Maruti Suzuki has just introduced a swivel seat option for the WagonR. 17th December 2025.
The solution, developed with TRUEAssist Technology Private Limited under NSRCEL-IIM Bangalore’s startup incubation programme, allows senior citizens and persons with disabilities to enter and exit the vehicle with dignity. No structural modifications. One-hour installation. Three-year warranty. ARAI approved.
Elegant. Simple. Overdue by four decades.
Maruti Suzuki has manufactured vehicles in India since December 1983, when local production commenced with the launch of the Maruti 800. The WagonR was launched in India on 18 December 1999 and has sold over 3.2 million units (32 lakh) to date. In all these years, across millions of vehicles delivered to Indian families, why did it require a startup in 2025 to solve a problem that should have been addressed in the original design brief?
India’s passenger vehicle sales reached an all-time high of 4.3 million units in FY 2024-25, registering 2% growth over FY 2023-24’s 4.2 million units. Total automobile production stood at 3.1 crore vehicles, up from 2.84 crore the previous year. Yet in this massive market, accessibility remained an afterthought.
The answer exposes a fundamental failure in how organisations approach product development, process design, and operational planning. And it’s a failure that extends far beyond the automobile industry.
The Market That Was Always There
This isn’t a niche segment. The numbers are staggering:
26.8 million Indians live with disabilities (2.21% of the population), of whom 20% have mobility impairments. (Source: Census 2011, Office of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities)
150 million Indians are aged 60 and above (12% of the population), projected to reach 319 million by 2050. Nearly 19,500 Indians turn 60 every single day. (Source: LASI 2021; Ministry of Health & Family Welfare)
152 cm is the average height of Indian women aged 15-49, significantly below global averages, making vehicle ingress challenging even without age or disability factors. (Source: NFHS-5, 2019-21, IIPS Mumbai)
Rs 73,082 crore is the current value of India’s Silver Economy, with senior citizens identified globally as the ‘wealthiest age cohort.’ (Source: Government of India, October 2025)
This data has been publicly available for over a decade. Every automobile manufacturer in India had access to it. Yet 170+ million potential customers were systematically excluded from the design conversation.
This isn’t oversight. This is design without thinking.
Where Design Thinking Failed
Design Thinking, as a methodology, follows five stages: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Let’s examine where the automobile industry’s process broke down:
EMPATHISE: Did anyone observe an elderly person struggling to get into a WagonR? Did they watch a woman in a saree attempt to climb into an SUV with 200mm ground clearance? Did they see a son lifting his arthritic mother into the back seat? If they did, the insight never reached the design brief.
DEFINE: The problem was never defined because the user was never accurately identified. The ‘target customer’ in automotive market research apparently excluded anyone over 55, anyone under 160 cm, anyone with a mobility challenge, and anyone who might need to secure a child into a car seat.
IDEATE: Solutions cannot emerge for problems that haven’t been acknowledged. The swivel seat wasn’t a technological breakthrough. It existed globally for decades. The ‘innovation’ was simply recognising that Indian customers might also need it.
PROTOTYPE: It took a startup, TRUEAssist Technology, incubated at IIM Bangalore, to build what OEM engineering teams should have prototyped years ago. The capability existed within these organisations. The will did not.
TEST: And here’s the telling part. This solution is now being piloted across 11 cities and 200+ ARENA dealerships, with expansion dependent on customer response.’ In other words, after 25 years of selling the WagonR to families with elderly members, we’re still testing whether accessibility matters.
What They Said
Hisashi Takeuchi, Managing Director & CEO, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, stated: “Swivel seat will make daily travel more convenient for senior citizens and persons with disabilities. WagonR is among the top 10 selling models in India and is ideal to offer this accessibility feature to a wider audience. This initiative reflects our vision of inclusive mobility and reinforces our commitment to customer-focused solutions that empower people with dignity, independence, and confidence in their everyday journeys. It fully aligns with our motto to deliver ‘Joy of Mobility’ to as many people as possible.”
