Maruti Suzuki, the leading player in the Indian automobile industry has announced the investment of Rs. 2000 crore at its Gurgaon plant for the set up of diesel engine manufacturing facility. Owing to the untouched tax rates on diesel powered cars, the demand has shot up for the diesel variants of Swift hatchback and the Swift Dzire sedan.
The Chief General Manager (Marketing) of Maruti Suzuki India, Mr. Shashank Srivastava revealed that the company will be producing 1.5 lakhs diesel engines in this year for catering to the surging demand for the Swift range.
As per the company, during the last three months of the fiscal year 2011-2012, over 50 percent of the sales in the auto industry composed of diesel cars and with the highly unstable petrol prices, the Indian buyers are switching their preference to diesel run cars.
The automaker has recently revealed that it is heading towards establishing a new plant in Gujarat along with a vendor park that would phase down the assembly capacity at Gurgaon plant, which suffers infrastructural limitations. The Gurgaon plant will however, be utilized as the diesel engine manufacturing facility that would continue to assemble cars but in a lower quantum.
Maruti Suzuki has recently forayed into the utility vehicle segment with much awaited launch of compact MPV, Ertiga that is being directed from its Gurgaon facility and is aiming to sell over 5000 units a month along with its exports as a Completely Knocked Down unit to Indonesia by the end of next month.
