Is India turning out to be a big market for automatic cars. Quite Literally!
Customer’s driving automatics cars have doubled in the past five years and the sales are gushing at a rapid pace across India. So much so, that smaller hatchbacks and compact cars are coming closer to their bigger siblings like sedan and SUV’s on automatic gear shift and weaning customers away from tardy manual gears.
More than 2-lakh automatic vehicles have been sold in the past one year – doubling the demand – as country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) alone is targeting to sell 3 lakh units of vehicles equipped with different automatic transmission technologies by 2020.
The surged has been witnessed with the onset of highly affordable automated manual transmission of AMT, which was introduced by MSI in its Celerio hatchback in 2014, and now has been adopted by half a dozen companies like Renualt-Nissan, Hyundai, Tata Motors amongst others. Other variants of regular automatic transmission (AT) and continuous variable transmission (CVT) are also popular, but are much pricier.
Maruti, the market leader for instance currently sells around 94,000 units per annum of vehicles with AGS (automated gear shift), AT and CVT. It has branded the AMT as the AGS technology in India and aims to drive sales growth with automatic transmission. "Our mission is to double AGS contribution from the current levels of 94,000 units to around 1.5 lakh units by end of FY 17-18 and achieve 3 lakh mark by 2020," a company spokesperson told the media.
At present, Maruti Suzuki offers AGS in seven models in its range, including Alto K10, WagonR, Celerio, Swift, IGNIS and Dzire. It is contemplating to adopt AGS technology in new cars. “Our vision is to democratise the two pedal technology by making them affordable and relevant for the customers,” the company official added.
The sale of automatic variants across the company's product portfolio has risen steadily in the recent years. In 2013-14, the company had just sold 900 automatic units. In 2014-15, the figure rose to 32,426 units, while it surged to 56,968 units in 2015-16. In the last fiscal, the company sold a total of 94,736 units comprising AGS, CVT and AT technologies.
Many a players are taking the technology even further to gain edge in market and bring their technological prowess. Honda will launch its new CR-V in India (for the first time with diesel engine) and also bring a new technology of push button gear-shift to the local market. The new technology will give more space on the centre console, and rather than a lever, it will employ four buttons—P (park), R (reverse), N (neutral), D/S (drive/sport)—to change gears.
Interestingly, push-button gear-shift is not a new thing. The modern push button gear-shift technology is claimed to have been invented by the French inventor Francois Leorat in the 1980s, and later companies like Renault ad Chrysler popularised its in their customers.
But India is likely to be the market for cheaper AMT powered cars. The future belongs to automatic cars as and all major automobile firms Maruti, Hyundai and Tata Motors are betting big on sales of such models and prefer to bid goodbye to the hassle of frequent gear shifts. The resurgent Tata Motors believes that five years down the line, every second car sold in India could be an AMT. The reasons are simple and obvious; the innovation offers comfort and ease of driving to the customers with no compromise on fuel efficiency.
Even companies like Hyundai, the second biggest passenger vehicle maker in the country, has also seen a rapid increase in the share of its vehicles with automatic transmission (AT) to 9.8% of its total sales as on June-end this half year from just 4% in 2015. It plans to introduce AMT in its yet –to-debut all-new Santro hatchback and subsequent models.
