For those of you who don't know, the stop/start technology was especially designed to reduce fuel consumption by stopping the engine while the car is idle (for instance, when stuck in traffic jams). The engine is automatically restarted when the driver pushes the clutch pedal to change gears or solely the gas pedal.
Mahindra's service, dubbed FuelSmart and developed in collaboration with Bosch, will only be available on models sold on the domestic market, although the Indian company plans to install it on export variant in the near future. However, according to Thaindian, the difference between and FuelSmart-equipped model and the base car is somewhere around $85 and $89, on models such as Bolero and Scorpio.
“This is a technological innovation, which we have developed with support from Bosch. This will give an average fuel saving of about five percent from the normal vehicles. We may look at similar markets like Southeast Asia and Nepal in future but our present focus will be on the domestic market,” Pawan Goenka, Mahindra automotive president, said according to the aforementioned source.
Start/stop technologies saw daylight in 1980 when German manufacturer Volkswagen developed such a feature and installed it on Volkswagen Polo, also known as Formel E. The same system was improved and re-used in 1990 on Golf Ecomatic and Lupo 3L, being then adopted and slightly modified by many other carmakers.
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