Bad fuel hits Agra roads

VISHAL SHARMA

AGRA. Planning to buy a new Maruti or any four wheeler for that matter? Make sure you use good fuel from a reliable outlet, otherwise, the car manufacturer may completely deny the warranty cover on your engine.

In a small town like Agra, where the number of cars running on the streets is barely over 32 thousand, the car models being manufactured by Maruti are especially popular, selling almost 6-7 hundred cars each month, followed up closely by Hyundai.

But these days, the users of this most popular car in Agra are in a state of panic with the cases of engine failure in newly purchased Maruti cars taking a steep upward hike. On top of that, the car dealers of the town too have begun to refuse warranty claims on engine repairs, citing company guidelines againstwarranty cover on engine failure arising from fuel adulteration problems.
According to the Maruti sources in Agra, atleast 3-5 percent of the Maruti cars sold in the town were coming back to the workshops after having developed engine troubles in just a few months of running on the city roads, out of which, about one percent cars needed a complete engine overhaul for which, the company held adulterated fuel as responsible.
The situation has become so grave that a large number of Maruti cars are being refused their warranty cover every month by the dealers for having used adulterated fuel, charging the car owners heftily for engine repairs.
But while the car owners are claiming that they were not warned of this “technical point” when the purchased the car, the company is in no mood to honor its warranty agreement with its customers, claiming that engine damage due to fuel adulteration is not a manufacturing defect and the company could not be held liable to uphold the warranty in such cases.

Talking to Business Standard, Sachin Srivastava, Regional Service Representative, Maruti Udyog Ltd. said that it was the car owner’s responsibility to ensure that only good fuel was being used in the car and the company could not be held liable to provide service to a car that was damaged due to fuel adulteration.

Mr. Srivastava said that the company used strict quality check to ensure that there were no technical problems in its cars and the number of new cars developing technical snags due to adulterated fuel far outran those coming back due to manufacturing defects and the situation in small cities like Agra was especially serious, where a large number of filling stations only servedadulterated fuel.

Asked why the company does not warn its customers against this menace and the threat of losing the warranty cover on their cars for using adulterated fuel, he said that the company always suggested the Maruti owners to only use 91-octane petrol in their cars but in cities like Agra, where pumps dispensing 91-octane fuel were still not widely popular, the number of failed engines in Maruti cars was significantly high and in such cases, the company suggested the use of fuel additives in addition to the normal 87-octane petrol.

He said that the company did honor its warranty in some cases of fuel adulteration
but this was not a general practice and limited to minor engine repairs only while in cases of complete engine overhaul, it was the liability of the car owners to pay for the engine repairs.

He said that though Maruti was the first company to have begun turning back warranty claims in fuel adulteration cases, the other car manufacturing companies were also following suit as the use of adulterated fuel was equally damaging to all car models, irrespective of the manufacturing company.

But, he said, only Maruti was aware of the problems being faced by its customers due to fuel adulteration and to sort out this issue, Maruti was planning to launch a co-branded “petro-card” for its customers, acceptable only at a select number of petrol pumps in each major city of the country which shall be strictly monitoredfor fuel quality by their respective companies.

(UNITED NEWS NETWORK)
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