In a high profile unveiling over the weekend, Tata Motors announced the launch in India of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles at an average price above Rs 62 lakh, the marquee brands it bought from Ford Motors last year.

But in a market dominated by cheaper offerings and intense competition in the premium end, it will be interesting to see how Jaguar and Land Rover perform in the market.

The premium car segment in the country was 7,400 units last year and has been showing a 80-90 per cent growth year on year. The past few years have seen the entry of brands like Porsche, Bentley and Lamborghini with others like BMW and Audi even establishing assembly operations here.

BMW, in fact, has seen over 100 per cent growth within its first year of operations is now selling close to 3000 units a year. Interestingly, all these brands offer their complete global portfolio of vehicles in India.

Tata has chosen just 6 select models from the JLR range for India and is looking at volumes of few hundreds for the first year.

The company has debuted the brands with just one dealer and workshop in Mumbai and Delhi is getting the same in the next 3-4 months. Tata says it will try and expand that to another 4 cities by the year-end but no comprehensive investment plans have been drawn up so far.

When compared with competition like Mercedes Benz with 24 cities, 15 dealers network or BMW with 24 dealerships in 20 cities, Jaguar and Land Rover start to look niche within the niche segment.

Tata says it could consider assembly operations in India but not in the near term. So, with completely built imports for now, JLR models are priced much higher than competing models. In some cases the difference is two times and that too could impede any hopes for significant volumes here in India.