Ford EcoSport & Mahindra XUV300: Buyers prefer diesel to petrol

The BSVI emission norms will kick in from the 1st of April, 2020. After this date, only BSVI compliant vehicles will be allowed to be sold in the country, though vehicles bought before this date will remain unaffected. What this has resulted in though is the recent announcement by several companies to stop the production of diesel engines by April 2020. This is because upgrading a current lot of diesel engines to be BSVI compliant will be a very costly endeavour which, as several manufacturers are thinking right now, will not reap any benefit. Looking back at the sales of vehicles in the sub-4 meter SUV segment for the fiscal year 2018-19, we see that the diesel models were in more demand than their petrol counterparts.

Talking about the Ford Ecosport, the American manufacturer sold a total of 46,265 units of the vehicle between April 2018 to March 2019. Out of this number, 16,029 were petrol powered variants while 30,236 of them were powered by diesel engines. This means that the sales of the diesel engine powered Ecosport models was almost double the sales if their petrol counterparts.

The same is the case with the  Mahindra XUV300. which was launched in the month of February this year. In the last Fiscal year, Mahindra sold a total of 9,532 units of the XUV300 out of which 2,744 units were powered by a petrol engine while 6,788 units were powered by a diesel engine. Talking about the whole segment, around 81% of the total cars sold were powered by diesel engines. What this means is that the sales of the vehicles in this segment will be affected if the diesel engines are put off. However, nothing can be said for certain right now as brands like Maruti Suzuki have said that they can continue the diesel engine if enough demand for the same persists.

Talking about the Ford Ecosport, its petrol variants get powered by a 1.5 litre 3 cylinder naturally aspirated unit that makes 123 Bhp-150 Nm. The gearbox is a five-speed manual. The diesel engine is the 1.5 litre 4 cylinder TDCI turbocharged unit with 98.6 Bhp-215 Nm. It gets a 5-speed manual gearbox as well. Higher variants of the Ford EcoSport get the petrol-automatic trim, where the petrol engine is paired to a six-speed torque converter automatic gearbox. Apart from this, there is another 1.0-litre three-cylinder petrol engine available on the Ecosport that pumps out 124 Bhp of power along with 170 Nm of torque.

The Mahindra XUV300’s petrol engine is a newly developed 1.2 litre, 3 cylinder turbocharged unit that churns out a maximum power of 110 Bhp and a class-leading 200 Nm of peak torque. The diesel engine is a 1.5 litre, 4 cylinder unit that churns out a maximum power of 115 Bhp along with 300 Nm of torque. Both engines get 6-speed manual gearboxes as standard. An automatic transmission option is not available on the XUV300 yet but the company is already developing an AMT box for the car. This gearbox will be made available later this year.

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