Rohit Khullar, who works in a multinational bank, commutes in his WagonR CNG (manufactured by Maruti Suzuki India), which he bought for his wife around three years back, with a clear purpose of using it for small errands and ease of parking.

So what changed his mind, and instead, of using his diesel sedan he is now regularly using the CNG vehicle.

There are various reasons — cost of diesel per litre getting higher and another is the odd-even formula that the Delhi government has resorted so as to ‘clean up the city’s air pollution’.

“One of the advantages is that CNG costs less and once I fill up for just around ₹200, it runs for around 150 km which saves me a lot of money, especially when I am driving to and fro from my Noida office,” Khullar says.

Khullar is not the only one. In cities such as Delhi and Mumbai many have switched to gas with CNG stations becoming common.

CNG is also economical if you are driving more than 30 km every day.

In case of CNG vehicles there is only one-time cost involved — the CNG kits.

But, in the long run, CNG is economical by more than 55 per cent in cities like Delhi compared to petrol and around 24 per cent more economical than a diesel car.

To put things in perspective, cost of running a car on CNG is around ₹1.75/km, autorickshaw is ₹1.05/km and ₹10.45/km in cities like Delhi. Prices of petrol, diesel and CNG in Delhi right now are ₹60, ₹48 and ₹38, respectively.

And, because of running costs, especially with the taxi aggregators, the government has also made it mandatory to run the taxis and cabs on CNG from May 1 (it has extended the earlier deadline of March 31 to April 30 now).

Taxi aggregators such as Ola and Uber are also happy as CNG is treated as the cleanest fuel and also saves their drivers from running costs.

Fitment of kits

However, in the personal usage of CNG cars, there is not much traction and few cars are available with ‘factory fitted’ CNG kits.

And, companies like Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) and Hyundai Motor India (HMIL) do not recommend retro fitting as those could be cheaper but dangerous.

Also, retro fitted CNG cars do not get any advantage of warranty from the companies.

“We encourage our customers to get factory fitted CNG cars as those have same warranty as any other car in petrol or diesel,” said a spokesperson at MSIL.

“The fitment of kits takes outside the factory, but the warranty is equivalent to any other petrol or diesel car and the company is authorised and approved by Hyundai only. It is on par with all the quality checks that we do with any other product,” Rakesh Srivastava, Senior Vice-President Sales and Marketing, HMIL, told BusinessLine .

He said the customer while booking a car has to chose the car (colour, variant, etc) and if the customer chooses to be in CNG, he/ she gets the delivery of the car in CNG-only from the dealership (after being fitted with all the kits from its vendor).

Proper roadmap

However, this is restricted to Delhi or Mumbai where more CNG cars are on the road.

Besides, the government has to have a proper roadmap for such vehicles in future.

“We need a proper roadmap so that people can plan,” Puneet Gupta, associate director at IHS Automotive said.

He said there are some limits to the CNG cars too. For example, if one wants to drive outside Delhi or Mumbai, they cannot complete the journey only on CNG, especially for taxi companies and they have to fill up petrol at some point which makes the journey expensive.

Diesel variant of such cars would have made sense, but the technology of CNG kits is limited to petrol cars (petrol-CNG) right now, Gupta added.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW