Tata Motors to hike prices of commercial vehicles from Oct 1

Tata Motors, the country’s largest commercial automaker on Tuesday said that the prices of its commercial vehicles will go up by up to 2 per cent starting October 1, 2021. “The effective price hike, in the range of 2%, will be implemented basis the model and the variant of the vehicle,” the company said in a filing.  

The automaker has blamed the rise in the cost of commodities and raw materials for its decision to hike the prices. “The continued rise in the cost of commodities, such as steel and precious metals, necessitates the company to pass on a part of it through increase in price of the products. The company has further strived to minimise the increase in the price by absorbing a certain portion of the cost at various levels of manufacturing,” said Tata Motors.

This is the second price hike coming from the carmaker in less than 2 months. Earlier in August, it had hiked the prices of its passenger vehicles by an average of 0.8 per cent, barring the 'New Forever' range. This move too was attributed to the rise in input prices.

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Shailesh Chandra, President Passenger Vehicles Business Unit, Tata Motors had told news agency PTI that they had seen a “a very steep increase in the prices of steel and precious metals over the last one year”. Chandra further added that the financial impact of the increase in commodity prices is in the range of 8-8.5 per cent of their revenues in the past one year.

Tata isn’t the only carmaker that is facing the brunt of high input expenditure. Maruti Suzuki, the country’s largest carmaker in July had hiked the prices of its hatchback Swift and the CNG variants of other models by up to Rs 15,000 to mitigate the rising input costs. Honda too had done the same in August when it announced a price hike for its entire model range in India in a bid to offset the effect of rising commodity prices.

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