The news that Honda is planning to introduce the diesel variant of its Honda City within 2012 end had been creating a lot of flutter in the Indian domestic automobile market. This is because diesel cars are increasingly growing in popularity in India and are selling much better than the petrol variants owing to the increasing price gap between the fuel types. However, a source that has been closely monitoring this new development at Honda has revealed that there are no plans on the part of the company of launching the diesel variant of the Honda City within 2012. The market was also having speculations that the premium variant sedan, the Honda Civic is about to make its debut in a diesel avatar, however this launch is also going to be delayed.
The Indian portfolio of Honda does not feature any diesel vehicles at present. The absence of diesel version vehicles is making Indian consumers opt for cars made by other automobile manufacturers, in preference to the vehicles manufactured by Honda. This has prompted Honda towards working aggressively in developing a completely new range of its diesel engines and the car maker has secured the services of erstwhile engineers from Formula-I to work towards developing these engines. The company has recently unveiled its latest i-DTEC 1.6L turbocharged diesel engine, which has the capacity of delivering a significant maximum power of 120Bhp along with an excellent peak torque figure of 300Nm.
The engine is expected to provide power to the 2012 edition of the Honda Civic premium sedan. Market rumors are also indicating that Honda is developing another smaller diesel engine that is going to be the nucleus of its hatchbacks, the Brio and the Jazz. The recent Motor Show to be held at Geneva is expected to be the platform that Honda is going to use for exhibiting a new small sized engine.