Maruti Suzuki Celerio – FrontView
It is no secret that the Celerio has been a runaway success for Maruti Suzuki; clocking nearly 40000 bookings within just three months of its launch, it is one of the biggest successes for Maruti Suzuki, who is now looking forward to doubling up the production capacity at their production facility to match demand. What is even greater is that, a majority of the bookings had gone to the variants equipped with the AMT gearboxes which was pioneered by maruti suzuki in india. The Celerio is currently powered by the 1.0-litre K-series engine with a max output of 68 PS and 90 NM of torque. Seeing that the petrol powered versions clocked such great numbers, it should come as no surprise that Maruti Suzuki has decided to launch a diesel powered version too.
The engineers at Maruti Suzuki have been hard at work, developing an all new indigenous diesel engine for use in their future products. All of Maruti Suzuki’s diesel cars till date have been powered by the Fiat 1.3-litre Multijet diesel and sourcing these engines from Fiat was an additional cost in the production of the cars, and this additional cost was being included in the final retail price. Maruti Suzuki wanted to keep costs as low as possible and hence, indigenously developed an all new diesel engine and has already begun testing it in the Y9T LCV.
The first LCV ever, from Maruti Suzuki, codenamed as the Y9T will be the proving ground for this new engine, and this new diesel engine will eventually make it to the passenger vehicle segment as well with the Celerio being the first one to receive the new diesel engine. It will be a family of engines with varying displacements, tailored to suit vehicles from different segments. While the Y9T will be using a 2-cylinder 800cc turbo-diesel, the Celerio will make use of a 1.0-litre or a 1.2-litre 3-cylinder turbo-diesel and cars from the larger segments such as the SX4 will get a higher capacity 4-cylinder engine.
Maruti Suzuki Celerio – RearView
The diesel variant of the celerio is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2015, and will be priced at a Rs. 80000 premium over the petrol powered variant, so we can expect a price tag of around rs. 4.56 lakhs. Since the AMT tech was the one of main reasons for the phenomenal success of the celerio, maruti suzuki will equip the diesel celerio too with AMT technology. This diesel variant will take the Tata Indica eV2’s upcoming replacement, head-on as competition.
In other news, Maruti Suzuki is also looking forward to add new features to the Celerio ZXI AMT variant, as till now the features available on the manual transmission variant like Bluetooth, audio system,steering mounted audio controls , front airbags etc. were not available on the AMT variant.
Also see – Maruti Suzuki Celerio launched in India
Maruti Suzuki’s Celerio based Compact Sedan in works!
