[CPH]

I am not Indian as many know and still in my signature you see one car I want to own We still have to wait for another year or so.

I was born and lived a long time in the country where the first car was built long before the Yanks stopped people hanging horse thieves.

When I compare cars for quality then the cars a lot of the young folk in India seem to be the worst in my opinion.

A Toyota LFA killed the chief test driver of Toyota in a head on collision of a car that is far inferior to the LFA. Interestingly both occupants in the in India not so liked box standard BMW 3 series survived. Well over 9 million safety related recalls on Toyotas and these increasing every week with plenty of people dying and your friend calls it a safe car.

The amount of cars Toyota has to call back right now is more than what Mahindra and Tata have produced combined in the last how many years?

Honda has got an increasing poor safety rating to and is still the best thing since sliced bread?

I think your friend is in need of a reality check. Send him my regards from an automotive engineer that has over thirty years of experience and where the majority of motor racing history is being written. I am saying this in a factual manner and not any other (just that nobody gets the wrong idea): If a German would buy a Tata Nano then it can't be that bad. Call me crazy, but I am not suicidal.

And on a different note. My father's late ex boss drove very simple cars. No premium brand cars. He was only the third richest man at the time. He did it because he did not have to prove that he can show off. He used the money for better purposes than that.

I personally have fired people working for me who had bigger cars than me because their quality of work was not adequate to be paid the money they needed to show off with such a car.

Your friend and everyone thinking on these lines need a lot of growing up to do.

Mercedes being the biggest pile of rubbish being produced out of Germany but it is being hailed like an army of heroes. The much better Audis end somewhere in limbo?

[amitk26]

Originally Posted by radek

I understand the catching-up part required for Indian car companies to reach Japanese or German level. But what I do not understand is why same time required to equal their service standards. When one third of Indian economy is in service sector, this should not be any issue at all. But we still see Tata service standards still behind that of Maruti-Suzuki.
Probably this is one of the main concern for most of us.

Well as I have written on multiple such threads based on my personal experience with two brands this is simply not true for at-least last 2 years. However the point Raj raised is entirely different so discussion on service quality is immaterial here.

I have personally seen some people who feel happy buying product which are Foreign, does not matter from where. Even may be from countries such as Moldavia or Ukraine because they are in Europe ( though outside EU) but feel inferior using Indian product.

I am just using Moldavia and Ukraine as a metaphor because level of development is not exactly same as in western Europe no offense to anyone from these countries,

[raj_5004]

Originally Posted by amitk26

@raj, I call such people as RNI that is resident non indians, Sigmand Freud says any superiority complex is menifestation of deep seated inferiority.
Any way to fix this friend of yours why don't you invite him to some excrusion in his car where barely broken roads are involved. I am sure repair costs and shaken and stirred backbone will end the argument on why Scorpio

i did that! but did you mean where broken roads are involved or did you actually mean barely broken?

Originally Posted by CPH

I am not Indian as many know and still in my signature you see one car I want to own We still have to wait for another year or so.

..............................

Mercedes being the biggest pile of rubbish being produced out of Germany but it is being hailed like an army of heroes. The much better Audis end somewhere in limbo?

great post sir!

i will definitely mail him the link of this thread & let see whether he has something to say on this.

[amitk26]

Originally Posted by raj_5004

i did that! but did you mean where broken roads are involved or did you actually mean barely broken?

I meant broken roads , Actually I was posting from my Mobile and seems it applied spell check on something and converted to barely , I completely forgot now what was the original word .

[greenhorn]

A significant amount of indians would prefer value over absolute quality, while of course they would never admit to choosing value over quality in public. For example, if you ask the average dude where he would eat , he would mention some decent restaurant, but he would actually eat somewhere cheaper ( I forgot what this is called)
I guess the same carries over to cars. A lot of people denounce indian brands over the phoren stuff because thats what you do in public.

And the fact that indian manufacturers compromise so much to meet these targets makes them easy prey for armchair critics.

A 99.99% reliable car is fine, but sometime 99% for half the price is good enough for most, and unacceptable for the rest 1%

[amitwiz1]

This is hilarious. God bless your friend, and people of his mindset. I've never met someone who thinks the same yet, thankfully.

[DicKy]

All this inferiority complex is ingrained from the license-raj era.
It was needed,but it was tooooo long,and it took a crisis to open up the market.
If it was pre-2000s ,i agree indian cars were not upto the mark,but now i don't see what's so inferior in them.
Agree they have to improve a lot,but they are almost there.They can now,but only thing holding them back is that people keep buying them so why change fast?
not to say they are really trying hard.Just think, the next generation indica family would be upto the mark,even more.Just a little more higher quality plastics needed.

[ahuja365]

I can`t believe such a conversation and i don`t think people mind being seen in a tata or mahindra its just these homegrown car makers are behind in rubber ,fit & finish but otherwise they are more accustomed to our needs so we get better needing vehicles.

