As petrol and diesel prices have been on the rise, the country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) sold about 235,000 CNG cars in FY22 that ends on March 31, 2022, with a year-on-year growth of 31%. The carmaker sold about 162,000 cars in FY21. There is also a huge booking backlog of 120,000 units for CNG variants due to chip shortage. CNG cars contributed 17% to the total sales and 33% to the sales of the models with CNG variants. Maruti Suzuki has 9 out of 15 models with CNG options. According to MSIL CNG’s contribution to the overall industry sales is about 8.5%Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Director, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, said that the biggest driver of the demand is the low running cost of CNG cars at about INR1.80 /km. For petrol / diesel cars it is about INR 5.20 /km. 90574613 90574637The prices of petrol and diesel have increased in the last 10 days and the total increase now stands at INR 6.40 per litre.”Apart from that the number of CNG stations have also doubled in the past two years from about 1500 to over 3000 and its penetration has also increased from 140 cities two years ago to 253 cities now.” he said. CNG can also become a good stop-gap arrangement for the automakers to meet the upcoming second phase of CAFE (CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) norms.The Phase 1 of the CAFE norms requires average corporate CO2 emissions to be less than 130 gm/km. In Phase II, emissions, effective from tomorrow, need to be further reduced to less than 113 gm/km. 90574654The safety and quality concern has been a big challenge for CNG which has changed now. “Earlier a lot of retrofitted CNG cars were sold and they had quality challenges. After the BS-VI implementation only company-fitted CNG cars were sold which boosted the customer sentiment toward CNG vehicles,” Srivastava said.According to sources Tata Motors has sold about 10,000 CNG cars in just three months after their launch in January 2022. CNG variants of passenger vehicles are witnessing growing demand. However, if a proposal by MoRTH to allow retro fitment of CNG kits in BSVI vehicles is passed then it may hamper sales of vehicles with factory-fitted CNG kits. The draft notification also proposes the replacement of the in-use diesel engine with a CNG engine. Both proposals are for vehicles with a GVW of less than 3.5 tonnes. Narrowing of the price difference between CNG and petrol/diesel could also hamper demand for CNG vehicles. However, for now, it’s a case of making hay while the sun shines, for OEMs.