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Around 57% of 10,543 vehicle owners surveyed by LocalCircles said the reasons for a car to be removed from service should depend on miles on the odometer rather than age.
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A little over a half of the consumers surveyed said they were planning to reduce the number of cars they owned because they believed India’s cash-for-clunkers policy would make it more expensive to keep an old vehicle.
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Authorities have made auto fitness tests more expensive since April, with owners of cars that are older than 15 years now having to spend eight times more to renew their registration.
The Indian government last year ordered that personal vehicles more than 20 years old and commercial vehicles more than 15 years old would need to undergo fitness tests in order to remain on the road. The aim was to reduce the number of old polluting cars from the roads.
The order, however, gave rise to number of queries. Around 57% of 10,543 vehicle owners surveyed by LocalCircles said the reasons for a car to be removed from service should depend on miles on the odometer rather than age. Also, a little over a half of the consumers surveyed said they were planning to reduce the number of cars they owned because they believed India’s cash-for-clunkers policy would make it more expensive to keep an old vehicle. Authorities have made auto fitness tests more expensive since April, with owners of cars that are older than 15 years now having to spend eight times more to renew their registration.
ET reported that the lack of interest to get rid of polluting vehicles was a setback for India’s ambitions to turn net carbon zero by 2070. Recycling old cars was crucial for India to cut emissions since the demand for electric vehicles continues to lag due to the lack of charging networks and the high price of battery-powered transport.
According to the Centre for Science and Environment forecasts by 2025, India will have as many as 20 million old vehicles near the end of their lives, causing huge environmental damage.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that the scrapping of end of-life vehicles in India was not productive because precious metals were not recycled.
Automakers believe that the public is right when it says that the miles on the odometer was more important than the age for scrapping a vehicle. “Age is not a good criteria for scrapping a vehicle,” Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. Chairman R.C. Bhargava was quoted saying in an interview. “The logic has to be the car’s ability to ply roads safely so it doesn’t put other road users in danger. A vehicle gets scrapped when the user finds it isn’t economical to repair it to get a fitness certificate.” Personal vehicles should undergo fitness tests every three years at least,
Bhargava said. In India, when a car goes on the road there’s typically no further inspection to check whether safety standards that were prescribed at the time of sale are being met. A large number of accidents happen because of defects in vehicles that are not periodically certified as fit, he said.
India also needs more large scrapping centres with recycling currently dominated by informal small-scale units. Maruti Suzuki and Toyota Tsusho Corp. have jointly set up a facility with an investment of INR 440 million rupees to scrap and recycle over 24,000 end-of-life vehicles annually. Mahindra MSTC Recycling Pvt., which has a recycling facility in Pune, is building four more scrapping units in the western state of Maharashtra with a capacity of 40,000 vehicles annually.
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