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New Delhi, October 31
Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) on Monday expanded its S-CNG technology in Nexa channel -- the new Baleno and the all-new XL6 -- providing the customer with feature-rich and class leading products with minimal impact on the environment.
Introduced first in 2010 with Eeco, Alto and WagonR, MSIL has so far sold 1.14 million CNG vehicles, which has saved CO2 emissions of around one-million tonne and this extension of CNG fuel option to vehicles sold under premium retail chain Nexa is to meet the target of nearly 75 per cent jump in sales of CNG vehicles at four-lakh units this fiscal, a senior executive at MSIL said.
“This year, we should be selling close to four-lakh CNG cars as against 2.3 lakh cars that we sold last year. Today, we have 10 out of the total of 16 models (that the company sells) which have the CNG,” Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Director - Marketing and Sales, MSIL, told reporters adding that with these two new models the company’s CNG offering will go up to 12 models.
Two variants
The Baleno S-CNG will be available in two variants -- Delta, manual transmission (MT) to be priced at ₹8.28 lakh and Zeta (MT) priced at ₹9.21 lakh, while the XL6 S-CNG will be available only on Zeta (MT) variant at ₹12.24 lakh (all ex-showroom prices), he said.
On the overall demand for CNG vehicles, Srivastava said the average bookings per day last year was 1,300-1,400 vehicles and it went up slightly in the first quarter of this fiscal to 1,400 to 1,500 range.
In terms of order book for CNG vehicles, he said, “As of today pending bookings for CNG vehicles is about 1.23 lakh units.” However, the unavailability of CNG controller semiconductor along with certain other components related to the technology led to long waiting period for CNG vehicles, which ranged from a week for WagonR CNG to about eight to nine months for Ertiga CNG which has the highest pending order of 72,000 units, he added.
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