Cars of the 1990s: 12 cars that defined India’s automotive landscape

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; these words are back to haunt us today, much like they did at the start of the 1990s when 700 Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, oil prices doubled, and India – which imported nearly 60 per cent of its crude – found itself broke. But the country was not without gumption. When the government organised the largest civilian airlift in human history to bring home 170,000 Indians from Kuwait, it set the stage for a period of profound transformation. Six months later, the Reserve Bank of India airlifted 47 tonnes of gold to London as collateral for an emergency loan, a desperate measure because India’s foreign exchange reserves had fallen to just $1.1 billion. Having spent decades building a socialist fortress, the country simply ran out of money to maintain it.

The political kerfuffle was intense, but in crisis emerged an opportunity. Liberalisation in 1991 blew open the doors to the closed-off automotive industry. Import duties fell, the rupee was devalued, and foreign direct investment was allowed. The government decided it wasn’t its place to mandate how many cars could be made or at what price they should be sold, leading to a flood of foreign joint ventures like DCM-Daewoo, Honda-SIEL and Hyundai. The decade that began with India mortgaging its gold ended with Ratan Tata unveiling a car that established an indigenous industry. These are the 13 cars that defined that era.

Maruti Suzuki 800 (SB308)

The defining event of the ’80s was the entry of Maruti Udyog, which smashed the Ambassador-Padmini duopoly and introduced India to Japanese quality. The original SS80 was so popular that three years of production were sold out in two months. However, when Suzuki attempted to foist an older, four-year-old model onto India, the bureaucrats running Maruti Udyog – notably managing director V Krishnamurthy – banged on Suzuki’s table to ensure India received the latest technology.

In June 1986, the Maruti 800 SB 308 hit the market, marking a massive leap forward. Transitioning to the 800 was like moving from a base model to a luxury vehicle; it featured a moulded dashboard, bucket seats, a floor shift, and power that didn't require muscles to steer. Weighing only 640 kilos, its performance, handling, and braking were revolutionary for the time. Throughout the ’90s, sales skyrocketed, hitting a peak in 1999 with 1.89 lakh units. While critics sometimes called it a "dabba" or a hazard, the 800 introduced Indian drivers to the concept of the crumple zone, prioritising occupant safety in a way previous domestic cars never had. By the time it was retired in 2014, 2.87 million cars had been built over 31 years, cementing its status as an icon of Indian automotive history.

Maruti Suzuki Zen

By 1996, the automotive landscape was evolving rapidly. While the Maruti 800 was a workhorse, the Zen – launched in 1993 – represented a shift toward style and desirability. Known for its "jelly bean" styling, the Zen introduced two new words to our vocabulary: the design itself, and "yuppie," the label for the profligate buyer who dared to look past the tried-and-tested 800. It featured India’s first all-aluminium engine, which was light, super-refined, and peppy, earning its name from the concept of "Zero Engine Noise." While early variants were carbureted and required careful driving to get the most out of them, the Zen was undeniably fast and fun. In 2000, the engine was upgraded to fuel injection, boosting power to 60bhp, though subsequent changes to wheel sizes for ride comfort dulled the handling sparkle. This led many enthusiasts to perform their own modifications, swapping in larger engines from the Esteem or upgrading to aftermarket wheels and rally-spec parts. For those who owned one, the Zen wasn't just a car; it was a canvas for performance and a milestone in Indian design.

Maruti Suzuki Esteem

In 1994, the Maruti Suzuki Esteem was the car you drove to convey "You’ve Arrived in Life." Unlike hatchbacks with tacked-on boots, the Esteem was a purpose-built sedan that quickly made the Hindustan Contessa irrelevant. Though it shared engine mounting points with the Zen, the Esteem took performance to another level. With its G13B engine, it was a rev-happy, agile machine that made for a terrific base for race and rally cars for years to come.

The Esteem’s independent rear suspension gave it handling that was significantly sharper than the Zen, making it a favorite among professional drivers. It earned legendary status in Indian motorsports, particularly through drivers like Hari Singh, whose skills behind the wheel of a yellow JK Tyre Esteem earned him the title of "Flying Sikh." Like the Zen, the Esteem evolved, receiving fuel injection and a 4-valve head in 2000 that boosted its power significantly. With a weight of just 875kg, it offered a power-to-weight ratio of 99bhp/tonne, ensuring its place as a favourite for enthusiasts until it was finally phased out in 2008.

