Auto cos meet Oscar Fernandes; discuss quadricycle norms

The country's top automakers met road transport and highways minister Oscar Fernandes on Friday. The meet was aimed at creating a consensus amongst the industry members and government officials over quadricycles, reports CNBC-TV18’s Ronojoy Banerjee.

Tata Motors continued to oppose government’s draft rules for quadricycles segment, even as Bajaj Auto is about to unveil the RE-60, India’s first quadricycle. “The 30-days notice period expires on September 26. We gave an opportunity to the interested ones to make their points and we will have look at them. A notification has been issued. There are certain points they have added on that which we will look into. We will go by the statute on the issue”, said the road transport and highways minister, Oscar Fernandes to CNBC-TV18. Also read: No slowdown in auto sector; cos line up new launches The industry also seems to be divided into two camps. Apart from Bajaj Auto; Eicher Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) and Piaggio have supported the concept. However, M&M and Piaggio have certain caveats associated with it. “We are not against quadricycle as long as we are clear that quadricycle is an improvement over the three-wheeler in terms of safety and emission norms. It should be somewhere between M1-N1 category. The current draft notification is almost same as three-wheeler. One should reconsider whether the emission norms and safety norms should be tightened compared to a three wheeler”, says Pawan Goenka, president- automotive business, Mahindra and Mahindra to CNBC-TV18. Piaggio on the other hand wants a more level playing and gives other companies lead time to develop these vehicles. Meanwhile, TVS Motors, Maruti Suzuki also echoed Tata Motors’ stand. Cyrus Mistry argued that currently annually there are about 1.3 lakh fatalities on the road and any regulations for any new category of vehicles must look into the safety aspects very closely. His deputy, Tata Motors MD, Karl Slym, spoke on the need to make regulations progressive. He said that a vehicle generally has about 47 safety regulations; a quadricycle however meets only about 38. Goenka mentioned his pointers on the current notifications being similar to the three-wheeler ones. Dinesh Tyagi, who was the chairman of the committee on quadricycles said he originally proposed 55 regulations, six of those regulations were aligned with three wheelers, 30 of them with four wheelers and 19 were between three wheelers and four wheelers. But, the notifications in the current form only meet the three wheeler standards which should be corrected. Bajaj Auto countered all of this. With the fourth wheel, the vehicle is more safe and Bajaj Auto does not understand why a category of vehicle with new features should be opposed by the industry. The government is now taking into account all these views and will consider whether changes are needed or not in a few weeks.