Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (M&M), has announced that it will launch its much awaited Global SUV the XUV500 on September 28th 2011 at Pune. Designed and developed entirely in-house by Mahindra, the XUV500 is Mahindra’s first global SUV platform, with significant inputs in styling and development from customers across the globe.
The product unveil of the XUV500 will be followed on September 29th 2011 by the announcement of the price, strategy and technology behind the vehicle, post which will be a visit to its manufacturing facility at Chakan and test drives. Four years in the making from conception to global testing, validation and final production, the XUV500 is the embodiment of the Mahindra Group’s automotive vision of providing the best world class products to its customers.
Inundated with requests for information on the global SUV, Mr. Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman & MD – M&M Ltd., also ran a contest on his personal Twitter page to “Guess the date” of the global SUV launch last night. Mr. Akshay Kalyanpur (@Mrkalyanpur – Twitter handle), was announced as the lucky winner of the contest. He is the privileged winner of an exclusive visit to the world-class Chakan plant where the XUV500 is being made.
The XUV500 has been designed entirely in-house at M&M’s world class research and development facility, the Mahindra Research Valley at Chennai. It will be the country’s first indigenously developed monocoque SUV with the first transverse engine offering from Mahindra. Making the XUV500 truly unique and global is the manner in which it was conceived and designed. In fact, all research & development activities for this global SUV were aligned with global standards of quality, technology, testing norms, regulations & emissions from the very start. The XUV500, thus, is the very epitome of the Mahindra RISE philosophy as its development challenged the limits of conventional thinking and involved the innovative use of resources. It is a truly contemporary and stylized vehicle equipped with sophisticated technologies that will set benchmarks in the global automotive arena, for others to follow.