might be true, what’s really ironic is the timing of such steps of hiking prices. This time around the price hike is very conveniently slated for April 2017. This suspiciously equates to an act for more sales numbers and meet 2016-17 fiscal year targets.

A similar act was planned by most of the game players towards the end of last year. Nearly all of them announced that due to the rise of input costs, prices for their offerings will be hiked from January 2017. Again, clearing up stocks from 2016 is of utmost priority for every carmaker and this price hike gimmickry was just to cover that.