Little more than a decade back, we all lived in a world where one never needed to dig deep into his pockets to buy a few litres of petrol. There used to be some lucky blokes in a country called United States of America, who used to burn this liquid in cars running inefficient mammoth sized 8.0 liter V12 engines, having a fuel efficiency of something like 2 kmpl! And they never needed to sell off their kidneys for indulging in this pleasure.
However, times have changed and how! The change is so drastic that car makers all over the world are now working hard to produce cars that can stretch a litre of petrol to a few kilometres more. Petrol prices seem to be rising like there is no tomorrow and this has made people with high daily usage to turn towards diesel powered cars.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. (MSIL), India’s largest selling car maker, has always provided India with affordable motoring and the car maker has achieved enough success with the sales performance by Swift and Dzire diesel variants.
Rumors have been abounding that Maruti is contemplating coming up with a diesel engine for the Wagon R. Our friends at TeamBHP claim that Maruti might laucnh the Wagon R diesel as soon as in festive season this year. Powering the new Wagon R diesel would be the same 800cc turbo diesel engine that will power the diesel variant of the Alto 800. This engine is being developed ‘in-house’ by MSIL (with assistance from a team of engineers from Suzuki, Japan.)
The new 0.8 Liter diesel engines would ensure two things-
- Maruti won’t have to pay royalty to some other car maker for the procurement and usage of their diesel engine (Currently, Maruti pays to Fiat for using their Multijet motor). This would enable MSIL to price its cars more competitively.
- A 0.8 liter diesel engine means that not just the Wagon R and the Alto 800 but also the AStar could soon get a diesel engine variant to battle it out against the diesel powered Chevrolet Beat and upcoming all new Hyundai i10
A diesel engine should indeed make the WagonR a ‘smart choice.’ No?