Price deregulation will not affect much on diesel variants

The deregulation of diesel prices would not affect much the demand on the variants as the customers still go for diesel cars across the country, a top official of Fiat Chrysler India, said today.
Replying to a specific question on losing advantage if diesel prices are increased substantially over a period of time, Sanjay Gopal, Associate Vice President-Marketing, Fiat Chrysler India Operation, told reporters that at present car market was distributed at 70:30 per cent in favour of diesel.
Though the customers preferred petrol variants in urban and metro areas, diesel cars were still preferred by a large number of customers, Sanjay, who was here to launch its new "Punto Evo", said.

Even if the ratio became 50:50, still the diesel segment would be in an advantageous position and there was no chance it going down further, he claimed.
The company, with 116 exclusive dealerships in 93 cities across 23 States in the country, plans to target 150 dealers by the end of 2014, he said.
He replied in the negative, when asked whether there was any proposal to come out from the Tata-Fiat Joint Venture in manufacture and start own manufacturing unit in India.