Japan's small car makers are eyeing India

The company has designed its N BOX to share certain structures with the Fit, Honda's global compact car also known as the Jazz, meaning the two cars can be manufactured on the same line, said Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, Honda's managing officer. Honda currently builds the Fit or Jazz at 10 plants around the world, including Indonesia and Thailand. Japanese automakers like Honda Motor Co and the Toyota-Daihatsu group have a problem: the smallest cars they make are very big in Japan - and only Japan. Consider Honda's hi-tech N BOX, a four-passenger microcar that combines some of the utility features of a much larger SUV - the seats roll down to load a bicycle or two - and the fuel-sipping economy of a tiny, 660-cc engine. For the first half of 2013, the zippy N BOX was the best-selling car in Japan's popular vehicle category that now represents almost 40 percent of vehicles on the road. But outside Japan, the concept of the so-called kei car, a term derived from the Japanese word light, is mostly unknown. Now that could change. The Japanese auto giants are considering exporting the technology to emerging market countries. "We have fairly low-priced cars in those markets already, but in India and markets like Indonesia, we need even smaller, even more affordable cars," Honda's chief spokesman Masaya Nagai said. Rising fuel costs and a fast growing middle class in the world's second and fourth most populous states make them likely to be the first microcar customers. MICROS IN MACRO RACE