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Palio Adventure Weekend to hit the roads in May

BS Corporate Bureau

Fiat India Private Ltd on Thursday announced that it will launch the Palio Adventure and Palio Weekend in May. The company has also decided to discontinue the production of Siena Weekend after the launch of Palio Weekend.

Managing Director M P Bianchi said they were hopeful of selling 200-250 units of the new models every month.

"Palio Adventure is a cross between a sports utility vehicle and multi-utility vehicle and it will create a new segment in India", he said.

Refusing to disclose the price tag, he said that Palio Adventure would be priced 'cheaper' than Siena Weekend.

At present, Siena Weekend's petrol and diesel versions sport an ex-showroom tag of Rs 7,21,000 and Rs 7,70,000, respectively, in Chennai. Both the models will have 100 bhp, 1.6 litre petrol engines.

Bianchi said, "We have successfully increased localisation content in Palio to 85 per cent from 75 per cent over the last one year". The company, which has sold more than 17,000 Palio's since its launch in September 2001, confirmed its plans to sell 50,000 cars in calendar 2002 and achieve financial break-even.

Company officials said that they would be able to ramp up production as per market demand. Fiat, currently, manufactures 210 cars a day on a two-shift basis at its Kurla plant, which has a capacity of 60000 units.

On vendor development, Bianchi said that components exports was expected to double from the last year's export value of $10 million, and added that exports this year would include components for other models that were not being manufactured in India. Fiat India has 108 vendors.

In order to reach out to newer areas, Fiat is planning to increase the number of dealers from 62 to 75 and service points from 100 to 150 by the year-end.

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