ROUGH RIDE

INDIA IS HOME TO MORE than 200,000 millionaires and some hundred-odd billionaires. But these figures are hardly indicative of the country’s luxury car industry. In fact, they’re a total contrast. Last year, only 21,400 luxury cars were sold in the country. “This number should be 10-fold,” says Martin Schwenk, Managing Director and CEO, Mercedes-Benz India. Not only do those 21,000-odd cars represent a 37 per cent decline from 2019, they also account for less than 1 per cent of the overall auto market (in China, it is 13 per cent). For the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Bentley and others, this share has remained unchanged over the past five years. Industry estimates suggest it will take around two more years for sales to reach pre-pandemic levels of 35,000-40,000 units a year.

Sharad Agarwal, Head of Lamborghini India, is quite blunt: “The growth in the super luxury segment will look smaller than the overall passenger car industry. It’s not like the demand for the segment is going through the roof. The right way to look at how the segment is shaping up is to look at