GM to launch third small car by year-end

New Delhi: Riding on the success of its two small car brands, Spark and U-VA, General Motors will launch a third brand by the year-end. GM is the fifth largest car manufacturer in the country.

“The new Chevrolet Mini will not be a competition to Tata Motors Nano. We are not in the numbers game. It will be positioned above the Chevrolet U-VA. Pricing will be around that range,” said Karl Slym, President & MD, General Motors, India at the launch of the company’s bestselling SUV Chevrolet Captiva Automatic.

An company executive said Chevrolet Mini will be positioned against Hyundai’s recently launched i20. GM, which earlier planned to import the Mini is a CKD form, now plans to manufacture the highly fuel-efficient car, to be made available both in petrol and diesel options, at its Talegaon plant in Maharashtra. GM says the new small car’s configurations are currently being tuned to match Indian road conditions.

In addition to the Chevrolet Mini, GM plans to launch its premium segment car – the Chevrolet Cruz — in the middle of this year which will take on Honda’s Accord and Toyota’s Camry. The one-week shutdown at the Halol plant in December last year, according to GM, was to help it re-jig production lines for manufacturing the Chevrolet Cruz.

As part of its plans to launch vehicles that run on alternative fuels, GM plans to introduce models with the CNG/LPG facility from this year onwards. “The Captiva hydrogen fuel variant is available in the US market. It’s the lack of infrastructure that prevents us from introducing it in the domestic market,” says Slym.

GM, which sold about 65,000 units last year in the domestic market, grew by 10 per cent despite the 2 per cent decline in growth posted by the passenger vehicle industry in 2008. Its domestic market share inched up from 2.9 per cent in 2007 to 3.4 per cent in 2008. With the completion of the $200 million power train facility at Talegaon in 2010, GM hopes to turn into India into its power train hub for the Asia Pacific region.