Maruti Suzuki, the country’s largest carmaker has sold over one lakh cars with automatic gear shift technology since it was introduced in early 2014.
Of these, about 97,000 models were sold in the domestic market, while 3,100 units were exported, Maruti Suzuki India Executive Director (Marketing and Sales) R.S. Kalsi told The Hindu.
The company, currently offers, auto-gear shift option in Celerio, Alto K-10, Wagon R and Dzire. Mr Kalsi said.
The AGS variant of Celerio has sold about 66,000 units or 60 per cent of the total Celerio sales.
Sales number for variants of Alto K-10 stood at over 18,000. For Wagon R and Dzire the number stood at about 12,000 and 2,200 units, respectively.
AGS, also known as Automated Manual Transmission (AMT), is a clutch-less or two-pedal technology that enables automatic driving experience at a much cheaper price while taking care of the lower fuel efficiency.
“AGS as a technology saw great acceptance from customers due to convenience of automatic transmission, available with the fuel efficiency of a manual transmission. It has particularly seen great response from women and youth,” Mr. Kalsi said.
For the 2015-16 fiscal, the carmaker sold over 54,000 units of AGS models as against 30,000 units in the previous year.
At present, an automatic transmission version of a car in the market is about Rs.1 lakh more expensive than its manual transmission counterpart.
With an AGS, that difference can come down to about Rs 40,000.
Maruti Suzuki has also introduced Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) in Baleno and Automatic Transmission in Ciaz and Ertiga, Mr. Kalsi said.
