Toyota Kirloskar Motors has officially discontinued the Toyota Urban Cruiser from the Indian market. There is no official statement on whether there will be a replacement.
Official statement
“The company continuously studies the market to understand the changing preferences of customers and focuses on providing them with ever better cars with better and sustainable technologies. In line with this philosophy, we have developed the Toyota Urban Cruiser in phases. has decided to discontinue, firmly believing that our existing strong and durable product line-up in India will help us meet the demand in the market,” Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) said. .
Urban cruiser failure?
Introduced in 2020, the Toyota Urban Cruiser was the facelifted Maruti Suzuki Vitara Brezza. So far TKM has managed to sell 65,000 units which is a low number according to them. Also, these sales were mostly from Tier II and Tier III cities. This shows that this car is not very popular among the common buyers.
The discontinuation of the Urban Cruiser is not a shock as we were expecting a new version of the car to be introduced as MSIL has already introduced the new Brezza in the market. However, reports suggest that the Brezza will not be redone for another Toyota car.
Toyota’s portfolio in India
Toyota currently has two products that it does not share with Maruti Suzuki – the Innova Crysta and the Fortuner. Their other cars include the Glanza and the Urban Cruiser Highrider which share their platform with the Baleno and Grand Vitara respectively. The Innova is going to get an update for the Toyota Hicross soon.
Will we see more “Toyota” cars?
Ever since the Suzuki-Toyota partnership, buyers have been asking Toyota to bring a “real” Toyota to the market. Given Toyota’s brand image and the trust of its customers, Toyota might recognize the public’s demand. If you think about it, Toyota didn’t end up with the “Urban Cruiser” name. It has just been transferred to another car – the Urban Cruiser Hyder. While Maruti-Suzuki renamed the Vitara Brezza as simply the Brezza and named its new offering the Grand Vitara. This could mean that Toyota discontinued the Urban Cruiser just to make room for another car.
Also Read: Upcoming Toyota Innova Hicross To Get Panoramic Sunroof
Toyota Rise
If the above speculations are true, then there is not a good, not a big chance that we will see the Toyota Rise in India. If we dial back a few years, Raize was supposed to enter India in 2019. However, as the Maruti-Toyota partnership came to fruition, we got the Urban Cruiser instead. The Rise has the makings of a formidable sub-4 meter SUV. It is designed like the RAV4 which is a very popular crossover SUV in the domestic markets. It also gets a 1.0L turbo petrol engine and gets a 1.2L naturally aspirated engine. Comes in both manual and CVT transmission options. It has enough kit to take on the likes of the Venue, Brezza, Nexon and Sonnet.
Most people know what Toyota plans to fill the void left by the Urban Cruiser. For now, we can speculate and kind of hint to Toyota what products we actually want to see. 😉