[PGA]

Indian car scene fifty years ago.

[anjan_c2007]

A joke going around in vintage bike circles:-

Q. What is the greatest contribution of M/s Classic Legends to our automobile scenario? After all, they have relaunched Brand Jawa and Brand Yezdi as repackaged classics in a contemporary but legendary way?

A. The resale prices of the older Mysore made Jawas and Yezdis have jumped through the roof.

That's their greatest contribution, despite the fact that M/s Classic Legends Private Limited are selling miniscule numbers of both the classic and legendary brands.

[SR-71]

Originally Posted by PGA

Indian car scene fifty years ago.

The ambassador cost Rs. 7.3L by 2022 rupee valuation and the price hike was around Rs. 5000, again by 2022 valuation. I cannot say if cost of an ambassador of that era sounds reasonable by today's valuation, but the hike seems to be. These days both the cost of the car and each hike, especially as you go up the range, seems to make very little or no sense, even if one were to retain it for decade plus!

[samyakmodi]

Originally Posted by SR-71

The ambassador cost Rs. 7.3L by 2022 rupee valuation and the price hike was around Rs. 5000, again by 2022 valuation. I cannot say if cost of an ambassador of that era sounds reasonable by today's valuation, but the hike seems to be. These days both the cost of the car and each hike, especially as you go up the range, seems to make very little or no sense, even if one were to retain it for decade plus!

I am not very sure how you calculated the 2022 valuation. But if you do the current valuation VS historic valuation compared to gold - we will see a totally different prices here.

for eg. 10 grams of gold was for Rs. 202 in 1972 VS Rs. 53,095 today.
With that comparison an ambassador would cost a whopping 44.7 lacs in today's money. and a minuscule price hike of Rs. 127 would amount to Rs. 33,700 today.

No wonder our elder generation still believes in investing in gold instead of anything else.

[SR-71]

Originally Posted by samyakmodi

I am not very sure how you calculated the 2022 valuation. But if you do the current valuation VS historic valuation compared to gold

I am a financial noob but if I am not wrong, currency and other investment instruments like gold and stocks and bonds do not grow by the same proportion though there is some co-relation. The investment instruments tend to run ahead and fall behind based time to time on many parameters. The buying power of the currency on the other hand is impacted by inflation.

The calculator I used is simple computation of buying power of the rupee, a.la an inflation calculator. There are dime a dozen out there on the internet that helps us compute for any currency you want. If this is not right, I would be happy to be corrected on the right method of computation for buying power of the currency.

[dailydriver]

Flipping through the pages of Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, I came across passages referring to pre independence India's failed attempt at establishing automobile manufacturing units in India.

The following screenshots have been sourced from here.

Background

The Attempt

The Attempt cont'd...

Page Nos: 410-412

[arpanjha]

Originally Posted by GTO

So here's some interesting trivia for non-Bombay folk. This road in Mahim is the ONLY one I've seen anywhere in India, which is open one way in the North -> South direction (first half of the day), and South -> North one way in the second half. Basically, one-way in the direction of rush hour traffic.

This is old Cadell road, that ends at Mahim Church. Sharing pictures going to the suburban side. In the morning, it's the other way around.

Ends at the Mahim Church:
Attachment 2275322

Actually this is arrangement is very very common in many many roads of Kolkata. Out here it is 6 am to 2PM and 2PM to 10PM, 10PM to 6 am I guess all streets are two way including the ones which are flow controlled.

Originally Posted by cuboid

Couple of roads in Kolkata CBD also has the time-dependent-one-way-traffic. Park Street used to have traffic East-West till 2pm, and after 2pm, it becomes West-East. Same thing was there for portion of roads near Exide junction.

Not just Park Street, Shakespeare Sarani, Wood Street, Camac St, Rabindra Sarani, Ho Chi Minh Sarani, College Street and many many more around that area of South Central Kolkata and few North Kolkata have traffic flow controlled by this arrangement.

Originally Posted by akash_v12

My parents’ native town in Murshidabad, WB also has a road with a very similar system. They divide the day into four 6-hour slots and keep two way traffic open only for the night hours. Unfortunately, in a town of that size, I still haven’t understood the purpose of doing do.

Out here in Kolkata, it is done to handle traffic in a much much smoother manner especially on narrower (compared to major roads), it is very safe too, no one has to worry about oncoming traffic.

Originally Posted by dragracer567

Out of curiosity, does this get updated automatically in google maps?

