Twenty-five years ago, I V Rao, nursing a dream to design cars, joined what was then a fledgling Maruti Udyog Ltd. It must have been a distant and vague dream.
Maruti was just starting to roll out an 800 cc mini car designed and built in Japan. It was to compete with Hindustan Motors' Ambassador and Premier Automobiles' Premier Padmini, both of which, designed outside India, had been largely the same for decades.
Currently the joint head of the engineering and research & development wing of Maruti - it is Maruti Suzuki India now - the lanky and genial Rao looks amused to find himself living that early dream.
Earlier a typical day for him would be monitoring the status of component development - meeting the basic dimension, metallurgy, performance and durability. Testing of vehicles occupied a lot of his time.
Now, his time is spent working on new models simultaneously and in conjunction with Suzuki's team in Japan. "Although I am with the same company in the same department, it's a new job," says Rao.
His comrade-in-arms is C V Raman, who denies any connection with his Nobel prize winning namesake. The surprise is even bigger for Raman. A few years ago he was in the vendor development department - as far removed from design and development of cars as a tender is from a spanner.
These two have been instrumental in bringing out DZire, the sedan based on the same platform as Swift, in March this year.
This car fills the void left by the exit of Esteem. Since it also has a diesel version, fitted with the same 1,248 cc engine that has been appreciated in Swift, it marks the entry of Maruti in the diesel sedan segment.
DZire is the second sedan in 10 months from Maruti, which is known as predominantly a maker of small cars. That is much more than what the companies known as makers of big cars do. But the change in Maruti is bigger than the size of its cars.
Text: Suveen K Sinha
Image: Models pose with the popular 'Swift' model in New Delhi | Photograph: rakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
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