In India, diesel engines are becoming more popular as more carmakers penetrate the market and bring new technologies. Currently, petrol models dominate the Indian car market, which rose by 25% to 1.9m vehicles last year.
In fact, petrol cars represent 75% of the cars that India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki sells. Historically, diesels sales have been pulled down by high maintenance and premium pricing. Nonetheless, the proportion of diesel sales has been rising steadily from 15% in 2006 to 25% in 2009, due to improved technology and fuel efficiency.
India’s top two carmakers, Maruti Suzuki (with 54% market share) and Hyundai (18%) said that they intend to invest more on building and marketing diesel cars to cope with demand. Meanwhile, Honda and Toyota plan to develop diesel engines for their passenger cars. Honda, which offers only petrol-powered vehicles in India, will soon have a small diesel engine for the market.
Toyota will soon roll out a diesel version of Corolla Altis – which would be its first diesel-driven passenger car in India. Honda Siel’s marketing chief, Jnaneswar Sen, told India’s Economic Times that there’s a need to come up with a diesel engine.
The company has yet to settle on a timeline for its launch. Toyota disclosed that 90% of its sales are diesels, but that these are not in passenger cars but rather, in utility vehicles and SUVs.
Production of diesel cars has been ramped up by Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, Tata, General Motors and Ford. They intend to take advantage of a rising demand for diesel cars, which consumers consider to be more fuel efficient and environment friendly than petrol-driven cars.
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