The smell of gasoline after refuelling, the hum of the engine
while cruising on an empty road, tyre marks on asphalt, artistically aesthetic
wheels. These are some of things that tingle the grey cells of a petrol head. I
am no different and I live in a country where the only thing holier than our
cows is the curry we eat.
The automobile industry in India as far as the choice of the
customer was concerned was pretty lacklustre for almost forty years since the
country obtained independence. This was primarily because of the licence raj that
was strictly followed by the Government of that era, which somehow believed
aping the USSR (as Russia was called at that point in time) was the way forward.
Therefore, with the exception of the Rajas and Maharajas of the yester-year
princely states who rolled in their Rolls Royces and Cadillacs, the fate of the
Indian petrol head was pretty much like a black and white movie. It was then that two good men
decided India should have cars manufactured or at least assembled in the
country. Ghanshyamdas Birla manufactured the Hindustan 10 based on the Morris
10 in association with Nuffield of UK and Walchand Hirachand started Premier
Automobiles by assembling De Soto and Plymouth cars in association with
Chrysler of the US.
The Hindustan 10 subsequently morphed into the Hindustan
Ambassador which ruled the roads for the next few decades. An Ambassador or
Amby as it is endearingly called was like a tank in today’s terms, the kind of
car which you could walk out of, even if Juggernaut decided to head-butt you. The
‘King of Indian roads’ as it was called went out of production in 2014 but
still finds a place on the roads of Kolkata. They still ply the roads of the
City of Joy as taxis if you ever want to ride in one, albeit at your own
personal risk. The piece de resistance of Premier Automobiles was however the
Premier Padmini, another four door saloon which was vastly popular among the
film fraternity as also women folk in general. Padmini shared its name with a
Rajput princess and means ‘she who sits on the lotus’, probably because the
body roll on this one was slightly lower than in the Ambassador. However, the
car became popular by its pseudonym Fiat, since the Premier Padmini was
originally a Fiat. Hindustan Motors also produced a ‘luxury’ sedan by the name
of Contessa which reached a few garages but not as many as the Amby.
The true transformation in the Indian auto industry was
however brought in by the launch of the Maruti Suzuki 800 in 1984. This vehicle
was a sea change from the bulky Amby. I still remember the time I drove an 800
for the first time after learning my driving skills in the great Amby. I had
the same exhilaration as General Rommel the Desert Fox would have had if he was
dislodged from one of his Tiger tanks and put on a flying carpet. This little
hatchback was so light that it could be lifted off the ground by a couple of
well-built people. It was light on the road, needed very little space to park
and it was Japanese and came with all the Japanese efficiencies. It was an
instant hit! The 800 transmogrified into other models over time like the Alto
and the Zen, but the charm of this model which revolutionized the Indian auto
industry still stays fresh in the memory of all Indians with the exception of the
young millennial. It would be pretty impetuous of me if I don’t mention the
Maruti Omni minivan which was launched along with the Maruti 800. This was a pixie version of a station wagon
with slide doors and became pretty notorious as an instrument of kidnapping in
reel and real life, when it was not being used to ferry school children from
home to school and back. The only problem with the vehicle was that the body
and chassis of the vehicle had minds of their own. So if you applied the brakes
in New York, the chassis would stop there but the body would come to a stop
only in Boston.
The mid 1990s saw an influx of the whole Japanese automobile
industry into the Indian market like Honda, Toyota and Mitsubishi.
The Japanese are a clever lot. They realised that the
discerning Indian customer was starved for new vehicle models and decided to
use that psyche to mould their business model. They created multiple versions
of the same model. Now you will think that is common practice across the globe,
but not the way it is done in India. Here the car companies invented the
concept of different versions of the same model. All versions had the same engine capacity,
output, security and other features which should be the parameters for
difference in models. But no, Akihiko was like - “Tanaka-san! Karera wa
orokamonodesu!” (See Tanaka, they are fools!).
They gave two versions of the same model, one with air-conditioning and
one without, though this country is located a stone’s throw away from the
equator and aircon should have been an inclusion and not an add-on. Mind you,
the price differential between the versions was quite substantial and had no
resemblance to the cost of adding an aircon. Similarly, there were models with
floor mats and models without, models with “body colour” fender and door
handles and the one without, all at differential pricing. The sale strategy
which took the cake though was where the companies offered a different model
with chrome tipped door handles and chrome strips on the door frame! Alas, the
great Indian middle-class gobbled up the body coloured gibberish, hook, line and
sinker with the auto industry recording multi fold growth in their toplines. The
Koreans were not far behind!
It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that the Germans realised that
the Japs and Koreans were creaming the Indian market and they were not even
present here. Achtung, achtung they cried and landed here with their Mercs,
Beemers and Audis! But they weren’t any different. Audi had an A4, A6 and A8 as
popular sedan models abroad. Moment they landed on Indian shores, they released the
A5, A7, A7 and a half, A8 and three by quarters and God knows what else. History repeated itself.
However, the irony in all this was the condition of the roads
in India. It was only in the late 1990s that the Government started privatising road
projects and the infrastructure started to improve. National highways and state
highways became broader, longer and crater-less. That was a welcome change!
However, the paucity of driving sense in us Indians far surpassed the apathy of
the Govt towards road development.
I was watching a series on Netflix the other day covering the
life of Special Forces Snipers. They have to undergo countless hours of
training to achieve an elevated efficiency of their senses, where every sight,
sound and smell is registered by the brain, where their breathing rate is
lowered and they achieve a heightened sense of their surroundings and their own
existence. We Indians can achieve all that in fewer than five minutes by
driving around in rush hour traffic! People on the roads here just do not care. Lane discipline is a misnomer, civic sense is not civic in anyway and any
space that can be claimed on the road shall be claimed whether you run over
somebody in the process or not. In such a scenario, it doesn’t matter whether
you own an A8 and three by quarters. The guy riding a run-down Vespa is in a
far better position than you are. It is in such circumstances that I visited a
friend of the family. He owns many businesses and as expected his garage has an
Audi A6, a Mercedes AMG C-63 sedan and a BMW M5, all a dream to drive. But our
friend lets them rot in the garage and uses a Toyota Innova, a compact
multi-purpose vehicle to move around daily. Even Akihiko was like – “Tanaka-san!
Karera wa orokamonodesu!”
It is only in the recent past that the competition started
picking up and companies from all across the globe started setting up shop or
getting into joint ventures with Indian companies to launch their vehicles
here. Launch of Kia and the re-launch of Morris Garage are typical examples.
With increase in travel, purchasing power parity and access to information, the
auto industry is witnessing a major transformation in the country, for once
skewed in favour of the petrolhead.
P.S: - A question which may have popped up in some of your
minds is why I only mentioned sedans above and not bikes, jeeps or SUVs. For
the love of vroom! We shall take that up separately.
