You are probably familiar with bajaj as the name of the iconic three-wheeled orange smoke-belching vehicles (although the new blue ones that run on LPG are slowly replacing them) that many Jakartans rely on to cover short distances cheaply. But Bajaj is actually the brand name of Indian company Bajaj Auto that popularized the autorickshaw (as bajaj are technically classified) in the 1940s and the company continues to produce them as well as other vehicles.
One of those is the appropriately named Qute, which was first unveiled in India in 2012 and was recently launched in Indonesia at the low price of just Rp 65 million – which would make it the cheapest car on the market here.
However, the company doesn’t actually define the Qute as a car. As stated on the Bajaj Auto website: “Qute is a four-wheeler, yet not a car. It comes under a whole new category — the quadricycle. It is a new-age vehicle that carries the attributes of a three-wheeler as well as those of a car.”
So basically the Qute is meant to be something of a hybrid between an autorickshaw and a regular car. The company boasts that the compact vehicle (measuring 2.752 m in length, 1.312m in width, and 1.652 m in height) has a carbon footprint that is 37% smaller than the smallest car available while still giving the drivers and passengers a comfortable and safe ride (we’re assuming that none of the passengers they’re talking about are particularly tall).
The engine of the Qute can run on either LPG or CNG and is capable of going up to 70 km/h. To keep the price low, the Qute lacks air conditioning, power steering, power windows or an audio system. But at a price closer to a motorcycle than a car, we could see it appealing to many in Indonesia and even becoming a possible commercial replacement for old-school bajaj. According to a report from automobile website Otomotifnet, the Qute is already available for purchase in some parts of Indonesia like Serang, Banten.
The idea of such low-cost vehicles causing the number of drivers in Jakarta to vastly increase kind of scares us, but it’s much less scary if they are tiny compacts like the Qute. We’ll just have to wait and see if this bajaj of the future takes off in Indonesia.
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