The Hindu Business Line : Innovative vehicles

There have been recent news reports on the perceived reduction in the offtake of heavy commercial vehicles from the major companies Ashok Leyland and Tata Motors. Such a decline in demand results in lower sales of vendor-supplied items, such as tyres, and has a cascading effect on the automotive industry as a whole. This cycle keeps repeating, partly due to the industry's failure to be innovative in bringing out new generation of products to suit present conditions. These include:

a) Hybrid vehicles run both on electricity and petrol,

b) Vehicles run exclusively on compressed natural gas,

c) Vehicles run exclusively using overhead electric power supply (can be widely adopted in Indian cities as they are environment-friendly and cost-effective compared to underground or over-ground metro rails.),

d) Bio-desiel vehicles,

f) Vehicles with automatic transmission, eliminating the use of clutch for manual gear-shifting,

g) Vehicles with low floor height, and

h) Special vehicles for containers, water-tankers, etc.

If such diversified products are made available, there will not be such frequent fluctuation in the demand for commercial vehicles. The falling demand is not exclusively due to "market pull" of the economy alone but due to lack of innovation in the products as well.

K. Venkataraman

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