Demand for pre-owned luxury cars in smaller towns is set to rise

Pooja Patel

Thanks to the ongoing pandemic, safety and secured mobility has taken precedence over everything else. This, in turn, has given rise to more and more people buying cars, especially pre-owned cars. LuxeBook spoke to Sumit Garg, Co-Founder & MD of Luxury Ride, about the market, managing business amidst crisis and the company’s growth strategy.

What kind of clients prefers pre-owned luxury cars?
We have a mixed profile of customers. From younger to mid-aged and so on, and mainly the ultra HNIs, HNI, upper-middle-class, businessmen, bureaucrats and others. We see the highest sales coming from the age group of 31-45 years. This age group is a diverse lot, as they are young and young at heart and prefer luxury driving. In fact, 41 per cent of our sales come from the age group of 22 to 45 year olds. We have seen more demand from Tier-II and Tie-III cities such as Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Gurugram.

Recently, after the pandemic hit India, most of our online queries have come from Tier-II & Tier-III cities and on a daily basis, we receive more than 50 queries. We have been getting a good amount of attention from Jaipur, Dehradun, Ahmedabad, Pune, Kolkata, and Hyderabad.

What kind of price are consumers willing to pay for the cars?
Most of our customers buy within the price range of Rs15 lakh to 50lakh. We have recently ventured into the exotic cars/sports cars segment and reaching out to a new consumer base

Is the pandemic responsible for the growth in the demand of pre-owned cars?
There has been a shift in consumer preference. People are more inclined towards personal mobility, a safer drive with a strong attachment to brands, which offer unique experiences and value for money, equivalent to a new car in a much lesser price. The high rate of depreciation value of the luxury cars, the fast-growing base of young population, increasing disposable income of consumers (along with rapid urbanisation), and growing internet penetration in non-metros are also reasons for the demand of pre-owned luxury cars.

Your company has presence across North India. Sales in which city was the highest in 2019?
Yes, we have a strong consumer base in the North India market and the highest sale in 2019 came from Delhi.

Since January 2020 up till now, how has the business been?
The year started well with good response from customers. When the lockdown happened in March, the sales had gone down and April and May were the worst months, but post May, the situation started to normalise and we have seen an increase in sales.

How many pre-owned luxury cars did you sell in the lockdown?
We have sold all our previous stock of pre-owned cars during (March-August, 2020). Last year, we had better sales than this year. We have so far, neither made any profit nor loss.

What kind of new service/maintenance features have you added to your bouquet of service in the/post the lockdown?
We have re-started our online sales and 40 per cent of our sales is coming from it. We are expecting it to reach 70 per cent by the end of this year. We have started pick and drop services, we are also delivering our cars to those cities where we don’t have a physical presence. We are soon launching our mobile app, which will be available on, both, iOS and Android. It will have features like online booking, EMI calculator, comparison sheet, 360-degree video of the car, virtual reality showroom tour, service history and online submission of documents, payment gateway and many more services.

Are you seeing a surge in the number of people wanting to sell their luxury cars?

Rather than selling their luxury cars, people want to exchange their cars. People with more than one luxury car are the ones thinking of selling their automobile.

What are your company’s expansion plans?
We will open 50 new showrooms in India by 2023 and will be expanding our footprint in Tier-II, Tier-III cities and beyond. We will open showrooms in Ludhiana and Gurugram by the end of this year. Soon after, we will open showrooms in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Indore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Kolkata and Pune. All our showrooms will have ‘3S’ facility – we will provide, sales and after-sales services, and will have an integrated service workshop as well.

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