Honda lines up a hot hatch for 2011

Honda’s new small concept car is finally making its way to India in the second half of 2011, and will add on to the aggression in A2 compact car segment.

Tatsuya Natsume, director (marketing), Honda Siel Cars India, said the car will have a petrol engine under 1.2 litre and will cost below Rs 5 lakh.

The car was unveiled at the auto expo and will be manufactured at Honda’s Greater Noida plant.

However, Natsume said the company is also considering shifting the production of the small car to its Rajasthan plant, where it has over 600 acres of land.

“From this plant, we are currently manufacturing body and engine parts and we are looking at setting up a car assembly plant there with annual capacity of 60,000 units, expandable to 2 lakh units annually.”

The assembly lines at Rajasthan plant are flexible and the production to others models can be shifted to.

At its Greater Noida facility the company has production capacity of 1 lakh units of which half the share is commanded by City at 50,000 units annually, 20,000 units of Accord-3000 units), Jazz (10,000 units) and Civic (7,000 units).

Jnaneswar Sen, vice president (marketing), said that we have spare capacity of 30,000 units, which will be for the small car.
Sen said that the small car will have localisation content of 80% as this is the mark the company is trying to achieve in case of City and Jazz, which is 76% currently.

Since Honda will be present in the highly competitive A2 segment where Maruti Suzuki is the leader and the segment is also moving towards dieselisation, Honda will not launch a diesel variant of its small car.

According to Sen, this will not be of any disadvantage to them as their cost of ownership is as competitive as the diesel cars. The company also showcased its hybrid sports car CR-Z which is not for the Indian market at the moment due to the high import duty.