Maruti electric and hybrid cars – true?

Quite a few sites have published stories about upcoming electric and hybrid cars from Maruti Suzuki.  Let’s try to make some sense of what we can expect.

All the stories mention electric and hybrid cars as if they are the same. Not true. When you call something an electric car, it is a car that runs off a battery which is charged of an electrical power source. A hybrid car uses an electric motor and a petrol /diesel / CNG / LPG engine together, using them in a variety of power combinations.

The original story which everyone is quoting from appeared in Business Standard under the headline Maruti to launch hybrid cars in 3 to 5 years. However, the story itself is quite confusingly written. Assuming that the story is written by the reporters, while the headline is by a sub-editor, the story talks about Maruti working on an ambitious plan to launch electric cars and CNG variants.

Note: CNG variants are not hybrid cars.

The headline looks like it was written by someone who did not know what he was talking about. The story is comparatively clearer.

Not that the story is any less exciting, though. If Maruti Suzuki wants to launch electric cars in India, more power to them!

However, any electric cars from Suzuki are going to take quite some time to make it to India. Testing and R&D are going on, and we can expect an electric Suzuki car in India only earliest by 2011. Most likely, it will be 2012.

The challenges faced by the company are mainly two: Price of the car, and range per charge. A car that would offer realistic range less than 100 kilometers per full charge would not be practical. While you can say all you want that most driving would be less than that, there are times when you might want to make a longer trip, and your car would not be able to do it.

Hybrids, as they have both an internal combustion engine and electric motor can offer better range, and Suzuki is testing hybrid car prototypes. But at least according to the content of the story, the company officials were talking about introducing practical and affordable electric cars in India, not hybrids.

It is very possible that Suzuki would manage to offer a car with a higher range as well as low pricing. Tata Motors has just such a car for Norway – the electric Tata Indica EV. It is believed to offer a very practical range of around 200 km per full charge.

Electric cars would make running costs cheaper than even diesel cars, and maintenance costs too would normally come down as electric motors are much less complicated than internal combustion engines.

2011-2012 would also be around the time when we can expect to see electric and hybrid versions of the Tata Nano in India.

So if all goes well and Suzuki manages to pull this off, we are going to see electric cars from Maruti India. All the best!