Daewoo Cielo

Today there’s only one but in the 1990s we had two giants from South Korea and Daewoo was arguably the more ambitious and aggressive of the two. Daewoo had a head start on everybody. When the passenger car sector was de-licensed in 1993 following the 1991 liberalisation, every new entrant faced the same multi-year obstacle course: find a partner, buy land, build a plant, develop a supply chain, meet localisation targets of 50 per cent or more.

Daewoo found a shortcut. DCM-Toyota had been set up in 1983 to make the Dyna LCV but the Tata 407 had killed the Indo-Jap light trucks. Fed up, Toyota exited the JV in 1994 leaving Daewoo to swoop in and take a majority holding. The lines were retooled for the Daewoo Cielo and within a year, in 1994, Daewoo introduced their first car in India. This was three years before the Honda City, two years before Hyundai even started work on their factory, Daewoo were on their way to challenge Maruti’s hegemony and their first target was the Esteem.

The Cielo wasn’t brand-spanking-new, however. India’s entire car industry had been built on other people’s hand-me-down architectures – the difference with the Cielo was that Daewoo had at least restyled the body properly and the underlying engineering, based on the 1984 Opel Kadett E, was genuinely good. It was the same platform already used on the Opel / Vauxhall Astra (the generation prior to the one that came to India in 1998), Pontiac LeMans (sold in the US) and Chevrolet Kadett (sold in Brazil). Daewoo had badge-engineered it as the Le Mans in 1986 and then gave it a more thorough facelift to become the Cielo, which was offered in three body styles including a hatchback. India of course got the sedan with the 1.5-litre, 75bhp, fuel-injected engine which, by the standards of what we had been driving, was quick and refined.

I have to point out that fuel injection was A Very Big Deal in the ’90s – it would take the introduction of court-mandated emission norms in 2000 for Maruti to divorce the carburettor. And the Cielo had multi-point fuel injection; the Opel Astra that came two years later had single-point fuel injection and the injector kept gumming up because of the poor quality petrol back then.

The interior wasn't a thing of beauty but it got power windows, power steering, a cassette player integrated into the dash, remote fuel and boot release. It also had a little handle that you cranked for the driver's seat height adjustment. Even the ride quality was superb, and Daewoo priced it aggressively, marketed it heavily and expanded the dealer network at considerable speed as they ramped up for the Matiz. So why don’t we remember the Cielo, or even Daewoo?

The problem was not the car, it was Daewoo. The company had expanded across the globe on borrowed money, a very great deal of borrowed money, and when the Asian financial crisis struck in 1998 the entire house of cards collapsed. Daewoo went bankrupt in 1999. The car you see here has done remarkably well to survive – not because Cielos broke down, but because finding parts when something goes wrong is near-impossible. Three years later General Motors acquired Daewoo’s passenger car assets for $1.2 billion and bow ties were strapped on to Daewoos. The Matiz became the Chevrolet Spark and later the Beat. GM dropped the Opel name in India in favour of Chevrolet and the Optra arrived to replace the Astra, which was based on the Daewoo Nubira which was the successor to the Cielo which was based on an older Astra’s platform. The circle of life.

Hyundai Santro

The Daewoo Cielo and the Nexia that followed weren’t Maruti’s biggest headache. Nope, that came in 1998 when Daewoo got Giugiaro to pen a pretty little car as successor to their Tico, which was a re-bodied third-gen Suzuki Alto (the SB 308’s successor, which never came to India). We loved the Matiz. It starred on the cover of Overdrive magazine’s launch issue and not long after it won the small car mega test, in the process upsetting many manufacturers, none more so than Hyundai who stopped talking to Overdrive. It took until I joined Overdrive for things to change, in November 2000 we did a cover story on why the Hyundai Accent is a bestseller using a car borrowed from my would-be father-in-law who was a Hyundai dealer.

Now there’s a reason why enthusiasts didn’t like the Santro but everybody else did and the styling has nothing to do with it – though the Hyundai Santro was an acquired taste. India was actually going to get the Atoz with its near-vertical tailgate but BVR Subbu, the man at the helm of affairs, insisted Hyundai do something about it. And they did, making the slightly more conventional Santro for India. Us enthusiasts, we loved the Zen because it handled beautifully; same with the Matiz with the added benefit of contemporary styling and more power. The Santro didn’t handle. It was tall, had a high centre of gravity, stiff anti-roll bars and lots of understeer. But Hyundai hadn’t made the Santro for handling. They’d designed the tall boy for practicality and the backseat was ten times more spacious than the Zen. More spacious than the Matiz too. You didn’t have to crouch to get in, you walked in. The engine, four cylinders and fuel injected, was not just peppy but completely opposite to the Maruti in character. It had tonnes of low-down torque, so much better for dealing with traffic that had started to pick up. The air-con was much better than any of the Marutis. And the gearbox was also very good. I know, we owned one. Those sensible, practical touches made Hyundai the number two car manufacturer in India within a year of starting operations.

