The country’s largest car maker Maruti Suzuki is mulling changing all engines in its range of entry level and A-plus segment cars to the latest KB Series engine which it unveiled last year, a top company executive said.
Currently, the new series of engines is being used in the latest models of the Maruti stable – Estilo, Ritz and the ‘A’ Star.
Asked whether all the entry level cars would be equipped with the KB Series engine, Maruti Suzuki India Chairman R C Bhargava said that it could happen over a period of time.
“It will not happen immediately. We cannot do that. It will happen over a period of time”, he said.
The KB Series engine, a part of the company’s efforts to offer the latest technology to customers, is produced from the KB Series engine plant at Gurgaon.
The all new, light-weight, engine series will be progressively introduced in other models over a period of next 3-5 years.
The KB engine plant at Gurgaon has an installed annual capacity of 240,000 engines.
To a query on investments proposed, he said, “we have to wait till the end of October. The whole project would come to the Board by October and after that we have to decide how to go forward. So we have to wait till the end of October to know what the investment is and what will come”.
Maruti Suzuki India last year said it would shift production from a plant at the Gurgaon factory in Haryana, to the factory at Manesar, 25 km to its south, also in the same state.