Nice to see Hyundai Nishat do now what they should have done in the first place with the Elantra!

Nishat launched Elantra above Corolla and Civic with a bigger engine, posing as more premium. Then a few years later Atlas launched the Civic 11th gen https://carspiritpk.com/11th-gen-honda-civic-launched-in-pakistan/ at a much more expensive list price but with a smaller and more powerful engine. The whole market positioning of 2000 cc Elantra totally became redundant!

Now they will bring a 1600 cc Elantra at ½ or ⅔rd the price of a Civic, and given that Corolla just raised price of lowest trim 1600 cc to 40 lakh https://carspiritpk.com/toyota-car-prices-increased-yet-again/, the 1600 cc Elantra will be the cheapest 1600 cc at 36 lakh. They are also responding to prices of fuel.

This totally changes the market positioning of Elantra from a “premium wannabe” to its true brand identity: secondary to the Japs in its own market segment, priced to attract the buyer of smaller Honda City (lower market segment), and wanting to sell volume instead of profiting on shortage of supposedly Veblen goods.

Basically this is a fruit of market competition. It is the result of the auto policy which is not achieving all of its goals perfectly, but at least some results are being apparent. At least enough players are now in the market that they have to respond to market changes. This never happened when there was a monopoly/oligopoly. Now other market segments where all these assemblers have avoided competition by not stepping on each others’ toes are still running in monopolistic form, imagine how much the public can benefit by having more options and competition!

I agree, the Altis X is so far the ugliest 11th gen Corolla variation I have ever seen… and I thought the rear of the base car was already ugly. 🤢🤮 Really terrible swoops…

Looks are a subjective matter. Corolla 11th gen facelift 2017-2020 (pre-minor-model-change) did look better than Elantra, but the Altis X mmc is typical ricer with its black bumper inserts.