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Hyundai had done things differently. Instead of scouting for a local partner they went to the Foreign Investment Promotion Board and applied for permission to own their Indian operation outright. Mahindra-Ford, HM-Mitsubishi, GM also with HM, Fiat with PAL, Honda-SIEL, DCM-Daewoo, every carmaker did a JV because it was the easier, faster route to government approvals. Hyundai took the harder road and in return got full control over product, pricing, service and the dealer experience, making it the only success story from that era! There’s no Ford or GM. Honda isn't in the best of health. Fiat as a brand has long gone. Both HM and Mitsubishi have been wiped out. Daewoo went bust and, after years of lying unused, the plant was acquired in 2008 by Argentum Motors headed by Hyundai India’s former head BVR Subbu. His plan was to do contract manufacturing but nothing came of it – a shame really because Daewoo had built a sophisticated engine and transmission line. Hyundai meanwhile grew and grew. In 2024 they did an IPO, a year later they commenced operations from their second plant at Pune, the very same one that GM had abandoned after pulling out of India. Tells you something about how Hyundai navigated India’s policy hurdles and unpredictability with tenacity, vision and a commitment that none of the others bothered with.

Tata Indica

Everybody knows Ratan Tata’s famous brief. A car with the space of an Ambassador, the footprint of a Zen, the purchase cost of a Maruti 800 and the running cost of a diesel. Nobody believed all four were achievable at once, except Tata’s engineers did it. The Indica was unveiled on the penultimate day of 1998, and Maruti Suzuki, watching from Gurgaon, dropped prices of its bread-and-butter 800 by ₹30,000. The Tata Indica had not even launched yet and it already set the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons. The Indica bagged 115,000 fully paid bookings within a week, a record for its time. The Indica had a diesel engine which no other hatchback at that price did and it prompted Maruti to shove a big Peugeot diesel under the hood of the dainty Zen.

The Indica had the space Ratan Tata had promised – adults, three tall ones – could sit in the back. The styling was by I.DE.A in Turin and except for the ungainly wheel arch gaps, this was a very handsome car. And then came the quality nightmare followed by a massive ₹500 crore loss, the first ever for Tata Motors. Rumours began that the passenger car division would be hived off. Ratan Tata and his team didn’t give up. The Indica V2 arrived in 2001, re-engineered and with (most) quality problems addressed. It was my first long-termer at Overdrive magazine, a Coral Green V2 diesel in which I clocked 50,000 kilometres in just over a year. I even used it on a family holiday, driving to the Rann of Kutch, north to Rajasthan for some palace hopping, and on the way back the accelerator cable snapped. Quality was still not Maruti level and that’s why you don’t see too many on the road nor any enthusiast clubs preaching its virtues.

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The ride was excellent, the handling was not too bad even though body roll was generous, but the gearbox was horrible. Tata’s gear shift quality was always their weak point and I once wrote that it felt like churning a stick through wet mud. This wasn’t an enthu-cutlet, not by any stretch of imagination, except the Indica was the first rally car I drove. Buried deep within Tata’s enormously complex organisation were a bunch of enthusiasts and at the concept stage itself they’d made the Indica Sport. Nothing came of it except for its unique taillamps finding place on the IndiCab years later. But they eventually managed to release a few Indicas to J A Motorsport in Coimbatore who put in a roll cage, slapped on rally suspension, tweaked the engine and put it to test as forward cars for the Indian rally championship. I first drove it at the Nashik rally as the triple-zero car.

The Indica ran until 2018 – 20 years, over 2 million units, engines from Fiat, exports as the City Rover, variants including India’s first compact sedan – and it fathered every Tata passenger car since. The Indigo, Marina, Vista, even the Nexon traces its roots back to the brief Ratan Tata wrote in 1995, and to the engineers who delivered it from a moth-balled Nissan factory that was dismantled, shipped brick by brick from Australia, re-assembled in Pune, and produced India’s first indigenous car. It also gave birth to India’s flourishing auto component industry. Were it not for its later-year proliferation in the taxi market and the awful maintenance those taxis were subject to, the Indica wouldn’t have the reputation that it suffered at the end of its life.