[sgiitk]

I think there are many reasons.
1. As Dicky stated it is a hang over from the license permit raj when quality was shoddy. Even today teh QC of MNCs is often better.
2. Indian firms believed after sales service was a charity. I have found the same in the past few years that when MNCs franchise service it goes to dogs. Sony got hit for over a decade due to a poor service centre, and by the looks of it Samsung are going down the same drain.
3. The official habit of working out the price on a cost plus basis often made the stuff overpriced. The comsumer had no option, which is now not the case.

[Amartya]

Originally Posted by CPH

I am not Indian as many know and still in my signature you see one car I want to own We still have to wait for another year or so.

I was born and lived a long time in the country where the first car was built long before the Yanks stopped people hanging horse thieves.

...................

Mercedes being the biggest pile of rubbish being produced out of Germany but it is being hailed like an army of heroes. The much better Audis end somewhere in limbo?

Am I glad to read your post. I hope some more people who have been over-critical of our home grown brands, specially Tata, get to read this. Thanks once again.

[CPH]

Originally Posted by Amartya

Am I glad to read your post. I hope some more people who have been over-critical of our home grown brands, specially Tata, get to read this. Thanks once again.

The problem is that many people need a reality check. My intention is to set-up production in India for export as well as the domestic market.

This would partly be know how brought in but also know how from India. If I was thinking that everything from India is crap, why would I want to take such a risk?

I have been flamed on this forum quite a few times for standing up for Indian products by people who prefer to hail the foreign companies????

Some of the companies they praise so much are regular in court for deliberate ignoring for issues that led to fatalities. Toyota that had to recall nearly the entire production of the past few years for safety issues is still the best thing since sliced bread. What seemd to have failed the attention of most here is that the chief test driver of Toyota recently died in on e of the cars he tested.

Not only that the car was the most expensive Toyota ever built, but interestingly the Toyota LFA Nürburgring edition ahd a head on collision with another car car on test. The other car had 2 testers on board who both survived it. The car? A box standard BMW 3 series.

Why do people try to **** in their own nest?

These people should think about this:

India is about 15 times as big as Germany. Germany is one of the largest economies in the world. It is on export for many years with brief interruptions largest exporter.

Is this because Germans are better than Indians? No at all. The Germans were just forced to be organised.

If the Germans can do it, what stops you guys doing it?

When I had a consultancy job for a Turkish manufacturer, we had a lot of quality problems. What the management couldn't solve I was solving in a very short space of time.

When I had to go back into quality control with the typical problems one might want to attribute to the Turkish mentality, I asked them a few simple Questions:

1. What do people think of Turkish products?

There answer was: Crap

2. What are you going to do? Do you want to prove them right?

Answer: No

3. What are we waiting for then?

No answer, but the quality improved.

To the ones moaning my advise is: Be the man you want to be.

Otherwise: Go and prove the rest of the world wrong and start advertising yourself. Be proud of your product. Stop thinking of the Indian flag. Think about yourself and your fellow Indians and turn India into place everyone will respect.

[mooza]

Originally Posted by CPH

Is this because Germans are better than Indians? No at all. The Germans were just forced to be organised.

@CPH, you hit the nail on the head here.

Here in India, there are certain cultural differences, which includes a "Chalta hai" attitude, which translated, means "everything is fine, it's all right".

I had a German team here a couple of years ago, to commission one part of a huge test system for my company. On one of the days, the chief German engineer saw two separate pieces of 440 V, 3 phase, 30 kW electric cables joined crudely together with some adhesive tape, to connect a welding machine (for piping) to the electric mains. All this was under the supervision of our Indian chief piping engineer (again, outsourced by us). The German engineer, shocked by this dangerous practice, turned to me and said "In Germany, your chief piping engineer would have landed up in jail by now, for this violation".

Here, incompetent people don't get fired, or do not have the fear of losing their jobs as much as people do in Germany, at least. And I am not speaking of just Government firms here. I have seen shoddy jobs being executed by Authorised Service Centres for many of the automobiles I that have owned, and yet, at the most, the personnel are job rotated to some other sections, but rarely dismissed or severely punished.

I know, there are exceptions to this, but there must be more of cultural changes here towards not tolerating mediocre work in any area, which should be taught right from the childhood, to our next generations.

[sachinj12]

Originally Posted by mooza

@CPH, you hit the nail on the head here.

Here in India, there are certain cultural differences, which includes a "Chalta hai" attitude, which translated, means "everything is fine, it's all right".

Couldn't put it any better



@ CPH, couldn't love you more for post number 26. Cheers to you.

[rayygeorge]

Regards to your friend Raj.You can find a lot of such people around.Those Indians are living in some dream world.
I have got appreciations for my Indica ( First batch 2000 DLE) from many foreign nationals when they travelled with me.The car has completed 10 Yrs with me and has clocked 92000 Km , which never stranded me in the road and still in good condition.
When I wanted to buy a SUV I didnt think about Innova , generations old Pajero , fortuner etc. The new addition reached home is a 4WD Scorpio, last week.

[pgsagar]

Don't know why the guy owning an NHC is feeling so top of the world. He is not owning a Jaguar or a Bentley. Honda Citys are run of the mill cars. As for Tatas and Mahindras, their initial offerings were indeed rough around the edges but they have imporved a lot. I wish them good luck. And CPH, yours was an excellent post.