In a recent development, it is learnt that General Motors owned Chevrolet has restarted the production of its flagship Multi Utility Vehicle (MUV), Tavera in the Indian auto market. According to industry insiders, the company has resumed the manufacturing of this model after getting approvals from the regulatory bodies. During July 2013, General Motors has recalled 1.14 lakh units of Tavera due to the issues pertaining to emissions and other regulatory norms. After this, the company resisted in halting the production of BS III and BS IV variants of Tavera.
Reports have indicated that the company has only received approval for the BS III compliant 7,8,9 and 10-seater models while for the BS IV variants it is still pending. Speaking on this development, General Motors India Vice President, P. Balendran was quoted as saying, "GM India has already received BS III 7, 8, 9 and 10 seater type approvals and production has also started. BS IV approval is under process and approval is expected any time now and will start production soon."
General Motors has created quite an uproar in the Indian car market owing to the violation of the emission norms. The company followed an internal probe in to the development and the results shocked the whole industry. As stated in the report, “the new models of the Tavera were re-fitted with already approved engines for matching emission norms and in order to comply with less tight emission norms, manipulation was done to the weight of many of cars.” Owing to this development, General Motors itself reported to the Government of India mentioning the practice adopted by its employees. In the report, the company said “Recently, the company has discovered information that it wishes to report to you...investigations initiated by the company have revealed that over a period of time some employees of the company engaged in the practice of identifying engines with lower emission which were fine-tuned and kept aside to be used for installation on vehicles during inspection.”
With these problems, the sales of General Motors declined considerably to 10.71 per cent as the company sold a paltry 6575 units. These figures were mainly helped by the good response meted out to Chevrolet Enjoy MPV, otherwise the picture could have been much darker. In order to investigate this case, the road transport ministry had set up a committee that probed both the plants of General Motors. The committee was headed by Nitin Gokarn who is the Chief Executive Officer and Project Director of National Automotive Testing and R&D Infrastructure Project.
The safety issue with Tavera also affected the production of Chevrolet's other models as P Balendran, Vice President for Corporate Affairs at General Motors India was previously quoted as saying "We have not arrived at any decision yet to recall the Sail, but are looking at all options." As told by company officials, a number of issues and malfunctions were reported in the Sail models due to which its manufacturing was stopped but the company soon figured out the solution to the problem and the process was started again.