Tata Sumo

Before we talk about the Sumo I must reprise the Tata Sierra but I promise not to bore you seeing as we’ve already done plenty with the OG Sierra in our Gone But Not Forgotten series. This was India’s first SUV, launched in 1991, the same year India opened up its economy, and was India’s first luxury car with things such as power steering, power windows, air-con, central locking, stuff that did not exist prior to ’91. The Sierra started Tata's passenger vehicle story but had one teeny-weeny problem. It was a three-door body, which was far from practical in the days when you didn’t have two, forget five cars in a household. Those were the days of nuclear families and everybody piled into the family car – and there was no way your parents could climb into the back of a Sierra.

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TELCO knew this and a year later came the Tata Estate with five doors, more space and styling that was unmistakably Mercedes, which was no coincidence. Everything TELCO knew about building vehicles had filtered down from their truck partnership with Mercedes-Benz, which began in 1954, and even the Sumo had clear G-Wagen cues in its face. The Sierra was a handsome car but almost nobody bought one. Because what India needed in 1994 was not a style statement but a do-anything-load-everything MUV, which was not named after a Japanese wrestler. SU and MO was a homage to Sumant Moolgaokar, the legendary chairman of TELCO who spent decades building the company from a truck assembler into India’s largest commercial vehicle maker. He supervised the development of India’s first indigenous pickup, the 206 launched in 1988, and it was the same X2 platform that spawned the Sierra, Estate and the Tata Sumo.

The trio also shared the same Peugeot-derived 2-litre indirect-injection diesel. Same dog-leg gearbox. But the Sumo had five proper doors, a full-width rear bench, two-storey tall roof, and jump seats that could take the rated passenger count of ten to twenty if personal space wasn’t very high on your priority list. The Sumo’s launch price of ₹3.5 lakh was spot-on, the running costs were comfortable on the pocket, and the practicality was completely right. India, a country that had spent the previous decade trying to fit seven people into a Maruti 800, bought it in enormous numbers. The Sumo became the vehicle of urban and rural India. Government fleets, families crossing states, the Army as a 4x4, forest services, NGOs going places where roads were a joke. It was not glamorous nor was it fast but on bad roads – and highways in the 1990s were catastrophic in parts – it was magnificent. Because this was a vehicle with truck ancestry running through its veins. To keep costs in check Tata raided their parts bin to create the Sumo so much so that the taillamps are Tata truck pieces mounted vertically instead of horizontally as on the truck.

The Sumo went up against rivals like the Mahindra Armada which was launched in 1993 and made use of learnings from the Commander HT. It was adapted to be more suitable for on-road driving, had a Peugeot-licensed engine and unlike the Sumo, was offered with radial tyres as standard to improve handling. But what it couldn’t do was seat 20 people. The Sumo was vastly more spacious and it was only at the turn of the century when Mahindra made the Bolero did they finally have a rival. Driving it tells you exactly what India needed in 1995. You sit high, you see everything, the diesel pulls from nothing. The gearbox has the precision of a Shaheed drone. And the suspension, soft as a bureaucrat’s deadline, refuses to corner or complain.

These early Sumos didn’t have power steering and weighed 1.7 tonnes. For reference the Ambassador was 1.1 tonnes. You did not twirl the steering as much as muscled it. Or wrestled it. The engine shakes itself to life with an explosive roar. It is designed for hauling and that’s what Tata doubled down on. The Sumo spawned the Spacio which got the 407 light truck’s 3-litre direct-injection diesel. The engine was 80 kilos heavier needing new engine mounts to hold it in place. The chassis was beefed up as were the rear leaf springs and the clutch. The styling was beefed down to nothing really save for an all-black perforated plastic grille and headlights from the 407 truck. Terming that engine crude is to call the Himalayas hilly but even today decades after it went out of sale, in the hills of the North East, it is still the Spacio that moves entire villages.

