Why Maruti's strong-hybrid Victoris and Grand Vitara are getting harder to buy, even as sales boom

Maruti Suzuki's strong-hybrid Victoris and Grand Vitara are selling in record numbers this year, but a shrinking share of the two SUVs leaving showrooms are actually the hybrid version — and the company says that's not about buyer appetite, it's about where the hybrid hardware comes from. Speaking at Maruti's October 2026 sales briefing, Partho Banerjee, senior executive officer for marketing and sales, said the strong-hybrid powertrain kit is imported from Japan with a procurement lead time of four to five months, a bottleneck that petrol and CNG production simply doesn't face.

What happened

"For hybrid, we have to wait because the kit comes from Japan," Banerjee said, according to Autocar Professional's report of the briefing on 1 November, repeated and expanded on by Autocar India on 3 November. "There is a lead period of almost four to five months. So if you increase the other volume, obviously, percentage-wise, it will come down" — meaning that as Maruti ramps up petrol and CNG output, which it can scale domestically, the hybrid's slice of the total naturally shrinks even if the hybrid's own numbers hold steady or grow.

The scale of that shift is stark. Combined strong-hybrid registrations for the Victoris and Grand Vitara rose roughly 15% to 13,172 units between January and September 2026, compared with 11,439 units over the same period in 2025 — an analysis of VAHAN registration data by ElecTree, cited by both Autocar India and Autocar Professional. In isolation, that looks like healthy growth. But combined registrations across all three powertrains for both SUVs more than doubled to approximately 1.77 lakh units in the same window, driven overwhelmingly by CNG uptake on the Victoris in particular, which uses a factory-fitted underbody tank design that doesn't eat into boot space the way aftermarket CNG kits typically do. The arithmetic follows: strong hybrids made up close to 15% of combined Victoris and Grand Vitara registrations in January-September 2025; a year later, despite more hybrid units actually being sold, that share had fallen to around 7%.

Banerjee said Maruti sold roughly 17,000 Victoris and 11,000 Grand Vitara units in October 2026 across all powertrains — not a hybrid-specific figure, but a sign of how much volume the hybrid supply constraint is operating against. He also flagged a second structural disadvantage for the hybrid variants: India's GST treatment taxes strong hybrids at the same rate as comparable petrol vehicles, unlike battery-electric vehicles, which attract a lower GST rate. That tax parity, layered on top of the supply-side cap, means the hybrid variant carries a real price premium over petrol without the tax break that would make the efficiency gains a clearer financial win for every buyer.

Maruti has not disclosed exactly how many hybrid kits it receives from Japan each month, nor given a timeline for when the constraint might ease. The company has been adding manufacturing capacity and raising average daily output — from roughly 9,100 units in Q1 FY27 to about 10,100 units in October, per corporate-affairs executive Rahul Bharti — but that capacity expansion addresses overall vehicle assembly, not the separate, slower-moving supply of imported hybrid powertrain components.

What it means for an Indian buyer

If a strong-hybrid Victoris or Grand Vitara is specifically what you want — for the fuel efficiency, the electric-only crawl in traffic, or simply because it's the variant you've decided on — this is a reason to expect a longer wait than for the petrol or CNG version of the same car, even though neither model file currently carries a hybrid-specific waiting-period figure from a dealer survey. The constraint Maruti is describing is upstream of any single dealership: it's a national supply limit on the kit itself, so a longer wait for the hybrid variant should show up fairly consistently across cities, not just in high-demand metros.

It's also worth treating the hybrid-versus-petrol decision as a genuine trade-off rather than an automatic upgrade. The hybrid's efficiency and smoothness are real, but with GST parity to petrol and a materially longer wait attached to it, buyers who mainly want a quick delivery and decent running costs may find the CNG variant — strong sales momentum on the Victoris in particular — a faster, cheaper route to broadly similar economics, especially for drivers doing high in-city mileage where CNG's per-kilometre cost advantage is largest.

The Auto Grid angle

Whichever powertrain you end up with, the wait itself is worth using productively. A four-to-five-month pre-delivery window — longer than most buyers expect — is enough time to research paint protection properly rather than deciding on it at the delivery counter under pressure from a dealer up-sell. Both the Victoris and Grand Vitara share Maruti's typical mix of a tall, upright bonnet and prominent wheel-arch cladding that takes stone-chip and kerb-rash damage early in ownership; deciding on a PPF package before delivery, rather than after the first scratch, is the more cost-effective sequence regardless of how long the car itself takes to arrive.

FAQ and what's next

We'll revisit this story if Maruti discloses a hybrid-specific dealer waiting period, confirms a timeline for easing the Japan supply constraint, or if the GST Council revisits strong-hybrid tax treatment — any of which would materially change the calculus for a buyer choosing between the Victoris or Grand Vitara's petrol, CNG and hybrid variants.