Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Wither Mahindra, Goodbye MahindraPlanet

The End

I've been putting off writing a final post to kind of close out MahindraPlanet for a month now.  Obviously, Mahindra has decided to bail out on their often promised commitment to manufacturing and selling a compact diesel pickup truck for the United States.

I was writing a long overdue response back to Pee Wee from MahindraTruckForum.com today and realized that what I was writing really summed up my personal thoughts on the Mahindra debacle.  So I am publishing the slightly edited version of that response:

Hi Pee Wee,
Interest in Mahindra and MahindraPlanet certainly has waned in the last several months.  Yes, I did read all about their announcement back when you posted it up on MTF.  Frankly, I was too disgusted to post anything at the time. 

I would say that in a nutshell, I have moved on as well.  My interest in MahindraPlanet is barely there anymore, and I am completely disappointed in how everything transpired.  My heart certainly isn't into maintaining the blog like it once was.  I have heard absolutely nothing from John Perez so I am assuming that he is pretty well devastated by the news.  Certainly those dealers are all going to recoup anything they can from him or Mahindra.  I feel for the dealers more than anyone else. 

I really need to put together a final post to kind of close the site down and finish four years of blogging about Mahindra.  I certainly owe that to the awesome people I have met over that time.  The whole story is pretty silly in retrospect and I hope that in some way Mahindra's epic failure to launch a highway vehicle in the US has at least put a slight ding in their humongous egos. 

That said, I bet Mahindra will try again.  But I bet that they will do it withSsangyong and they will do it all a lot differently.  Since I have no interest inSsangyong or even the unitized Mahindra XUV500 (and the fact that they totallyburned every single person they dealt with in the US), I don't see the point incontinuing to support them. 

Like many other people, I was probably more in love with the concept of abare-bones, heavy-duty but compact, diesel pickup.  Unfortunately it was only ever a concept and never a reality that Mahindra could actually deliver.

Take Care!Chris
With that said, MahindraPlanet will continue to live on the web as long as Google leaves it here.  I might or might not update it once in a while.  We shall see.

I do want to thank every single person who has supported the website over the years.  I even want to thank the haters and trolls who really added character to the comments and kept me in check.  I learned a hell of a lot about writing, blogging, and annoying the hell out of people.  All in all, I had an awesome time and I hope that many of you did too.

Anyway.  Take care, and see you somewhere else!

Chris