A SWIFT switch to design

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: India's automotive sector has never reacted as strongly to design as it has in the last 3 years. One of the biggest design successes in recent times, the Maruti Swift, is already India’s 4th largest selling car on a monthly basis. The Tata light commercial vehicle ‘Ace’ has had a runaway success, the Hyundai Santro sales picked up considerably after its design makeover and the car buyers took their own time to give thumbs up to the boxy Maruti Wagon R whose sales have grown only in the last 18 months.

These are all signs of a market that is giving more significance to design now. “The success of the Swift is primarily because of design,” says Dilip Chhabria, chairman, DC Design Pvt Ltd. According to B Bhaumik, senior general manager, production & development, Mahindra & Mahindra, ‘‘Earlier, we were 25 years behind. We must be now five years behind the rest of the world. Indian auto design and style is maturing very fast. We have to. The middle-class in India is extremely price-sensitive. Therefore, we tend to work on our design models from price backwards.’’

India has never been a force in designing automobiles. Cars like the Ambassador that symbolised this country were originally designed in the UK. But barring the indigenously developed Tata Indica and the Mahindra Scorpio, the Maruti Swift was the first car to be jointly designed by the Maruti team in India and the Suzuki team in Japan.

Has India become a design sensitive market for automobiles? It would appear that it could finally made the grade as foreign car makers are beginning to involve Indian designers at the concept stage of car development.

According to the chief general manager, engineering, Maruti, I V Rao, ‘‘The Swift has been conceived to be a global car, styled in Europe and simultaneously manufactured and launched in Japan, Hungary, India and China, give or take a few months last year.’’

The basic design was, however, evolved and worked on by the Maruti design engineers and the Suzuki design engineers parallely. The Maruti engineers were stationed in Japan for different durations and worked together on emission norms, fuel economy, drivability and road worthiness (the fact that India has plenty of speed-breakers is also factored in).