Naina Padaki, Founder, TRUEAssist Technology Private Limited, added: “We are truly pleased to collaborate with India’s leading passenger vehicle manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki, to bring our assistive mobility solution to a wider audience. Working with the R&D engineers of Maruti Suzuki has been a delightful experience, and it is inspiring how deeply they think of the customers in every aspect. By integrating our innovation into a model loved by the masses, we can ensure that inclusive mobility becomes a mainstream reality and reaches more families across India.”
Noble words.
But here’s the question that remains unanswered: why did it take 40 years of manufacturing and 25 years of WagonR production to reach this point?
The Deeper Problem: Homogeneous Thinking in Heterogeneous Markets
This isn’t a Maruti problem. This is an organisational design problem that pervades the Indian industry.
When your design teams, product managers, and decision-makers are demographically homogeneous, they design for themselves. They test with people like themselves. They validate assumptions that people like themselves would validate.
The result? Products and processes that work brilliantly for a narrow slice of the population while creating friction, inefficiency, and exclusion for everyone else.
And here’s the business cost that rarely gets calculated: every workaround your customer creates, every adaptation your employee makes, every ‘that’s just how it is’ moment represents value leakage, brand erosion, and competitive vulnerability.
What Zentra Consulting Brings to the Table
I spent 31 years in the Army Service Corps, managing logistics and operations across some of the most demanding terrains and conditions this country presents. I thereafter led operations at Mahindra Logistics, responsible for supply chains that serve millions.
Here’s what that taught me: operations don’t fail in boardrooms. They fail at 3 AM at a remote depot when the night-shift worker can’t reach the pallet because someone designed the racking for a 5’10” male. They fail when the delivery driver loses 20 minutes daily because the loading bay wasn’t designed for the trucks actually being used. They fail when the ‘standard operating procedure’ assumes capabilities that half your workforce doesn’t have.
Zentra Consulting exists to close these gaps.
We don’t do theoretical consulting. We don’t produce PowerPoint decks that gather dust. We go to your shop floor at 6 AM. We watch your operations through the eyes of your shortest worker, your oldest employee, your newest recruit. We identify the friction points that your internal teams have normalised because ‘that’s how we’ve always done it.’
And we fix them. Systematically. Permanently.
A Challenge to Decision-Makers
If you’re a CEO, COO, or Head of Operations reading this, ask yourself:
• When did you last walk your operations at a shift change, not as a scheduled ‘Gemba walk’ with escorts, but unannounced, observing how work actually happens?
• When did you last ask your oldest employee, your shortest team member, your newest hire what makes their job harder than it needs to be?
• When did you last examine a process through the eyes of someone who doesn’t match your demographic profile?
• How many ‘swivel seat’ solutions are hiding in plain sight in your operations, waiting for someone to finally see them?
Maruti Suzuki, with all its resources, R&D capability, and market research budgets, missed something obvious for 40 years. What are you missing?
The Zentra Proposition
Zentra Consulting offers what most consultants cannot: three decades of ground-level operational experience combined with a strategic perspective. We’ve managed continuity of operations in conditions where failure wasn’t an option. We’ve built supply chains that work under pressure. We’ve led teams across every demographic you can imagine.
We bring this to your organisation through:
Operational Audits with Edge-Case Focus: We examine your processes through the lens of your most challenged users, not your most capable.
Design Thinking Workshops Grounded in Reality: Not academic exercises, but hands-on sessions that start with observation, not assumptions.
Operational Resilience Planning: Systems that work when conditions aren’t ideal, when your A-team isn’t available, when the unexpected happens.
Implementation, Not Just Recommendations: We stay until the solution is operational, measured, and embedded. No orphaned reports.
The Bottom Line
A swivel seat should have been a factory option in 1999, not a retrofit accessory in 2025. Credit to Maruti for finally acting. Credit to Naina Padaki and TRUEAssist for building the solution. But let’s not celebrate solving a problem that shouldn’t have existed.
The question for every organisation is this: what are you not seeing because your design process doesn’t include the people who experience friction daily? What revenue are you leaving on the table because your products exclude demographics you’ve never properly observed? What operational inefficiencies persist because ‘that’s just how things are done here’?
These aren’t soft issues. These are hard competitive advantages waiting to be claimed by whoever sees them first.
Zentra Consulting helps you see them. And then we help you fix them.