While the world waited with bated breath for the compact car that Indian automaker Bajaj Auto, was going to make with giants Renault and Nissan, Bajaj has gone ahead and shocked everyone with the latest announcement. Today, amidst a lot of speculation, Bajaj has finally declared that it has absolutely no interest in entering the Indian car market, which is already extremely over crowded.
Bajaj has been for sometime thinking of going solo and entering the car market. However, wisely sensing its own inexperience in the niche and weighing the powerful competition presented by the already established foreign automakers, Bajaj has finally come out clean with its plans.
While the spokespersons from Bajaj have not thrown any light on whether the company would continue with their plans of making the compact car with the French and Japanese giants, there is still not clarity over the companies plants for the ultra low cost car which is being planned for the last few years.
In a recent function, the CEO of Bajaj Auto, Rahul Bajaj expressed that unless there was a manufaturing facility which could produce 200,000 cars every year, there were little chances of making any profits. The company has a passenger carrier in the offing, however, nothing much is being said about the low cost car.
Bajaj also thinks that the only way the ultra low cost car project could go through was if the vehicle was developed on the same platform on which Bajaj plans to launch its light commercial vehicle. If at all such a deal goes through, the vehicle will not be seen anytime before 2012.
Though there have been talks of launching this engineering marvel, which would have the lowest ever running costs, recently, in a car show at Geneva, spokespersons from Nissan claimed that none of the three partners had been able to find engineering solutions which could make this feat possible.
For the last two years, the three motor companies have focused their energies on this project. However, the project doesn’t seem to be moving in any direction. A lot of engineering solutions are required to ensure that the running costs of the car remain low throughout its life cycle. However, till now, no such solutions have been found.
The release of the car was first unduly delayed because the three motor companies could not agree upon the pricing and the design of the car. There was also the issue of fuel efficiency which the car makers could not tackle.