Indian Autos blog

The Alto’s dominance finally comes to an end, well sort of. The Maruti Suzuki Alto was the bestselling car in India since the mid-2000′s – crown that the Alto snatched from the 800. This epic dominance lasted for more than 6 years.

But all good things come to an end. The Alto has been dethroned from its podium by sister Swift for the month of April.

Let’s just say Maruti Suzuki isn’t complaining.

click through to read on

Maruti Suzuki showcased two vehicles at Delhi Auto Expo which were their entries for the Technology Day organized by SIAM and Ministry of Heavy Industries. Maruti Suzuki officials remained tight lipped about their market introductions but said studies were on to see the suitability of these highly fuel efficient hybrid cars. Do they need an introduction?

The SX4 hybrid is powered by a 1.2-liter four-cylinder petrol engine paired to a 30KW electric motor consuming 30% less fuel. The Swift on the other hand uses a sub-1 liter engine paired to a similarly powered electric motor.

The Swift hybrid is based on the previous generation model.

click through for image gallery

Everything you’ve heard about Maruti Suzuki in the last three months has been negative. Strikes, sacking of employees, allegations of pay-offs, sagging sales, launch of Hyundai Eon and delay of new models has affected the company’s morale.

The only good thing we can point out is the launch of the new Swift which generated record breaking bookings, crossing the 1 lac mark within a couple of months. It proved that a strong product always generates demand.

Maruti Suzuki is working overtime on increasing output at the Manesar plant

Now the problem was that the bookings and production could not be synced because of the problems at the manufacturing plant which resulted in a waiting period of over eight months for a new Swift. Though small in number, many customers cancelled their bookings and went ahead with a rival product.

The good news is that almost all the problems have been resolved and the company is back on track concentrating on how the Swift can reach more homes. Once the second line at Manesar becomes fully functional in January 2012, 18,000 Swifts are expected to roll out every month. With this, the plant output will go up from 1,400 units a day to 2,100 units a day. Recruitment of manpower is also going on in full swing.

With such plans, MS hopes to clear the existing backlog of the Swift by April 2012. This will not just bring relief to those who have already booked a Swift but will also bring in new customers who avoided the Swift due to the extremely long waiting period.

The new Maruti Suzuki Swift was a success story even before it was launched. A smashing 40,000 booking pre bookings were already gobbled up on August 17 (the day it was launched). Now, the Swift is only extending its lead over the competitors. The New Swift has crossed a one lakh marker in terms of bookings. However, I bet you have seen very few on road.

The simple explanation to that irony is – Labor union issues. Maruti has been grappling with trade union problems even before the Swift was launched. The company only produces 700 Swifts a day. The waiting period on the diesel model is nearly half a year, whereas a petrol car delivery is promised to a customer within 3-4 months.

click through to read more

In a message sent out to his fans and page viewers, NDTV’s Siddharth Vinayak Patankar says Maruti has registered over 80k bookings for the Swift. This problem of plenty is not new to Maruti and while it knows ways to deal with this type of pleasurable problem, it is grappling with striking workers at the Manesar plant where the Swift is made.

Its simple to understand – If assembly line workers don’t cooperate, cars cannot be made.

Maruti asked the Manesar workforce to sign a good conduct bond before entering the premises to which a section of the workers turned down the request and reacted by taking to protests. Maruti issued a circular to workers after it found defective cars with dents, severed wire harnesses and wrong parts during a surprise inspection at the factory yard. Maruti is only managing 200 units/day compared to the 600 units/day Swift production target if the 80k bookings have to be eroded quickly.

While worker strike has hit production and quality levels, customers have to wait longer at dealerships. Waiting period has risen from the officially-announced three months to ten months in some parts of India for a new Swift. If some reports are to believed, all Maruti Suzuki dealerships have stopped taking any further bookings.

The worker agitations are believed to stem from vested interest groups outside the company motivating a section of workers to sabotage production. Maruti has assigned shop floor rolls to the recently trained ITI graduates at Manesar to ramp up production.

There are two new cars for those petrol premium hatch buyers today in India. The first is of course the new Swift which has had a very strong start with 50k+ bookings and then there’s the cut-price Honda Jazz that lacks a diesel but makes up for that more with an amazing sticker price and huge amounts of space.

The Jazz has almost been down segmented and will piggyback on the Honda brand image in India.

click through to read more

Here is a little exercise that you can do for fun. Go down to any major street and take a pan shot of the traffic. You will notice that at least one of the cars in that traffic is a Maruti Suzuki Swift.

Such is the reach of this little urban run around that change the hatchback segment forever. The reason for this reach you ask? Well the answer is Maruti Suzuki sold 12000 odd units of the Swift almost every single month from the 2005 to 2011. More than 600,000 of the original Swift have been shifted into the market.

But as competition got fiercer, more and more cars with better features invaded the Swift’s territory. The sales of the Swift looked in trouble. The Swift was still outselling the competition by a huge margin but instead of 12K units, it started to show signs of slipping to four figures. The market demanded more features, more space, more fuel economy and Maruti Suzuki finally responded with the– All new ‘More’ Swift.

click through to continue reading

As we just complete posting images of the new Swift from the Delhi premiere, we’re getting live updates from our Mumbai man Kaustubh who tells us that Maruti has launched the Swift there. Here are the prices -

New Maruti Swift petrol Mumbai prices

LXI – 4.50 lakhs

VXI – 4.91 lakhs

ZXI – 5.78 lakhs

New Maruti Swift diesel Mumbai prices

LDI – 5.36 lakhs

VDI – 5.81 lakhs

ZDI – 6.62 lakhs

By this morning Maruti had registered 50,000 pre-launch bookings in dealerships across India. Shockingly 80% of the bookings were for diesel variants while the remaining were gobbled up by petrol. That clearly shows the how much diesel takes precedence over petrol variants.