Maruti 800

One of India's most successful cars is Maruti 800 would become a part of history coming April. Maruti Suzuki chairman R C Bhargava announced, " Maruti 800 is not compliant with BS IV norms and we don't have any intentions of making it complaint with BS IV." Following this announcement it is clear that the car's partial phase-out would begin in April 2010 and the company would stop selling the car in 13 major cities including Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Agra and Surat.

The new government guidelines, beginning April 2010, state that car makers would be allowed to sell only Euro IV compliant vehicles in the four metros and nine other cities. While the rest of the country would move from the Euro III to Euro IV norms in 2015-16. RC Bhargava added that the company would continue selling Maruti 800 in cities that don't have to comply to BS-IV norms. Bhargava also said that the company has no plans to introduce a new model at Maruti 800's price point, which sells four variants priced between 185,715 rupees ($4011) and 219,587 rupees (ex-showroom New Delhi).

Apart from this the other reason behind Maruti's refusal to upgrade 800 to BS-IV norms is that the sales of the model have gone down by 37 per cent and Maruti was able to sell only about 27088 cars in the 10 months ending in January 2010. With the phase out of Maruti 800 becoming a certainty the number of prospective Tata Nano, Hyundai Santro and Chevrolet Spark buyers might just go up a little.