At Overdrive magazine, in the days before we had to be politically correct with our stories, we went to the Tata plant, picked up two dozen workers from the shop floor and went for a lap around the track, all to prove the lugging ability of the DI motor. The stunt worked and it is being replicated every day in the hills of the North East. You hear the Spacio long before you see it, crawling up steep hills, barely managing to run away from its own smoke screen, carrier laden with shockingly tall cargo loads, insides crammed with so many people they’re literally spilling out. The Sumo’s bloodline is the lifeblood of these parts. That the plug was pulled on the Sumo in 2019 with no replacement planned will go down as one of Tata Motors’ biggest blunders. It let Mahindra muscle into India’s hinterland and the Bolero, Pik-up and all their variants are cash cows of the business.

Tata Safari

Tata though, hadn’t given up on luxury. Far from it. In 1998, months before the Indica, came the Tata Safari, and this is what put me on the map. 26 years ago as a cub journo, I came up with the idea of 4x4 travelogues and the very first one involved two Safaris and a week out of the office chasing wild asses in the Rann of Kutch, spotting lions in the Gir forest and buying junk from the Alang shipbreaking yard. Soon after that, we drove for two weeks to head to Ladakh, driving from Pune all the way to Leh in a Safari, across Khardung La to the Siachen border outpost, and then back down via the spectacular lakes. JK Tyres sponsored the expedition and along with their sponsorship came their star driver, Hari Singh.

During the drive, the clutch of the Safari needed attention in Leh having been abused up the Himalayas to counter the monster lag of the 2-litre diesel (same family as the Sierra and Sumo but subject to generous turbocharging) but otherwise, it ran flawlessly – which was a relief because these things were hardly a paragon of reliability. There’s a reason why these first-gen Safaris are super rare. They didn’t last. I know of Tata dealers who gave up their dealerships because the types that bought the Safari were not the types you wanted to mess with and there are enough stories of irate customers putting pistols on the table demanding their Safaris get sorted out. But those types continued to buy Safaris because, until the Fortuner came along, this was the absolute best set of wheels to criss-cross India in. Incredible ride, spectacular driving position, plenty of space, jump seats at the back for the gun man and enough power to stay ahead of everything else back then.

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Tata threw everything they knew about luxury at the Safari. The roof-mounted air-con blower for the second row might look aftermarket but was factory-fitted and the first of its kind before everybody else copied the idea. Later variants came with a VCD player (that’s Video CD player dear Gen Z), even a factory-fit Playstation. It had an evolution of the X2 ladder-frame chassis and rear-wheel-drive – which fan boys cried blue bloody murder over when the new, monocoque, front-wheel-drive Safari was launched. It got shift-on-the-fly 4x4 but you had to remember never to drop out of the power band or stop in slush else the 2-tonne SUV would sink in. Even the fuel filler lid release was electric, needed the ignition to be switched on and was one more thing that could go wrong.

The Safari might have been India’s answer to the Mitsubishi Pajero but it wasn’t spared the 407 treatment. In 2005, the 3-litre diesel was shoved into the Safari, but here it got common-rail and not the direct injection. It had more torque and less lag than the old 2-litre but I still remember the power band being a shocking 750rpm. That was addressed a few years later when the 2.2-litre DICOR engine came along and then the comprehensively revised Storme came along with what was essentially a new chassis. In a similar vein to the Safari, the Storme continues to be excellent, both to drive and be driven in, and that’s why you see senior Army officers being chauffeured in Safaris that have been uprated to handle 800kg payload, hence the GS 800 badge. But in the remotest areas, it is still the Gypsy that the Army relies on.

Maruti Gypsy King

The Maruti Suzuki Gypsy is an ’80s icon, launched in December 1985, two years after the SS 80. It was Maruti Udyog’s second car in India and it shared nothing with the 800 – this was a proper ladder frame. To start off with, it got the 1-litre 4-cylinder engine mounted longitudinally and driving the rear wheels with a 4-Low transfer case. Before it, 4x4s in India were Mahindra jeeps – tools, not toys. The Gypsy made 4x4s desirable. Quick, capable, light and oh so cool to look at. It was an immediate favourite with the motorsport community who, until then, were rallying Mahindra jeeps and Nissan Jongas. It was in the Gypsy that our dear, departed Hari Singh made his mark on Indian rallying, on the fearsome Himalayan Rally.

But the Gypsy also had a tendency to roll over on its side, which took eight years to address when the wide-track arrived in 1993 – both tracks widened by 90mm and wheel arches stuck on. In 1996 came the Gypsy King when the 1-litre engine – 45bhp and a healthy thirst for petrol – was replaced with the 1.3-litre unit from the Esteem. It made 60bhp in carburetted form which would go up to 80bhp with fuel injection in 2000. A bonnet bulge appeared to accommodate the engine and a five-speed gearbox arrived. And it got the cool King stickers on its flanks.

