How will Honda present its Brio based compact SUV?

Honda Cars India is riding on high success and confidence buoyed by the outstanding response to both its latest launches, namely the Amaze and the new City. The Japanese premium car maker is now preparing for the launch of two more new products this fiscal in order to continue its fast growing sales rates. These two upcoming launches are namely the Honda Mobilio and the latest generation 2014 Jazz. Post the Indian market launch of these two cars, the car maker has plans to bring in a compact SUV.

Thus, Honda will have a representative in all the major automobile segments in India, with the Mobilio fighting in the MPV segment, the Jazz in the premium hatchback segment, and the new compact SUV in the very popular segment that has the likes of the Ford EcoSport and the Renault Duster, while a lot of other new entrants will be joining soon.

Honda India’s expected compact SUV model will be developed on the popular Brio hatchback’s platform. This capable platform has been utilized to build the very successful and high selling Amaze compact sedan as well. Then again, similar to that of Amaze, the upcoming Honda compact SUV is not only expected to share the platform, but also share a lot of other components, body panels and features with the Brio and Amaze as well. This will help the company to keep the production cost under check in order to offer competitive pricing for the Indian consumers to actually like it.

However, this time around Honda will have to comprehensively modify the Brio’s platform, as unlike the Amaze only an additional boot will not be enough and the Brio hatch’s platform was originally not developed to accommodate the develop a SUV on it.

Previously it was being speculated that the Japanese car maker is planning to bring in the new Vezel compact SUV to India. Later on, it was made clear by the company that the Vezel will not head to India at least for some time, as it is meant for the developed car markets. However, the company did indicate that it is surely going to launch a new compact SUV model in India, as this segment is highly competitive. The Brio based compact SUV is thus the one for India.

Essentially, this new upcoming compact SUV from the house of Honda will be a sub-4 meter vehicle in order to get the excise duty benefits. However, according to some of the reports, this new Honda SUV will be rather a sub-compact vehicle and might as wll cross the 4 meter length, and it will be competing with the larger compact SUVs such as the Duster and the Nissan Terrano, but in this case Honda will have a tough time pricing the car aggressively. Then again it is being speculated that in any case the upcoming Honda Brio compact SUV will be more spacious than the EcoSport.

Whether the Honda Brio based SUV will be a compact or a sub-compact vehicle, only time will tell.