Defending Mahindra design

The Mahindra XUV500 has been a huge hit in its native market of India, says the manufacturer's design chief, Ramkripa ('Kripa') Ananthan.

But she admits that feedback she has received from markets outside India has spanned a wider range of opinions.

"It is a conscious decision to keep XUV the way it is," She explained in conversation with motoring.com.au during the Delhi motor show last week.

"The Indian market, from day one, really loved it.  We did get feedback from certain markets – Australia, Korea, South Korea... where some of the elements of the exterior and interior were found to be difficult to comprehend...

"I think they liked the proportions and I think that they liked the stance and definitely liked the overall appeal. But there were elements that were found to be [busy], and you can see that we did work on that in the refresh.  In fact, I still have the mental picture of a feedback from some markets.  Yeah, so when we do the new XUV, we would be considering those input but not moving that [Mahindra] identify."

For the refresh of the XUV500, Mahindra didn't stray far from the original concept, which has been doing strong business in India, but the design team did tidy up the front end a little.

"I think it needs to be a little cleaner so that’s exactly what we did. We said: 'The appearance is fine.  The graphics, the expression is good... We just pared down elements; we just removed some lines and we just cleaned it out."

The Mahindra design boss is determined to take the company's products in a direction that won't be mimicking the styling of rival brands.

"So currently it’s a stated intent from us that we would like to polarise [opinion] a bit. We would design in a way that we stand out. There is a likelihood of alienating a section of the market but ... without ambition in design, in our portfolio, we feel that if we [our] vehicles could be designed by any car manufacturer ... we wouldn’t have that edge. So we are sticking our necks out but I think we are quite open to risk in that sense."

Asked about the rear wheel arch line that interrupts the belt line of the XUV500, Ms Ananthan admitted that the company had built a clay model that tested the final production style against a more conventional treatment.

"So you could have a shoulder line that was going straight and clean all the way to the tail lamp or you could have this bump and you’d make one half of the clay with the bump and one half of the clay without the bump...

"But we would make half a clay and then we would mull over it repeatedly saying that, you know:  'That’s the Mahindra'."

It's perhaps not as easy to see from a western perspective, but the Mahindra line-up exhibits a common look across the range. There is obvious frontal styling common to the Genio ute and the Xylo people mover that we don't get here, but the small KUV100, larger TUV300 and the mid-sized XUV500 appeared to have few if any shared styling traits.

According to Ms Ananthan the Mahindra style thematically exudes ruggedness as a brand trait. In India, she says, where Mahindra is long established, people can look at any model and say at an instant that it's a Mahindra. That, no doubt, is helped by the fact that there are so many of them on the streets of India. Mahindra holds a market share of 52.8 per cent for light commercial vehicles (up to 3.5 tonnes) and 40 per cent for SUVs in a three-million-strong new car market.

She explained to motoring.com.au that Mahindra runs its forward design projection in two streams – production design and advanced design. The former is focused very minutely on individual models, while advanced design is considering the future of design for the company and what rival brands may be doing now. Ms Ananthan said that this fact-finding aspect of advanced design is conducted almost annually, or whenever there's a major shift in the product portfolio – as when the XUV500 was introduced.

"Just changing the entire portfolio to a new look is going to be obviously expensive so you look at the right times," she said.

The design executive sees a shared thread running through the styling of the current LCVs and SUVs in the range, with the one exception being the quirky TUV300.