Fiat Auto made a comeback in India and adopted a top down approach to rebuild the brand. It launched Fiat 500 as a premium luxury car as a brand building exercise. Later it introduced popular sedan Fiat Linea in India which received rave reviews and generated volumes for the company.
Fiat had earlier entered the small car segment with Palio Stile but it did not make its mark amongst the Indian audience. Now Fiat will phase out Palio, for which it had launched the new small car model Grand Punto. The premium hatchback model is fully compliant with the new emission norms and represents luxury in the small car segment.
Response from Punto and Linea has prompted Fiat to bring yet another small car model in the Indian market priced at Rs 3-3.5 lakh. It is widely speculated that the Fiat may introduce Fiat Abarth in the Indian market. “We are working on a small car which will be launched either by end of next year or early 2012,” said Fiat India Automobiles president and chief executive officer Rajeev Kapoor. “We are essentially a small car player which we tried to change with Linea but our strength is still in small cars. That will work in our favour when we introduce the small car which will be a benchmark car for Fiat,” he stated further.
