Nissan Motor India will launch the diesel Micra in the second week of December, a top company official said on Thursday.
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“India will be the first country to have the 1.5-litre K9K diesel version of the Micra hatchback with intelligent key, immobiliser, a push button engine start-stop system and electric foldable mirror,” Nissan Motor India chief executive Kiminobu Tokuyama told the Economic Times of India.
Nissan Indian laucnhed the petrol version in July and has since sold about 5,000 units.
“The success of the petrol powered Micra in the Indian market has given us confidence to introduce the diesel variant within six months of its launch in response to popular demand,” Tokuyama said at a pre-launch briefing.
Nissan formed the 50:50 joint venture with French automaker Renault to set up a manufacturing plant at Oragadam near Chennai with an initial investment of about US$500m.
“We signed an agreement with the Tamil Nadu government in February 2008 to invest a total of about $980m over the next seven years for ramping up the annual production capacity to 400,000 units from the present 100,000 units and introduce a range of models for domestic and export markets,” Tokuyama said.
Though the company has achieved around 85% of localisation, the engine and the five-speed gearbox are imported from its plants across Asia, including Japan and China.
The company has also started to export, in small numbers, the petrol variant to Europe, Middle East and Africa since October.
“We will ramp-up exports to about 100 countries including South Africa by October 2011 after meeting the domestic demand by scaling up the production to 200,000 units per annum,” said an official.
