No market?

Sheikh drives one of our office cars. A sort of captive public transport vehicle. He has owned a first-gen Pulsar 150 for four years now. Yesterday, he caught me in the parking lot and asked, 'It's a nice bike, but I grow tired of this. I want to sell it off and replace it with a heavy bike (Indianism for a faster, bigger, more impressive machine), how about new Pulsar?' How about it indeed. I told the man what I knew, you know about the DTS-Fi, the fuel injection, twin discs, 225cc rumoured capacity, June launch, the works. I also pointed out the Apache to him, to which his response was, at best, lukewarm. Not heavy enough, evidently. 'What's the new Pulsar price,' was the only thing he wanted to know. I told him that guesstimates were running at 85-90,000 levels. He beamed, 'Affordable!'

Without belittleing his profession even the slightest bit, if people like Sheikh are willing to splash 90K on a Pulsar, what justification do the manufacturer have for claiming that there is no market? Who're they kidding?