I couldn't find one with an elongated India plate, so I knew that was from another market--little did I know it was from Japan though.KuroNekko wrote:The Wagon R is a kei car from Japan that made it to the Indian market. It's Suzuki's most famous kei. In fact, that photo that you found of it was taken in Japan. I can easily tell because it has a yellow license plate which only kei cars have in Japan. The buildings and mountain in the background is also dead giveaway to me since I frequently visit Japan.
Anyhow, kei cars don't meet US safety specs so they never have been imported to the US. I wonder if the Wagon R in India is the same as the ones in the JDM.
Kei have a max displacement limit of 660cc so all are turbocharged.
Also, the kei car market didn't just take off. It's pretty much been a huge segment since their introduction decades ago. It's the #1 selling segment in Japan so you see kei cars everywhere in Japan. They would also make excellent city cars in the US. They are small on the outside, but roomy on the inside due to their vertical-bias build.
The latest version of the Wagon R gets the mpg equivalent of close to 67 MPG.
The Indian version is actually produced locally by Maruti to avoid the 200% markup on fully built imported cars. It's badged as a Maruti-Suzuki and probably keeps a lot of the same design, just with local Indian manufacturing. It's actually worked out pretty well for India as the local manufacturing has created tons of jobs while keeping the costs of the cars down. A Honda Jazz there was only $9000 USD compared to what we pay. The fully assembled and imported Accord was $35,000 USD.
Our Kizashis because they were fully assembled were roughly double what we paid here. 
Truly a top-of-the-line luxury car over there.I should have clarified. I meant that the kei-car segment has recently taken off in the US. Once the mid-size cars became full-size, the suvs became busses, and gas prices skyrocketed, there was high demand for the smaller yet capable cars. Hence the Mini and Fiat 500 are enjoying quite a bit of success. If those cars came out 15 years back, they would have suffered the fate of the Kizashi.
In the larger more dense US metros, kei-cars are the way to go, but you still don't see them as much as you would think. My brother lives in the city in SF, and there's still plenty of 'mid-size' cars around town.
