French carmaker Renault, a late entrant in the country, may come out with a

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new small car to be priced between Rs 2 to 4 lakh even as its ultra-low cost car in collaboration with Bajaj Auto appears to have run into rough weather.

The carmaker, along with alliance partner Nissan, had originally proposed to come out with an ultra-low cost small car in partnership with Bajaj Auto by 2011 but it appears to be running behind scheduled and it is not clear as yet when the project would materialise.

The company will also unveil its yet-to-be named premium hatchback at the auto expo in 2013. The new offering will help plug the gap between the two planned small cars.

“Between the Nano (over Rs 1 lakh) and Rs 4 lakh segment, you could put three, four or five cars. We have over 2,000 engineers and they can be working on these. After the five cars we launch by 2012, we have a lot of projects that we can’t be talking about now,” said Marc Nassif, managing director of Renault India hinting the possibility of a Renault car between Tata’s Nano and Rs 4-lakh premium hatchback segment.

Renault, which has set up a unit in Chennai along with Nissan, to jointly manufacture 4 lakh cars annually plans to aggressively grow in India targeting a sale of 100,000 cars a year by 2013. “We have to develop our sales outside Europe and outside this belt, we are looking at India as one of the top three countries apart from Russia and Brazil,” said Philippe Klein, executive VP (corporate and product planning) at Renault.

While the first product from Renault — Fluence premium sedan went on sale earlier this month, the Koleos premium SUV (sports utility vehicle) will be introduced later this year to take on Fortuner and Captiva.

Renault on Tuesday announced that it would also launch a compact SUV Duster in the second half of 2012 that will be pitted against Indian SUVs such as Scorpio, Safari apart from Skoda’s Yeti. Besides, it will launch by 2012 end a vehicle, whose name and model is yet to be disclosed. This will be apart from the hatchback to be launched at next year’s auto expo to take on competition from Maruti’s popular Swift.