DC Design Avanti – First Indian sports car

You certainly have heard about the cheapest car in the entire world – the Tata Nano. But India is about to have its very first sports car in the form of the DC Design Avanti. The DC Design company was founded by Dilip Chhabria who is a former General Motors designer and has been known for its one-off prototypes. The situation is about to change as this Avanti will be reaching the production line and it will be manufactured at the company’s new factory located at Talagon.

Chhabria has stated that the company’s plans are to build 300 units of the Avanti in 2013-2014. If everything goes according to plans and the automaker gets enough orders, they will increase the annual output to more than 1,000 cars.

The prototype of this sports car made its official debut at the 2012 Auto Expo and it is constructed around a lightweight yet rigid spaceframe chassis. It features coil over shock absorbers and unequal-length wishbones on both of the axles, and it will ride on 19-inch alloys wrapped around in 255/35 tires at the front and 295/30 for the back wheels. The stopping power for the Avanti will be provided by the 330 mm ventilated disc brakes that will have AP Racing calipers.

At the heart of this new Indian sports car will be a 4-cylinder, 2.0-liter mid-mounted Ecoboost engine borrowed from Ford which will be tuned in order to produce 240 hp and a maximum torque of 270 lb.-ft (366 Nm). The car will be available for export thanks to the fact that the power unit is Euro 5-compliant, but they will make a few adjustments in order to meet the upcoming Euro 6 restrictions.

All of those ponies will be sent to the back wheels through a 6-speed manual transmission also taken from Ford. As an optional feature, the DC Design Avanti will be available with a dual clutch PowerShift transmission.

Carrying a weight of 3,443 pounds (1,562 kg) and featuring 240 hp under its hood, this certainly won’t be a supercar, but the good news is that its price tag will be of Rs 30 lakh, which in dollars means approximately $56,000.

The company’s plans for the future are to introduce a turbocharged Honda-sourced V6 engine for the Avanti which should be able to generate about 400 hp. Most likely, this variant of the car will be significantly more expensive.

Source: DC Design via Carscoop | Photos: Motorbeam

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