Morris Garages (MG) Motor India on Thursday launched its first electric vehicle ZS priced between ₹20.88 lakh and ₹23.58 lakh (ex-showroom in select five cities).

Interestingly, the company has gotten maximum number of bookings from Bengaluru (more than 600) followed by Hyderabad (around 500), amongst the five cities it will begin to sell with.

Bengaluru and Hyderabad is followed by Delhi-NCR (around 450), Mumbai (around 400) and Ahmedabad (around 150). The company will begin deliveries on January 27 across these cities, it said.

₹1 lakh discount

MG Motor India is also offering a discount of ₹1 lakh to people who have booked the vehicle till January 17. So the effective ex-showroom to these customers (2,409 people) will be at ₹19.88 lakh for the ‘Excite’ model and ₹22.58 lakh for the ‘Exclusive’ variant, through cash backs from MG Motor India.

“Bengaluru and Hyderabad were obvious also because of the tech industry, more youngsters, more technology savvy. So probably that’s why they going going for this. But, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR were also not far behind,” Rajeev Chaba, President and Managing Director– MG Motor India, told BusinessLine on the sidelines of the launch.

He said 80 per cent of the bookings came from the individual customers and the rest from the ‘new-age’ fleet operators (that have EVs in fleet) like Mylescars, Lithium Cab and LeasePlan. However, it hasn’t received any bookings from Ola and Uber.

Requests from govt depts

MG has also got some requests from government departments such as Energy Efficiency Services (EESL) that has EVs from Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra and Hyundai Motor India, and even some Ministers on their ‘individual capacities’ have approached the company whom Chaba declined to name.

“We are getting good response from all over...our target was around 1,000 cars a year because the whole industry sold 2,000 cars last year, but we received so many bookings without revealing the prices,” Chaba said, adding that it received over 2,800 bookings in 27 days.

He added that the company received many bookings came from other States as well, especially Kerala, but had to deny them as MG has initial plans to sell the electric SUV in these five cities only.

MG eShield

Meanwhile, the car-maker has introduced the MG eShield, which provides privately-registered customers with a free of charge five-year manufacturer warranty for unlimited kilometres on the car and eight years/1,50,000 km warranty on the battery.

It also offers round-the-clock roadside assistance for five years for privately-registered cars, along with five labour-free services.

MG has also entered an alliance with CarDekho.com that will provide assured resale value and can be availed by the customer by paying a stipulated amount at the time of purchase of ZS EV.

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