Despite new launches and steep discounts, Indian carmakers suffered a decline of 8.25 per cent in domestic car sales in November.

Maruti Suzuki, the biggest car manufacturer of India, launched its Alto 800; while Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen launched refreshes and variants of their various models just ahead of the festive season of Diwali. They also tried to allure customers with offers of 5-10 per cent discounts on most models. But, all these efforts failed to bring cheers for Indian carmakers.

Mahantesh Sabarad, an auto analyst with Fortune Broking, said, "Despite the spate of new launches, we saw 3% drop this festive season (September to November) and this is over a 14% drop last year."

Sabarad underlined that the industry requires a slew of positive factors to return to normal, such as cut in interest rates, improvement in investment climate and encouraging moves from government.

However, the ongoing craze for utility vehicles helped the overall passenger vehicle grew 3.86 per cent year-on-year in November.

During the April to November period, utility vehicle sales grew 61 per cent to 3.57 lakh units, which helped the cumulative passenger vehicle sales to see a growth of 9.62 per cent to 17.52 lakh units.

Experts are of the view that the absence of diesel vehicles at the entry level is widely responsible for dragging down growth in sales.