Maruti Alto being fixed for oil leakage

Maruti Suzuki is the country’s biggest carmaker with almost 50 per cent of the market share. Among the company’s best sold cars is the tiny hatchback Maruti Alto. The company has a significant part of its sales coming from this brand that continues to be in the top sellers list. Alto is Maruti’s largest-selling model in India. The company sold 2.35 lakh units of Alto, or 27 percent of total sales, for the year to end March.

But the model has a glitch and Maruti is currently fixing an oil leakage in the engines of 6,000 Altos produced in April. The leakage has caused several problems including a starting problem for its owners lately. But the company officials are not calling it a recall, “The vehicle, if affected, may show some starting problems. This can be easily repaired at the workshop.” As a corrective measure, the company has instructed its more than 800 sales network centres and nearly 2,740 service workshops to check and repair the affected Altos. Maruti Suzuki has sold 64,500 units of Alto between April and June. However, the company does not have a clear number as to how many cars would be affected. About a year ago Maruti had to recall almost 1 lakh A-Star models for faulty fuel pumps. The Maruti A-Star Alto recalls happened in Europe, Australia and North Africa.

According to experts, Maruti Alto models have these problems because the company has modified the existing F-series engine to meet BS IV norms in effect since April 2010. Some experts are of the opinion that the design changes incorporated in the F series engine’s structure could have led to this problem. The immediate effects of this could be the leakage problem or a drop in performance.

Some Maruti dealers started receiving complaints of oil leakages during May and June and they have no idea about the total number of cars that have this problem. According to one of them, “We have called 28 customers to bring their cars for technical evaluation.”