Saar: The company has confirmed that the WR-V has contributed to 28 per cent of its total sales in the last one year

Honda’s jacked-up Jazz, which is popularly known as the WR-V, is celebrating its one year anniversary in India. Any milestone? Well, it has clocked over 50,000 sales for the Indian arm of the Japanese carmaker. That is quite an achievement, considering where the WR-V factually stands against its competition. Honda India confirmed that the WR-V accounted for 28 per cent of its total sales during the past 12 months.

Yoichiro Ueno, who is the president and CEO of Honda Cars India Ltd is surely a happy man on the WR-V’s success. He said, “This is a very proud moment for us. Honda WR-V has witnessed great success in the Indian market and the 50,000 sales milestone validates its strong presence. It has emerged as a strong volume model in Honda’s model line-up striking the right chord among young urban customers who are looking for status, comfort and have an active lifestyle.”

The company further added that in tier 1 markets, which we normally tag as tier 1 cities, the WR-V contributed to 38 per cent of its nationwide sales. The same figure for tier 2 markets and tier 3 markets stood at 30 per cent and 32 per cent respectively. Since its launch in March last year, Honda confirmed that 80 per cent of the WR-V customers opted for the range-topping VX variant. As far as petrol to diesel ratio is concerned, that currently stands at 48 per cent to 52 per cent.

The WR-V saw most of its buyers from North (30 per cent), followed by West (28 per cent), South (27 per cent) and East (15 per cent). In India, the WR-V is available in three variants – S, S Edge Edition and VX. All three variants can be had with either a diesel engine (1.5-litre producing 100PS/200Nm) or a petrol motor (1.2-litre producing 90PS/110Nm). While the diesel comes mated to a 6-speed manual transmission, the petrol is offered with a 5-speed unit. Apart from India, the only other market where Honda sells the WR-V is Brazil.

As far as its competition is concerned in India, the Honda WR-V battles with the Ford EcoSport, Maruti Suzuki Vitara Brezza and Mahindra TUV300. If you had to choose amongst them, which one would you put your money on?