Indian car market is a very price conscious market. Though the luxurious and very expensive car sales are rapidly growing, the country’s car market predominantly seeks value for money. The car makers in India thus, try and offer great products at attractive prices to gain maximum popularity and sales volumes. Auto makers are constantly working to offer great technologies to the Indian car buyers that offer convenience and added economy. One such very convenient as well as economical technology is that of the automated manual transmission or AMT, which became an instant hit and is growing in popularity.
2015 Corolla Hybrid
India’s leading car maker, Maruti Suzuki introduced this technology first in the country’s car market with the Celerio compact hatchback. The Celerio and the AMT technology both became huge successes surpassing Maruti’s expectations. Post this, many other major car manufacturers in India have been either considering or already offering the AMT equipped cars. Car makers such as Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra and Renault are all onto the AMT bandwagon. The AMT is not only cheaper than the conventional Automatic transmission, but also offers high fuel efficiency that the AT models don’t offer, making the AMT technology really very suitable for the affordable price and high mileage loving Indian car market.
However, there’s one car major in India which is not keen on offering the AMT technology in its cars, as it is not impressed by the technology. This car maker is Toyota Kirloskar Motor, the Indian joint venture of Japanese auto behemoth Toyota. Toyota is known for its expertise in making high quality, refined cars, and the company cannot trust the AMT as a quality technology.
This is because Toyota thinks that the AMT technology comprises of higher number of moving components as compared against the traditional automatic transmission. This simply means more wear and tear of the crucial components which will result in increased risks of high maintenance.
While speaking on this aspect, the director as well as the senior vice president of Toyota Kirloskar, Mr. N. Raja said that the company does believe that the Indian market is slowly warming up to the automatic cars. However, the company will continue to offer the conventional automatic transmission gearbox. This is because repairing a transmission gearbox is a costly affair, and AMT with its higher number of movable components compared to the AT has the risk of not being very durable.
Another reason, for which Toyota India might not be interested in offering the AMT gearbox in its cars, is the fact that being cheaper the AMT is not that refined as that of the traditional automatic transmission gearbox. Toyota had previously announced that it will focus on the more expensive premium cars in India and wishes to remain premium and exclusive. Thus, the AMT gearbox is surely out of the question for Toyota India, as this technology has no place in premium cars.
Toyota will continue offering its automatic car models and the upcoming next-gen Innova will also get an automatic gearbox.
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I am into the auto blogs field for quite a long time. Living my passion of reviewing cars.
Tagged: Toyota Cars
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