“If you don’t mind, can you please park your Fiat car out of the premises”. Don’t be shocked if you work for Tata Motors and hear this. The company has decided to only allow Tata badged vehicles inside its parking premises at its plants. This is being done to promote employees to drive their own vehicles and instill a sense of pride in the workers. Tata Motors is not the first company to implement such a policy, Hyundai has been having it for years now. Other companies prefer to offer mouth watering discounts to employees (to the tune of 30%) to lure them to drive their own brand of vehicles.
“To promote brand image and demonstrate pride of being part of Tata Motors, the management has encouraged all the employees to own a Tata Vehicle. As our commitment to further this cause, as a first step, we shall only Tata Vehicles to enter the premises. All the non-Tata Vehicles will have to be parked outside the (commercial vehicle business unit) CVBU gate in a parking lot” – a circular at the Tata Motors Pune plant states.
So why do manufacturers want their employees to own their own brand of vehicle. When visitors, suppliers or vendors come to the factory, it instills confidence in them to see company employees using their own brand of vehicle. Some automakers don’t give any discount to their employees but instead offer them lucrative finance schemes which lures them to buy the same brand. Some companies who do this include Honda 2-wheelers and Bajaj Auto. However Maruti Suzuki, Ford, Honda and Renault don’t have any such policy and employees are free to choose their brand of vehicle. Maruti Suzuki doesn’t have any such policy as its plant doesn’t have parking facility inside the factory premises.
This move by Tata Motors could also be done to resolve parking issues as the number of cars might be more than the number of parking spots. Now this brings us to the crucial question. Would you rather be forced to buy a vehicle because you work for a particular company, or would you choose to park outside and have freedom of choice? We choose the latter any day.
A funny comment on the source of this article (Economic Times), where a reader (Bluehawk) has posted – “Few months back we spotted Ratan Tata driving a Honda City. Poor Ratan ji will not be able to park in his own office now”.
