Automatic vehicles are no longer that niche variant which only a richie-rich or the memsahib down the road could flaunt. In tune with the trend of larger car models like SUVs and feature-rich designs gaining popularity, non-manual gearboxes, including both automatic and semi-automatic cars, have been steadily gaining market share in the country.
On Wednesday morning, the nation’s largest car maker Maruti Suzuki announced that it has crossed the 10 lakh milestone in automatic car sales. “We are already close to touching the one lakh automatic vehicle sales mark for 2023-24, as we stand in the middle of the financial year. This is truly a tremendous feat for us,” said Shashank Srivastava, senior executive officer, of Maruti Suzuki.
As customers look for ease of driving and are ready to pay a premium for it, the share of automatic variants in the total passenger vehicle sales has gone up from just 16 per cent four years ago to nearly 29 per cent presently.
While the lure of automatic cars is evident — smoother driving experience without having to bother about pressing the clutch pedal and appropriately shifting the manual gear shaft, the cost has always impeded many customers. Cars with automatic transmissions have an average 1.5 lakh rupee markup compared to their geared fellow variants.
While this stopped many from buying an automatic car, there were other issues, too, anything from the machismo which celebrated the process of clutch, brake and gear shift as ‘manly’, to the fact that it guzzled more fuel.
However, over some time, this slowly began to change as automakers themselves tried hard to push automatic transmission. Post-Covid and pre-immunisation and an increase in features as the priority over affordability also saw more and more users going for automatic transmission. They were also accepted as an easier way to deal with urban commutes, with its frequent need to change gears on India’s busy and often chaotic city stretches. The advent of better technology also meant better fuel efficiency for automatic cars.
“At Maruti Suzuki, we are passionate about providing our customers with the best driving experience. This spirit has enabled us to democratise automatic transmission technology with numerous types of options,” said Srivastava, adding, “And we are truly humbled by the customer response we have received.” Top contributing regions for Maruti's automatic car sales include Delhi-NCR, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, AP-Telangana and Kerala.
Of course, automatic and geared are no plain vanilla offerings, with automatic covering the whole gamut from a semi-automatic (which doesn’t have a clutch pedal, but has a lever to change gears) to full automatic. For example, Maruti offers four distinct automatic transmission systems – Auto Gear Shift (AGS), 4-speed Automatic Transmission (AT), Advanced 6-speed Automatic Transmission (AT) with Steering Mounted Paddle Shifters and Electronic-Continuous Variable Transmission(e-CVT).
