Tata Motors expects to meet BS-VI compliant norms before 2020

Tata Motors has started working towards meeting Bharat Stage (BS)-VI emission norms and is expecting to be ready with compliant commercial vehicles at least six to eight months before 2020, a company official said on Friday.

According to a Supreme Court verdict, the BS-VI emission standard would be implemented on vehicles from April 1, 2020.

"The R&D work has already been started. We have three years from now. We will migrate the product to that standard," Girish Wagh, the company's Head, Product line (Medium and Heavy Commercial vehicles), said here.

"Tata Motors wishes to be ready with the BS-VI compliant vehicles, at least 6-8 months before the deadline," company's Head Marketing (MHCV) Rajesh Kaul said.

The automobile manufacturer spends around Rs 3,500 crore annually for research and development of vehicles and 40 per cent of that amount is utilised for commercial vehicles sector, the officials said.

Being in a position with 53.5 per cent of the market share in medium and heavy commercial vehicle sector in India, the automobile manufacturer has the capability to ramp up its manufacturing units to meet the market demand, Kaul said.

Announcing the benefits of SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) technology, Wagh said: "We are coming up with fuel efficiency improvement which would in turn reduce the overall expense of the customer."

"In case of the heavy duty applications, we have gone for the SCR technology, where as a lot of our competitors have gone for the EGR technology. The resale value of SCR enabled vehicles would certainly go up when India leapfrogs to the BS-VI emission standards in three years time," Wagh said.

He said the sales in commercial vehicles reduced after demonetisation, however it came back to normal in the last quarter.

--IANS

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