A Deeper Look Inside Indian Automotive Industry
By: Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh
Tags: Márketing, Business, Automotive, India, Cars

The Grand Old Lady car

India had Ambassadors and Premier Padminis. These are curvy, fat cars with gear shifts behind the steering wheel.

Three people could sit in the front, including the driver.

These are the yellow-black taxis you’ll still see across India. They’re comfortable.

Ambassador taxi toy

Supremely snooty: Contessa Classic

A very fancy and expensive car was also available. It was called the Contessa Classic.

This was a very long car, a sedan, maybe you’d call it today.

There was a classmate of mine who studied with me in school in the early ‘90s. He and his sister used to come to school by this car. The Contessa Classic.

We peasants would lock up our bicycles with chain locks. This guy and his baby sister would get out of this car, the one my dad had held the door open of when his General Manager had come visiting Mysore.

I never even made eye contact with this classmate for two years. His car intimidated me.

The Contessa Classic car: Picture by Andrew Bone on Flickr

The car we wept for: The Nano 2009–2020

Oh the poor baby, the Tata Nano. $3953.5 and slightly more expensive than the Maruti 800. Discontinued from 1 April 2020 because the manufacturers aren’t upgrading it to BS-VI.

This was a car that needed better marketing.

Tata Nano

Crying in the rain

So many times in the ‘80s , in Guwahati, during the rains, I wished that my dad owned a car.

I would reach the school and change my footwear and skirt in the completely disgusting bathroom there. Having carefully packed a change of clothes in a plastic bag.

My parents never interfered or helped. Everyone in Assam went through this, seven months of the year. Cars were rare. Only the very rich owned them.

1990: The Maruti 800 dries our tears, clean and dry to school

If the Maruti 800 hadn’t come along, we’d have waited and waited to be able to buy the Ambassador, which was about twice as expensive as the Maruti, and horrendously difficult to drive.

A couple years later when my dad was promoted, he got his “own” official car, the one I wasn’t allowed to sit in unless my dad was with me- an Ambassador.

My dad managed to buy a Maruti Suzuki but only 3/50 students in my class had parents who owned cars.

Cheap car: the death knell for the Nano

India has every kind of person it it, and they should have been able to sell the Nano really easily., Specially during the rainy season. Why did the Nano flop?

The answer is : LakhTukhYa.

Lakhtakiya, pronounced as above, is the reason the Nano flopped. It means, car which costs a lakh. It made the Nano sound like a cheap car.

The sound of it, like hands clapping: lakhtakiya! It sounded a death-knell for the dear car.

They had a show on Discovery about the manufacturing and how they had made do with three lug nuts in the wheel instead of four. That wasn’t appealing. An hour long show telling you how they had cut corners.

The Nano didn’t help itself by having just the single windshield wiper. Just like an auto-rickshaw.

Yellow Tata Nano in same frame as an auto-rickshaw/three wheeler

How they could have saved the Nano: make it notorious

In 1995, a total of 42 people got inside a Maruti 800, closed the doors, of a stock Maruti to set the record. They got into the Guinness book for this.

Why didn’t they give the Nano a leg-up like this?

The Nano reached the Guinness record book in the year 2013 for the longest journey covering the entire country. Srikarunya Subrahmanyam and his team started from Kanyakumari and completed the record run in Bangalore, covering a total of 10,218 km in just ten days.

The Tata 607 truck

They should have turned it into a notorious car, one famous for strength and durability, just like the 607 and the 407. These are Tata’s most famous trucks.

I wish the trucks and larger Tata cars had gone on an all-India trip with the Nano.

The blue car’s a Hyundai, the black is a Tata Tiago.

The Tatas are ethical capitalists

Tata Motors, which made the Nano, isn’t just a car company. My God I am getting goosebumps just for typing such blasphemy. They’ve been making trucks which transport goods all across India’s highways since anybody alive can remember. They make steel, they used to own Air India!