The RE60 ‘four wheeler’ has been in news ever since Bajaj Auto Ltd, the popular Indian two wheeler maker, unveiled its plan to launch a four wheeled motorized vehicle in the Indian car market. For a lot of time, everyone was of the belief that the RE60 would rival the Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world. However, soon after unveiling the RE60, Bajaj made it clear that it has no intentions of challenging the Tata small car and that the RE60 would instead battle it out with auto rickshaws.
So basically, the RE60 will play the role of three wheelers but with. . four wheels. The RE60 is taking its own sweet time coming to us and it has now been more than a year since the car made its public debut.
It has now emerged that Bajaj is fast inching closer to completing the RE60 project and that the auto maker aims to sell as many as 5,000 units of its ‘four wheeler’ every month. The RE60 is being called as a ‘quadricycle’ and will be strictly a commercial vehicle for urban usage.
Powering the RE60 is a single cylinder petrol engine that has a claimed mileage of 35 kmpl. The RE60 has low CO2 emissions of just 60g per kilometre. The engine has a max power output of 20bhp.
Mr. R C Maheshwari, President of Bajaj Auto’s commercial vehicle division, stated that,”The government has given us an in-principle approval to create this new class of four-wheelers or quadricycles. A committee is working on regulations and norms for such vehicles. We understand that the process for the final inclusion of this new class in the commercial vehicles segment will take a few months more.”
While the RE60 is close to being production-ready, the car won’t be launched before Govt. of India comes up with a new policy for quadricycles.
Source: Profit.ndtv.com
I am surprised that Bajaj seems to be claiming that they are getting permission to “create” the “quadricycle” segment of vehicles with the RE60. The old 2 seater Reva’i’ was defined as a Quadricycle on launch way back in 2000 when it was launched in India.