As far as I have seen, it does get updated, at least in Kolkata.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by dailydriver

Flipping through the pages of Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, I came across passages referring to pre independence India's failed attempt at establishing automobile manufacturing units in India.

The following screenshots have been sourced from

Thank you for sharing this. My apologies in advance to any British readers whose sentiments may be hurt going through this post. Moderators please excuse my for going off topic by a light year.

From consciously & systematically destroying the handloom and muslin industries of Bengal in the 1760s onwards to forcing farmers to cultivate opium and indigo at the expense of food grains and then taxing them {when city dwellers paid no income taxes} to wilfully following a policy to hinder development of Indian industry at every turn the British followed a well planned strategy of extracting $$ from this land to fatten the Bank of England and finance their conquest of other hapless lands in Africa and Middle East. The damage caused by the British Empire, in my opinion a force of evil, was comparable to the havoc wrought by Hitler only this that the British spread the pain, the killing and the looting in slow motion over 150 years. They were more cunning than Herr Hitler in that they boiled the frog slowly. Sadly as the world media is dominated by the Anglo-Saxon press little is written about the excesses of the British Empire nor is it taught in their schools and the average Britisher believes his grandfather's Empire was a force for good.

A list of some of the excesses of the British Empire as stated in the Western books:

Between 1857 and 1947 some number between 12 to 29 million Indian died from man made famines caused by forced cropping and taxation to be paid despite crop failures. This in a period when the average population of undivided India was about 250 million. In comparison evil Hitler killed 6 million in the gas chambers. Let the numbers speak.

Some number between 20,000* and 100,000** Kenyans died in British concentration camps in the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1940s early 1950s. The British confiscated the fertile lands of the Kenyan tribes, gave them to British settlers, imposed a cash tax on the Kenyans who only knew a barter economy and the only way to pay that tax in cash was to work as indentured labour on the very farms that had been stolen from them. And when the protests started {called the Mau Mau rebellion} jet fighter bombers were used to level entire villages to suppress it.
*official British historian David Anderson; ** Caroline Elkins independent researcher and author

Some studies by the Columbia University,USA suggest Britain took away $44.9 trillion from India between 1765 and 1947. While I read through that I'll confess I'm not an economist to understand how that figure was arrived at or how accurate it is except to say that the loot was gargantuan. But figures aside the key point was that the foreign exchange ie GBP+gold+silver being earned by India in those 180 years was never ever ever sent to India. It was retained in the UK under the streets of London in control of the British Govt. and the Indian exporter was paid in INR at an exchange rate fixed to not favour the INR. If that forex had been available to an independent India maybe, just maybe we would have had our own Meiji Restoration in the 1800s like Japan did. Collectively in the 30 years from 1899 to 1929 India had the second largest trade surplus in the world after USA thanks to raw material exports but our per capita remained unchanged even though in that period our population grew only nominally.

One third of all the tax collected in India, mainly from farmers {income tax on the rich including the British came only in the 1930s} was paid to Britain under an account maintained by the Secretary of State for India. This money was spent in Britain for Britain or in conquering newer colonies! Only 2/3rds of the tax collected was spent in India a large part of which then went to pay for the British Indian Army and Police to keep the wretched colonial serfs in control.

I could go one and on. The systematic loot of India under the sophisticated guise of laws and Crown policies make for staggering reading. The embellished this smoothness under layers of titles, gowns, crowns and handouts to the loyalists among the colonials. We condemn today invaders such as Nadir Shah and Mohd of Gazni for their looting of India but nothing compares to the smoothness and scale of the British. The only thing comparable is their belief that their Raj was a force for good.

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by anjan_c2007

The 407 captured a sizeable pie of the LCV market and soon became the market leader. Toyota and Mazda found the going tough and Nissan and Allwyn too surrendered.
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Toyota and Mazda had to close shop and retreat.

Well to their credit Toyota didn't forget their lesson. Because a generation later a breadbox on wheels dethroned the mighty Sumo. Payback.

[GTO]

Neat one from ACI on how the Maruti Zen got its name:

The name was chosen in February 1993. The marketing department announced a naming contest for a vehicle code-named YE-2. The participation was impressive and close to 50 entries were received. The then director of Marketing & Sales, Kozo Senga, (Senga-san to all of us) liked the name “Zen”. It happened to be one of the two names I entered, the other being ‘Caligula’ (please don’t ever ask me why!). Senga called me and asked why the name Zen. Was it because of Japanese technology? I told him that I had spent some time with the vehicle before coming up with the name. It looked harmonious and calm from the outside, sweetly silent when you started it, but once you shifted gears and pressed the accelerator, it was like a manic beast. Yet, you could control it, at your command, due to its excellent handling dynamics. You had the power when required, but also the control to use it responsibly. That, to me, was the essence of Zen philosophy, hence the name. Senga smiled and said, “Thank you Avik-san for suggesting such an apt name.” As a greenhorn product manager just into the second year of my first job, nothing could have been better.

