Maruti Suzuki will be equipping the upcoming Ciaz Sports variant and the Ertiga facelift with a start-stop system in order to improve their fuel efficiency.
Maruti Suzuki has always been the market leader when it comes to fuel efficient cars. Since the past few years, other manufacturers like Honda and Hyundai have been posting high fuel economy figures. To get back the efficiency king title, Maruti is planning to equip two of its upcoming cars with start-stop system to increase their fuel efficiency by a bit. In the Indian market, customers tend to get influenced by the ARAI certified fuel consumption figures even though in daily driving situations, the average is lesser than the quoted figure. This thinking forces the companies to play the high efficiency card and work to eek out that additional efficiency.
Maruti Suzuki will soon be launching the Ciaz Sports variant and the Ertiga facelift, both of which have been caught testing on the roads and at the stockyard. The start-stop system will be an addition to improve the feature list of the cars and will be used as a selling point. What basically is a start-stop system is a question many people ask. It is a system that shuts off the engine when the car is idling in order to save fuel and brings it back to life as soon as the driver presses the clutch or the accelerator (depending on the transmission). The system is present in all the BMW vehicles and even Mahindra offers it in some of its vehicles. The feature can get annoying in bumper-to-bumper traffic and most users tend to switch the feature off. It remains to be seen how Maruti works on the system and is it able to work around this flaw.
Maruti Suzuki is facing some fierce competition in the Indian market now and will have to work hard in order to retain its market leader position in the future. They will have to continuously launch new cars and proper facelifts instead of the sticker clad special editions they are known for. The company will equip all its cars with the start-stop system in the future. It also plans to introduce downsized turbocharged petrol engines for certain cars to boost the fuel efficiency figure and play on its favorite trump card.
Source – Business-Standard.com