Ford Endeavour manual variants discontinued in India
Ford India has silently discontinued more variants of its flagship SUV offering, the Endeavour. The company initiated this exercise by first discontinuing the 2.2l Trend 4×2 MT variant. And now Ford has called off the 2.2l 4×4 MT Trend and the 3.2l 4×4 AT Trend variants. According to the official website, only the 2.2l 4X2 AT Trend, 2.2l 4X2 AT Titanium and the 3.2l 4X4 AT Titanium variants of the Endeavour are on sale in India.
While Ford India has not released any statement for the same, we believe this can be attributed to the lack of demand of the lower and the mid variants. This is not just a trend in the premium but also across the segments of cars sold in India. Additionally, in the premium segment, customers have always shown an inclination towards the automatic models in comparison to their manual counterparts.
The new-gen Ford Endeavour was launched in India in January last year. It primarily competes with the Toyota Fortuner and the Isuzu MU-X. However, it should be noted that the Toyota Fortuner is still sold in manual and automatic variants. The new starting price for the Ford Endeavour is Rs 25.49 lakh that goes up to Rs 31.50 lakh (ex-Mumbai). The rival Toyota Fortuner is priced between Rs 26.83-32.03 lakh.
Interestingly, Ford India dealers are not aware of this development. They claim that the company has not discontinued but have temporarily stopped production of the manual variants owing to the lower demand. We believe an official communication from Ford should settle this confusion.
Internationally, Ford has also started working on the new Endeavour. The new iteration gets a front-end design with the grille inspired by the new Ford F-150. Apart from the design changes and features update, the new Endeavour is expected to retain the powertrains offered in the present models.