One media report also creatively called it an acronym for “Zero Engine Noise”.

[anjan_c2007]

Originally Posted by GTO

IMHO, Rover was already a terminally sick patient by the time BMW stupidly bought it. It moved to ventilator support when the Phoenix Consortium bought it.

Off topic and though the topic is for "Indian car scene", I would take a little bit of liberty to cross the oceans and write.

In fact, BMW lost US $ 2.85 billion in the six years of ownership of Rover before hiving it off. But BMW kept the MINI with its production at Cowley and retained rights for the Rover, Triumph and Riley brand names. Ironically, MG Rover kept Mini brandname not BMW's MINI, that the latter grabbed and is still benefitting with. MG Rover could never rollout their Mini as planned by 2000.

Was reading a book by James Ruppert who has convinced the reader that the BMW - Rover deal was in fact a very shrewd move by the then BMW, CEO Mr Brend Pischetsrieder, an Anglophile according to him. Mr Brend was ironically related to Sir Alec Issigonis (Greek parentage) through the latter's mother. Hence, it was providence that Mr Brend's BMW took over the company manufacturing his relative's creation, the Mini.

James Ruppert aptly titled his chapter "Rover gets new parents and Crown Jewels flogged". He has said that BMW inherited world class expertise from Rover and BMW engineers could learn a lot. All BMW's were rear wheel drives, whereas Rover (Mini then under BMC) had been manufacturing front wheel drives since 1959. BMW had removed their largest competitor from the British market according to Ruppert. And the greatest takeaway by BMW was the offroad technology from Rover to make their then new X5 according to Ruppert. BMW soon made many more successful forays into the 4x4 technology that was alien to them They used Rover expertise and technology to the hilt.

BMW ultimately hived off Rover after it got all it wanted and couldn't nurse the sick Rover back to robust or even good health, leaving these jobs to the Phoenix Consortium (failure), Ford (failure) and now to Tata Motors ( all of us know about JLR).

[nareshtrao]

Originally Posted by d_himan

That said, I hated it within 10 min of the drive - even the Chennai auto-rickshaws were faster in the typical city hustle. Our humble 800 and the Sipani Dolphin felt much more perkier. The 5th overdrive gear, if slotted in at 50kmph would take forever to go to 60 kmph.

Owned the Zen and the G13B Swift later, miles ahead in engine performance/rev friendliness.

Originally Posted by PSM_360

Till last decade we all in the family used to call it an Esteem but my dad would always call it a 1000. I used to think that Esteem came in 2 engines capacities and we had the smaller one, otherwise, it is an Esteem . Later, my father briefed me about certain differences between the two cars, now I call it a 1000. Once repainted, I am not going to put Esteem badge. The Center console is already removed .

Originally Posted by chiranjitp

Since you have brought up the topic of Zen, let me give my point about how a Zen drove. I have owned 2 of these, first a 98 Zen carb, then later a 01 Zen MPFi.

These posts are pure nostalgia.

I used to own a Maruti 1000 (M1k as the Bangalore crowd used to refer to it then). While a looker those days with oodles of street presence (given the lack of many sleek cars on roads then) as pointed here by all, suffered with a seriously weak engine. Once the AC was switched on, it seriously struggled to overtake anything that moved. Over a period, got fed of the poor performance and sold it and got a Zen (Carb was the only one available then - MPFI was an unheard concept). That was a huge leap in performance and driving pleasure. Kept it for a few years and then sold it and moved on to the next beauty on road - A Mitsubishi Lancer. That stayed with us for many years before I got a Honda Civic.

In case it is not pointed out elsewhere, there was a fair bit of waiting period for Maruti 1000. After years of 800 on the road, this had evoked a fair bit of interest. Esteem too had a similar situation in early days but eased quickly along with Zen which too had a similar interest but lesser of a waiting period once Maruti increased the production.

[GTO]

Here's some trivia = I think Q4 2023 (October to December) was the only quarter that didn't see a single all-new car model launch. We only saw facelifts & the like.

On the other hand, the motorcycle world has been on fire .