Maruti Suzuki has received 40000 bookings for the Swift diesel alone and are in serious need of more diesel engines for their cars. Their manufacturing capacity is running on more than optimum capacity and the company is cutting export of the diesel motors to Hungary to reduce waiting period in India. However all this won’t help much and Maruti Suzuki has now decided to partner with diesel engine pioneers, Fiat to produce diesel engines for the Ritz, Swift, DZire and SX4. Now Maruti Suzuki will soon be signing a supply agreement with Fiat. India’s largest automaker recently conducted a technical feasibility study on Fiat’s Multijet engines, as some parts are different on Fiat diesel cars.
“We need to do a lot of work before going for these engines. Besides technical changes to meet our needs, we need to homologate (technically certify) our cars again to be launched with any Fiat engine in India,” R C Bhargava, Chairman, Maruti Suzuki, said.
Now Fiat will obviously gobble this opportunity without a second thought. The company has not been able to make significant profits even after help from Tata Motors in manufacturing and distribution. Fiat Powertrain Technologies which manufacturers diesel engines also supplies to Tata Motors for its Indica and Indigo range of cars. With Maruti Suzuki now openly sourcing these engine (currently they manufacture the Multijet engines at Manesar and have a license deal with Fiat for the same) from Fiat, we believe Honda too should ask the Italian automaker to give them some Multijet love.
