At the opening of the new global SUV here on Wednesday Hishashi Takeuchi, the Director of Implementing and CEO told the media that this new model would only be produced in India and would be exported to different markets.
He also said the medium SUV would be exported to the Middle East, South America and Africa and would not replace other models everywhere in the world.Asked about the volume of production and the company will order components from the vendors that he said production will depend on the volume of demand inside and outside India.
The newly hatched model will be produced at the Toyota Kirloskar Motor PVT Ltd Factory in Bidadi Karnataka.
Grand Vitara commercial production will begin in August and this model will be available for sale in the Nexa showroom starting in September and so on.
Takeuchi said, Maruti Suzuki India would decide to introduce hybrids to other models such as compressed natural gas -powered vehicles (CNG) in the future.
According to Senior Executive Director Maruti Suzuki, Marketing & Sales, Shashank Srivastava, the production deposits for the CNG model are around 125,000 units. The company will first delete the CNG model deposit and decide to have CNG-Hibrida.
Grand Vitara was designed by Suzuki Global while the component localization was carried out by Maruti Suzuki, C.V. Raman, said Chief Technology Officer.
Regarding the market potential for the Srivastava medium SUV said that last year the total volume sold in India was around 5.4 lakh units which were about 18 percent of the total car markets.He said the demand for Diesel SUVs would drop from 51 percent at this time.
