Once pitched as a luxury offering, carmakers are now offering automatic transmission variants at lower prices.
In a bid to fuel adoption of automatics, Ford and Maruti Suzuki have driven down prices. Their target: the upwardly mobile urban customer willing to embrace new technology and looking for a more comfortable drive in ‘stop and go' tight traffic conditions.
The high price of automatics in India has been a barrier to their adoption till now, even as the developed world mostly drives around in these cars.
Ford has launched two automatic variants for the petrol Fiesta mid/entry-level sedan, with a starting price of Rs 8.99 lakh. This sits lower than the price of the top petrol manual transmission version (Rs 9.43 lakh).
“This automatic is more fuel efficient than the manual version, because gear shifts are much faster than what a human can achieve. Plus, this had been tuned for the low-speed driving in India,” Mr Nigel Wark, Executive Director for Marketing, Sales and Service at Ford India, said.
“In the segment, 15 per cent market of the market is for automatics. But we expect a sharp take-off in the demand in the next few years – globally, automatics have a majority share in sales.”
Ford's ‘Powershift' dual-clutch automatic technology claims to be lighter and offer benefits such as smoother acceleration over traditional set ups. Earlier, the cheapest car to offer a dual-clutch automatic was the Skoda Laura (starts Rs 14.77 lakh).
Just this month, Maruti Suzuki had followed a similar strategy with the launch of the new Swift Dzire entry sedan. The market leader launched the cheapest automatic sedan (by offering it only in the middle petrol trim variant Vxi).