Thank you very much for sharing this and bringing back a lot of sweet memories
I am very proud to state that I have been a proud owner of a 1986 Mark 4 petrol Ambassador which I drove for close to 2 decades all over the treacherous terrain of North East India in mostly overloaded conditions. Never faced any significant issues with it.
However, the following four incidents will remain etched in my memory forever :-
First incident : It was about 30-35 years ago when we were driving through Kaziranga forest in upper Assam during the day and found a fully grown adult one-horned rhino blocking the road at a distance of about 20 metres from our 1986 Ambassador. It stared at us intently for about 5-6 minutes and then suddenly decided to charge at us. By the time we had engaged reverse gear, it had already reached us and with one swing of its head took out the left headlight assembly, slightly bent the front bumper and skidded to a stop behind us. By the time it turned around, we had already changed to forward gears and floored the accelerator but even then we could not save the rear left tail lights. However, we were able to escape a worse situation and that is what matters.
Second incident : It was probably in 1995 or 1996 when we had to drive our Ambassador through the treacherous terrain of Meghalaya. My husband had to join office the next day and hence we started our journey in the evening after he returned from office. If only I could explain the pains of transferable government jobs. Anyway, both of us knew driving and we had planned to take turns at driving to prevent fatigue. While we were navigating a tight turn, suddenly the headlights went dark right after we hit a small pothole. We tried the foglights but they too went dark after momentarily glowing very bright. We came to a halt and looked under the hood. Sure enough, all the fuse wires (yes, wires and not fuses for the young ones here) were blown. Not a big issue, as we were both adept at fixing minor issues like these. We rewired the fuse setup and continued our journey. After a few kilometers, the same issue cropped up again but this time the headlights were also blown as well as the foglights. We realized that there was a more serious problem. After checking out all other wirings as much as possible with a 5 cell flashlight (remember those ?), we narrowed down the issue to the dynamo (again, not an alternator for the young ones here) but couldn't fix it. The only consolation was that the engine was still running and at no point had we turned it off. The only source of light we had was from our flashlight. We decided to take a risk and continue onwards since it was an insurgency-prone area at that time. We could only use the flashlight intermittently lest we drain the batteries. Those were probably some of the most harrowing hours of my life. Anyway, we reached our destination safely in the morning. We later found out that the dynamo coils were slightly burnt and hence it was performing with reduced efficiency. This was not surprising at all considering all the water crossing we had to cover regularly. The plastic covers that we had put on and around the dynamo only protected it up to a certain extent.
Third incident : We survived a landslide in Arunachal Pradesh's Papum Pare area in the 90s. It had been raining for the past few days and this particular area was seeing minor and slow landslides every 20 minutes to half an hour. Anyway, our Ambassador slowly reached to be the first in line to cross after the last slow landslide around half an hour ago. On one side to our car's left was a 120-140 feet hill and on the right side was a very fast and overflowing river at the end of an 50-60 feet drop. Only one car was allowed to move on this approximately 400 metre stretch at a time. Now comes the scary part. Small stones, rocks and mud were continuously falling and sliding down but still we decided to move ahead. Once we reached approximately the midpoint of this stretch, the entire mountain-side decided to give way and started to come straight for us. My husband who was driving, stomped on the accelerator pedal and we somehow made it to the other side in the nick of time. When we looked back the entire hill side was gone along with the road that we had just crossed. Although, I did not have the guts to look back at the time when we were crossing the stretch, I can imagine that it must have looked like a scene straight out of any movie. Fun times, eh ?
Fourth incident : We survived a major accident in 1997 or 1998 but I cannot remember exactly though. We were traveling to Guwahati from lower Assam again through Meghalaya in our 1986 Ambassador and had to engage the services of a driver due to certain medical issues. However, much to our woe, we found that the driver had a mad penchant for speed. For example, he was taking hairpin turns at anywhere between 60 and 80 kmph. Despite our repeated warnings, he would invariably speed up after momentarily slowing down when rebuked and then the inevitable happened. He took a blind turn at about 90 kmph and our car got kissed by a Tata 1210 truck. The impact was such that the right headlight was stuck to the steering column. Miraculously all of us survived with zero injuries and our car, thankfully, didn't go off the road because there was an unbarricaded 70-80 foot drop there. Anyway, that same driver took us the rest of the way to Guwahati in our car while driving between 20-40 kmph. Thankfully, cars of that era could be repaired easily unlike the "total loss" situation of cars today in similar accidents.
Sadly, I had to sell it off in 2005 after the untimely demise of my dear husband but thank you for helping me reminisce all the wonderful times we had
Here is an image of an advertisement for the Ambassador Mark 4 petrol from those times :-