Hot news update on Cervo,Omni,SX4 diesel and Kizashi

Posted at May 5th, 2009 under Auto News |  Print This Post

Maruti Suzuki’s managing director Shinzo Nakanishi has spelled out his company’s roadmap for the future.  He indicated the company’s plan to launch a 600cc small car. “The Suzuki 660 cc car is a good car for the Indian market, but it will take some years to launch it here.” But the cost recovery could be one of the main issue hampering cervo prospects in India. Maruti Suzuki recently commissioned an engine plant for the K-series engine, which powers the A-star and upcoming Ritz. “We have to recover this investment first. Once that happens, we’ll focus on the 660 cc car,” said Nakanishi.  “Thirdly, the 660 cc engine needs to be upgraded to meet Bharat 4 norms, which push up the cost of the car,” said Nakanishi.

Contrary to earlier media reports, Nakanishi said Maruti Suzuki will not phase out its popular model Omni. Instead it will work on the engine and upgrade it to comply the upcoming Bharat IV emission norms. However, he admitted that 800 will be phased out from 11 major cities. He further stated, the Maruti Suzuki engineers tried but failed to make the cut. “Every month, we sell about 7,000 units of the Omni on an average. That’s a good number and we would not like to let go of it. Our engineers are working to upgrade the Omni’s engine to meet the new emission norms, so the Omni will not be phased out,” he said.  “We have had no progress on the Maruti 800,” Nakanishi added.

On the sagging sales of SX4 due to the advent of new models like Fiat Linea and Honda new City, Nakanishi said
“the company is weighing various options to increase sales of SX4″. “One of the solutions is to bring a diesel SX4 but we don’t have a big engine as 1.3 litre engine (used in DZiRE) that we have is too small for the SX4,” he added.

On the various conflicting reports on Kizashi coming to India,Nakanishi said Suzuki is scaling down development of large cars following preference of smaller vehicles in the global auto market. “The market has changed and SMC has now stopped developing such big engines. Now they are developing a 2 litre engine,” Nakanishi said. He further stateed that the if Suzuki launches the Kizashi in Japan then it would make it to India.”If SMC launches Kizashi this year in Japan we will think of bringing it in India. Otherwise, SX4 will be our biggest car here.”