Maruti Suzuki to release electric car in India in 2025
The Indian car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki wants to completely end the production of pure petrol cars in the next seven to ten years. Maruti Suzuki plans to start selling its first pure electric car for the mass market in 2025.
This is what chief technology officer CV Raman told the Economic Times. Maruti Suzuki had already stopped manufacturing diesel cars in April 2020. In future, the Indian manufacturer will rely on a mix of electric and hybrid cars as well as internal combustion vehicles powered by natural gas or biofuels, he said.
“In the next decade, we will convert all vehicles. There will be no pure petrol vehicles. They will either be electrified, or driven by CNG or bio-fuels,” Raman said. However, Raman did not specify what distribution in the powertrain mix the manufacturer expects.
This is also due to some factors that currently make it difficult for many customers to switch to fully electric vehicles. In addition to the hurdle of the higher purchase price, the report says that more than 60 per cent of Indians park on the street and only 20-25 per cent have access to charging stations. Moreover, power generation in India needs to become cleaner for electric vehicles to actually contribute to climate change mitigation – currently around 70 per cent of electricity generated comes from coal. “The energy mix has to change, along with product strategy, to meet COP26 (targets on reducing emission),” Raman said.
Maruti Suzuki is India’s largest carmaker and says it is working to align its product portfolio with the government’s goal of reducing crude oil imports and emissions. Suzuki has a two-pronged approach in India: on the one hand, the Japanese carmaker is active as Suzuki itself (and is planning to build a battery plant in India), and on the other hand, through Maruti Suzuki, which emerged from Suzuki’s acquisition of the Indian manufacturer Maruti Udyong.
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