Petra, not petrol

THE NINTH BRAND DERBY-II/ Derby respondents hit the brakes when it came to rating Fiat's new car

Fiat does not consider this a relaunch. But consumers "" not just Derby respondents "" tend to believe the Petra is just the Siena by another name.

And unlike the Shakespearean rose, the renamed car still doesn't smell sweet. Fiat Petra performed performed rather dismally at the Brand Derby "" just 1 per cent of the respondents considered it a very successful brand, but 74 per cent declared it "unsuccessful".

It wasn't meant to be that way. When Fiat Petra was introduced in April 2004, it was not just a relaunch of Fiat's existing sedan, Siena. In fact, it was a car that could rewrite Fiat's destiny in the Indian market. (After writing off accumulated losses of Rs 1,300 crore this year, the company expects to break even in the next 18 to 24 months.)

Six months after the launch, though, the Petra was yet to move into higher gear. Between April and September 2004, Fiat sold just 631 units of the Petra.

Granted, that's a shade better than the 569 units of the Siena it sold in 2002-03, but it's a different story when you compare the numbers with other cars in the rapidly-growing C-segment. During the same period, Tata Indigo sold 19,166 cars while Hyundai Accent clocked sales of 9,277 units (Source: SIAM).

Why hasn't the Petra steered its way to success? The biggest problem is customer perception that under the bonnet, it's still the Siena.

But Ravi Bharadwaj, commercial director, Fiat India says confidently, "The Petra is a completely new car. We never had a 1,900 cc diesel engine in the C-segment."

That may be true for the diesel car, but the petrol version is a renamed Siena "" and unfortunately, it hit the roads first, perhaps because petrol makes up nearly 70 per cent of sales in the C-segment. The diesel variant was launched only two months later.

The track record of the parent company didn't help, either. Apart from Fiat India's well-publicised losses and fears that the company would go belly-up, Uno, Siena and Palio hadn't exactly set the market on fire.

It might have helped if the Petra was seen as a revolutionary offering, but that didn't happen. Some Derby respondents believed that the Petra is not seen as a contemporary car and did not offer anything new on the price platform.

But that's where they're wrong. Fiat backed its comeback car's petrol version with a sticker of Rs 4.45 lakh (all prices ex-showroom Delhi). In comparison, the Siena 1.6 EL was sold at Rs 5.36 lakh. Even the diesel version (Rs 5.63-5.99 lakh), was positioned nicely between Hyundai Accent (Rs 6.60-7 lakh) and Tata Indigo (Rs 4.64-5.02 lakh).

Buyers, though, complained that the diesel car was overpriced, because they compared it with the Indigo. But that's an unfair comparison "" with a 1,900 cc engine, the Petra is miles ahead of the 1400 cc Indigo both in performance and refinement.

Instead of playing that up , Fiat chose to soft-launch the Petra. The ads went on air only two months after the petrol version entered the market. "We did not want a situation where the ad was released and the product was not available," Bharadwaj explains the delay.