On October 2018, the Supreme Court ruled out that BS-IV cars will not be sold or made in India after 1 April 2020. After that, Maruti Suzuki India said that proper production planning will be required to vanish BS-IV technology.
India is progressing to a complete generation shift of emission norms by controlling its vehicular emissions which are done by moving to the BS-VI norms by 2020 due to which both the OEMs and suppliers are in a crisis and are trying to meet up the deadline.
Supreme Court cleared that from 1st April 2020 only BS-VI vehicles will be registered and Maruti Suzuki announced that the production of BS-VI vehicles will start only after they clear the yearly maintenance closure in the last week of December 2019.
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“The production of our BS-IV vehicles will largely culminate by end of December 2019. These will be models which will by-and-large get converted to BS-VI by December 2019. As a result, we will only manufacture BS-VI cars from January 2020, but will produce BS-IV models only if there is a strong demand for any particular model, but that number will be very less” said RC Bhargava, chairman, Maruti Suzuki India while speaking to a media gathering in New Delhi.
Bhargava added “There will be just one model which we will not be able to be convert to BS-VI by December 2019 and it will be spilled over to the next calendar; but we are trying to expedite that as well”.
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Bhargava said that BS-VI petrol vehicle can run on the BS-IV petrol but it will not be considered in the case of diesel. He explained that there will be a huge gap between the price of petrol and diesel i.e. diesel will be Rs 2.5 lakh costlier than the petrol in case of Maruti Suzuki and the responsibility will lie on the customer who will decide which powertrain option he wants to buy.
Bhargava said “Also by that time, we will start equipping the BS-VI petrol cars with strong-hybrid systems by leveraging our Suzuki-Toyota agreement, which will serve to improve the fuel-efficiency performance of a vehicle by up to 30 percent, and will help us meet our CAFE targets”.