New platform promises high rigidity and weight savings.
Indian Autos Blog understands Suzuki engineers are well into the development phase of the next generation Swift, which could have its global premiere towards the second half of next year.
A person in the know told Indian Autos Blog that Maruti and parent company Suzuki follow a typical 5-6 year lifecycle with the Swift, and that the new generation model will soon commence its global testing program.
The source confirmed that the new Swift will ride on the 'New generation platform' which makes its debut on the Baleno this month. This platform, which promises better crash protection, uses up to 41 percent of tensile steel for its construction, which also saves plenty of kilograms. To put things in numbers, the larger and more feature-loaded Baleno weighs 100 kg lighter than the Swift!
The Baleno will be made at the Manesar plant with a localization of nearly 98 percent. Not only will this high localization help Maruti in pricing the hatchback competitively, it will also improve the lead time in launching the new Swift in India. Furthermore, the future Swift is not a single car, but rather a family of cars spanning the hatchback, the Dzire compact sedan and the Ertiga MPV. High localization of parts and components for these volume spinning models further improves the economy of scale.
One person who has seen the design of the new Swift says that the "design DNA is unaltered" in comparison to the current model, which itself is an evolution over the 2004 model.
Design wise, the first and second generation of the Swift have caught the fancy of the Indian consumer. Suzuki may not want to risk drastically altering a product which sells over 38,000 units in India every month (sales of Swift+Dzire calculated over the past 6 months).
