As the price of petrol goes high, car makers are speeding up their plans and processes to launch more diesel vehicles as soon as possible. After the de-regulation of petrol prices in 2010, we all are witnessing a major interest shift towards the diesel engine powered cars. Despite being costlier, Diesel car sales in India has grown 35 per cent in last fiscal where as sales of petrol cars have dropped by 15 per cent at the same time. And as we all can guess, this demand for diesel cars is set go to a new high, thanks to petrol price which is 75 per cent costlier than diesel.
Mr. Mayank Pareek, Managing Executive Officer (Marketing and Sales), Maruti Suzuki, said: “There is a clear shift towards diesel cars. We are targeting it by increasing our internal diesel engine capacity and also outsourcing some engines from Italian car maker Fiat”. While Maruti is pushing their production capacity for diesel engines, another auto giant, Hyundai kicked off their Diesel Engine Plant worth Rs. 400 Crores, inIndia. Other manufacturers like Toyota, General Motors and Ford are also expanding their diesel car production and are expected to come up with new line up as well.
As industry executives say, there are around 2 Lakh orders of diesel cars are pending to be delivered and these days petrol cars are available as off the shelf. When the car makers are gearing up to deliver the orders and meet the market demands, they’re also trying to push the sales of their petrol cars by offering attractive discounts and other schemes, as we have already reported.
So, expect an earlier launch of the diesel cars that are on the cards!
By,
Arghya Pan
Team MotorBash
News Source: Economic Times
