Fun & Interesting Trivia on the Indian Car Scene

[tharian]

^^^
Even the 4sp carb version could do it. But of course it required quite a distance to reach that and back then knowing the speedo error was not possible.

[GTO]

Dr. Pawan Goenka's first car was a Mustang . Now here's a car guy if I ever saw one. Can't think of any other Indian auto industry exec who'd come close!

Dr. Pawan Goenka, executive director, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd says, “My first car was a 1968 red coloured Ford Mustang V8”.

Source

[GTO]

Interesting trivia from the Tata Indica book (horrible book, don't buy it).

In the chapter covering the design of the Indica, Rajhans (Tata Designer) says:

Rajhans recounts an interesting ‘Indianness’ story from his days in Turin.

I remember the day the first design prototype of the Indica was finally ready, and it looked so beautiful. My colleague and I, who were deeply involved in the design effort, wanted to celebrate the occasion before shipping the prototype car to India. In Italy, they celebrate in a different way. But we were so proud of the Indianness of the car that we wanted to celebrate with a puja (prayer) to God Almighty, for having guided us in making our design so successful, so wonderful.

To perform this traditional puja ceremony, we needed a coconut, haldi (turmeric) and kumkum (vermilion). But where do you find these in a place like Turin? We roamed virtually every road and cobbled street of Turin for an entire day, hunting for these three essential items. It was difficult, but we eventually found them. We conducted our Indian puja and left the broken coconut in the car, as a symbol of the Almighty’s blessings.

I am told that our colleagues back in India were most surprised to find the coconut, when they opened the shipment and unveiled the car !

And

Girish Wagh says that he first saw the purplish-blue Indica when he strolled into the prototype shop on some other work. ‘Wow, what a wonderful new Toyota car!’ was his first thought. It was only when he got closer that he realized it was not another vehicle from the Japanese Zen master of cars, but the new Tata car.

[AutoNoob]

An interesting article from Popular Mechanics. May be something similar can be compiled from the Indian automotive gems.

12 of the Most Embarrassing Cars Built by Otherwise Excellent Automakers - These cars were the black sheep of their automotive families.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars...tive-families/

Request to Mods : Could't find a trivia thread for the International Car Scene, so posting here. You can move this to a more suitable thread.

[GTO]

Bet you never knew why James May was fired from Autocar. This is hilarious

Link to full article

James May was bored, and decided to fiddle with the big letters you see on headings. An Opponaut or anyone knows with some manipulation, messages can be put in.

[GTO]

For nostalgia fans, I found a couple of articles from the 80s. Gives a great insight into how the market was then, including customer perceptions & preferences.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Some notable excerpts:

The 118NE had 75,000 bookings!

Barely 3,000 cars have been turned out so far, against bookings of 75,000 in 1985. Result: the car commands a premium of Rs 20,000 in Bombay.

The first article starts with a complaint about the 800's fuel efficiency

In New Delhi, D.S. Mehta fulminates about Maruti's fuel efficiency, and the stiff price-tags for spares.

Premier Auto had a market-share of 24%. That's 50% higher than what Hyundai has today

The Rs 465-crore flagship company of the Walchand Group (turnover: approximately Rs 750 crore) closed its financial year in June 1989 with a net profit of Rs 13.65 crore - an increase of 21.8 per cent over the previous year. Sales have grown by 19 per cent; the industry figure is 12 per cent. And market share has gone up from 22 to 24 per cent. "It's been a good year for us," says a visibly pleased Vinod L. Doshi, chairman and managing director.

And why it did well, even after Maruti's entry:

So, how did PAL successfully stave off the Maruti challenge? The Premier Padmini had an advantage. Falling between the Ambassador and the Maruti, it has a niche market. Then, the company improved its fuel efficiency. And in 1986, it introduced the 118 NE.

There were even hostile takeover bids on PAL:

In 1982, PAL had thwarted a bid by an R.P. Goenka company. More recently, it was in the news when BoB Fiscal, the merchant banking arm of Bank of Baroda that was involved in the controversial Larsen & Toubro take-over, bought a large chunk of the company's shares. Says Doshi: "They had acquired over 85,000 shares, and we had neither accepted nor rejected them for registration with the company."

[GTO]

In all these F1 discussions, remembered something I'd seen on SpeedTV (yes, there was a channel dedicated to cars in the USA).

So, at a regular meeting with the Ford family, Jacques Nasser (then boss of Ford Motor Company) was asked a question by one of the family members. IIRC, it was a lady.

'Jacques, who is the highest paid employee of Ford'? Jacques replied saying that it was he himself, and probably wondered why this question came up. Pat came the followup question 'No, it's someone named Eddie Irvine....who is this????'

Irvine was then driving for the Jaguar F1 team. Just so you know, no one really watched F1 in the USA.

[GTO]

Picking up a lot of trivia & history from BVR Subbu's new book:

- The government offered a chance to Tata Motors to build a small car in the 60s - that didn't work out.

- At the time that Hyundai India was being set up, Hyundai HQ decided to move manufacturing out of Canada. All the high value stuff (including the stamping press) was shipped down from Canada to India, saving Hyundai India big bucks.

- In the mid-nineties, Tata & Mercedes were exploring developing a compact car together.

[GTO]

Here's another incredibly interesting bit of trivia from the same book.

The hotly anticipated Indica was just around the corner, as was the Daewoo Matiz. Hyundai didn't want to let the competition know whether they are going to launch the Accent first or the Santro. So, they simply told vendors to start preparations for both cars (OEM suppliers are known to leak info to competitors - even we get a lot of scoops from them).

As we all know, it was the Santro that was launched first.

[MadiMaama]

@GTO sir SPOILER ALERT!!!

, interesting facts about Tata being offered the chance to build a car by the Government of India
If that had materialized, maybe the Nano may have come out much earlier.

[GTO]

One more interesting bit of trivia.

When Ford arrived in India, it received 5,000 applications for the 15 dealerships it wanted to set up .

In comparison, poor then-unknown Hyundai received merely 200 applications for the 75 dealerships it wanted .

[NPX]

Originally Posted by VinodDevil81

the classic and 1st Gen DTSi had 18 litre fuel tanks.

once we filled the tank upto the brim in my friend's pulsar and it was a horrible experience. It wobbled very badly. It was difficult to ride, difficult to stop and very very difficult to handle on turns. It was like driving a fully loaded truck.
I think that was the reason behind downsizing of the fuel tank.

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by GTO

1

Very interestingly, R C Bargava's name figures in that article, published on 31/08/1987.

Maruti Udyog's Managing Director R.C. Bhargava concedes that Marutis have run head on into problems but...
On prices, Bhargava says that component specifications and quality are superior...

To be quote worthy for three decades is indeed an achievement .

[GTO]

An interesting bit of trivia from the book 'Men of Steel' by Vir Sanghvi.

In the late 80s & early 90s, Citibank had cornered a big share of the new car financing market. Uday Kotak wanted to crack that. Solution = they simply bought a lot of new cars on which they would offer 'instant delivery' if you took finance from them. In those days, the popular cars had waiting periods.

Eventually, I believe, everyone else adopted the practice.

[GTO]

You can drive a Mercedes Benz in India, but the Mercedes CEO cannot . Now, that's some trivia on the 3-pointed star!

The India head of Mercedes-Benz, Roland Folger has a valid complaint. Since 2015, when the 58-year-old took over the company’s India reins and shifted to Pune, he has been denied the pleasure of driving. “As a company policy, I am not allowed to drive here.” The rationale being that poor discipline on Indian roads can be difficult to deal with.

Source - ET