BS-III vehicle ban: New ruling to hardly affect four-wheelers across India

The Supreme Court announced a ban on the sale and registration of Bharat Stage III (BS-III) vehicles from 1 April. The move was to make BS-IV emission norms as standard across the country. The court has also said that the health of millions of people is more important as it dismissed the plea of automakers for an extension.The deadline was originally announced way back in 2010, but at that time it stated that no BS-III vehicles could be manufactured in the country after 1 April 2017. With the new altered ruling, vehicle makers are not only restricted to manufacture, but they can't sell BS-III based vehicles any more.This has led to several manufacturers being left with big stocks of unsold vehicles. To be precise, a report suggests automakers have stocks of 8.2 lakh BS-III vehicles in the country which includes 96,724 commercial vehicles, 6,71,308 two-wheelers, 40,048 three-wheelers and 16,198 cars.The numbers clearly point out that passenger cars will be the least affected. This is because almost every petrol based passenger car in India was converted to BS-IV years ago. The change from BS-III to BS-IV is quite simple for internal combustion petrol engines. As for diesel powered cars there is a small portion that could get affected by the emission ban. Manufacturers like Mahindra and Tata Motors are still manufacturing BS-III vehicles but that is also going to be a very small number.So in case you were hoping for a heavy discount on passenger cars today, think again. There won't be any.However, we have heard that two-wheeler manufacturers are offering heavy discounts on their existing BS-III products.