General Motors India, country’s fifth largest car maker, will roll out six new vehicles

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in the next two years, starting with a brand new sport utility vehicles (SUV) priced lower than the Captiva, its top official said.

“We will launch a total of six new products and 14 new variants in India in the next two years,” said Karl Slym, president and managing director, General Motors India. Of these six vehicles, four will be passenger cars and two light commercial vehicles, he said.

“The brand new SUV will roll out in mid next year, which will be smaller in size and lower priced than our existing Captiva,” Slym said.

P. Balendran, vice president (Corporate Affairs), General Motors India, said the two small trucks will be sourced from the Chinese joint venture partner, the Shanghai Automotive Industries Corporation (SAIC). The other four passenger cars, including a sedan, will be jointly developed from the joint platforms, he added.

“All these six new products will be sold under Chevrolet brand,” Slym said, adding that Chevrolet was known in the market and there would be no change in the brand name. Besides its popular Spark and Beat cars, the company at present produces Captiva, Optra, Cruze, Aveo, Aveo U-VA and Tavera produced from its plants in Halol, Gujarat and Talegao, near Pune.

Slym said the engines for these vehicles will now come from its new powertrain plant in Talegaon. “On Friday we inaugurated the $250 million GM’s first powertrain plant in the world to produce both petrol and diesel engines with capacities ranging from 1-1.5 litres which can be used for light commercial vehicles and the passenger cars,” he said.

Slym said the plant will first produce the petrol engine for the Beat, followed by the diesel engine. It will compete with cars such as Maruti Suzuki’s Wagon-R.

“The powertrain plant has an annual production capacity of 160,000 engines and scale it upto 300,000 depending on market demands,” Balendran said. The company said it had achieved 60 per cent localization for all its products, which would be scaled up to 80 per cent to beat competition.

He said the company sold a total of 93,960 units (out of which over 63,000 accounted for Spark and Beat) from Jan-Oct, 2010, a growth of 73 per cent over the same period last year (53,919 units). Balendran said it had targeted to cross 1.10 lakh units this year. It had sold a total of 69,576 units last calendar year.