Maruti Suzuki to introduce EVs at multiple price points: MD & CEO

Maruti Suzuki India Ltd managing director and CEO Hisashi Takeuchi on Thursday said the carmaker will introduce multiple EVs at multiple price points.

"The first EV will be an SUV (sport utility vehicle) for long cruising distance. But we have to have multiple price points for our EVs," Takeuchi told reporters.

Maruti Suzuki plans to roll out its maiden battery electric vehicle eVX by the end of the ongoing fiscal.

India’s largest carmaker is not giving up on entry-level small cars even as sales of hatchbacks witnessed a decline over the past several quarters as India's car market moved towards SUVs.

The total market of entry-level cars may be declining but Maruti Suzuki’s share is high, says Takeuchi. “This situation is very good for us where everybody is escaping. Sooner or later, once economy grows, people will start buying hatchbacks. Then our high market share will help us a lot. We will not give up the hatchback market. We will offer more models at an appropriate time,” he says.

The CEO of Maruti Suzuki believes that the hatchback segment will not disappear. “Lack of models in the entry-level segment from other OEMs is limiting growth in the small car category. We will not give up on small cars. When time comes we will revamp other products also. Hatchbacks will continue and hopefully when the economy grows, it will revive,” says Takeuchi.

The small car segment, which contracted during the last fiscal and in April 2024, still drives a significant number of sales for the Japanese carmaker. Maruti Suzuki expects small car sales to revive after two years as affordability is still an issue for entry-level car buyers.

Out of 1,000 people, only 32 own a car in India. The Japanese carmaker expects car penetration in India to increase to 44 cars per 1,000 people by 2030. This is expected to be aided by first-time car buyers and those looking to upgrade from two-wheelers.

To meet the ever-growing demand for SUVs, Maruti Suzuki is ramping up its capacity for larger utility vehicles.

“Maruti in the last 2-3 years had a limitation of capacity in manufacturing bigger cars when the market shifted towards bigger cars from smaller cars following a relatively sharper increase in prices of smaller cars. We did not anticipate that there would be such a big increase in costs happening there and that it would have an impact. So our production capacity got out of tune with the market requirements. It took us time but we have adjusted to a large extent. We are sharply increasing our market in bigger cars,” Maruti Suzuki chairman RC Bhargava said last month.

The automaker has now enabled production lines at its factories to produce multiple products. “We are now getting more flexible to the demand,” says Takeuchi.