Pictured here is a 2018 Gypsy, the very last built before emission and safety regulations ended production – for private buyers, at least. The Army continued purchasing it though and in 2019 production was re-started after the Army got a special waiver from the Ministry of Defence for safety and emission norms and ordered 3,500 Gypsys. And there are still many of those in operation; these things are so reliable, so unbreakable, you will continue to see them being used for decades more. It is simple. Leaf springs. No carpet. A dash you can hose down. A lever for 4-low that you can engage even while driving if you know how to. It’s an honest, no-nonsense 4x4. And a ride quality that will reorganise your spine in ways no chiropractor intended.

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I have fond memories of the King; as part of the 4x4 travelogue series in Overdrive, I did my first dune bashing in a Gypsy learning from none other than Hari Singh. The Gypsy we took was the legendary Zebra-striped rally Gypsy Maruti had made which made more noise than any real turn of speed but for me, in the early 2000s just starting off in car journalism, nothing could have been cooler. A year later, I was co-driver to Gaurav Gill in the very same Zebra Gypsy – those were the days before anyone outside the rally circuit knew his name. We were the forward car for the Delhi round of the INRC and he scared me so comprehensively that I refused to get back in with him the following day. All along I harboured a dream to rally the Gypsy and it finally bore fruit in 2017 when I lined up for the Desert Storm.

I was used to faster Polos and was shocked at how slow the Gypsy was. How bouncy. We’d rally in 4-Low and in fifth gear we’d get to barely over 80kmph. Also turned out the Gypsy we were driving was crap, running on three cylinders at the start. We were dog slow on day one. Blew the electricals on day two. Even blew the head gasket on day three. Yet it kept running, we kept finding our way back to the service park, and by day four the mechanics finally sorted out the Gypsy giving me some power to make overtakes. If you watch this video on YouTube you will see a clip of me overtaking another competitor on a desert stage, full Dakar-style commitment. We finished the Desert Storm rally second in class and on the last stage ,set the second fastest time behind only a Grand Vitara. That’s the thing with the Gypsy. No matter how much abuse you throw at it, it can take more. In remote areas, in places where reliability and the ability to fix something with whatever is at hand matters more than refinement, the Gypsy is still in use. And it will outlast everything that attempts to replace it.

Sedans of the 1990s

This is what aspiration and desire looked like in the ’90s. To be clear, the Lancer, or the Honda City for that matter, weren’t the most expensive cars on sale – in 1994 TELCO partnered with Mercedes-Benz to make the W124 E-Class, but that was a car only the 0.0001 per cent could afford. It was limited to industrialists and politicians with side hustles; conspicuous display of wealth was still frowned upon and an expensive car meant an immediate call from the tax man wanting to dive into your books.

First off the blocks with the “foreign” cars was Daewoo and then came Mahindra-Ford with the Escort in 1996 and treating India like a third world country that knows no better, Ford deemed the 1.3-litre petrol to be enough, along with a 1.8 diesel. Then came the Opel Astra, the most expensive car after the W124. And at the start of 1998 came the two cars that everybody cared about – the Lancer and City.

The Birlas of Hindustan Motors, the big daddy of car makers in India, stitched up two ventures. In Halol, Gujarat a factory was set up with General Motors that started off making the Astra, passed through partial Chinese ownership when SAIC bailed out a bankrupt GM’s India ops, and finally went back to peak capacity when SAIC fully acquired it to churn out MGs. HM’s second marriage, a technical partnership, was with Mitsubishi Motors starting off with the Lancer from Tiruvallur outside Chennai, the very same plant that now makes Citroens after HM sold whatever they were left with to the PSA Group, which is now Stellantis.

Mitsubishi Lancer and Honda City

The poster car of my ’90s – obsessed as I was with rally cars. Tommi Makinen flying through the Finnish forests in his Marlboro branded Evo VI was on my bedroom wall and this was the closest India got to a sports car, never mind that the engine was a mere 1.5 petrol (with a three-valve head, the first in India, coming as it did before the Santro). What the Mitsubishi Lancer lacked in the horsepower department it made up with fantastic handling – Overdrive magazine proving it in their very first track test. And who did they get to fling all the cars round the track with than our very own rally hero Hari Singh. The Flying Sikh soon found himself piloting Team JK’s Group A Lancer marking the advent of contemporary cars in Indian rallying to replace the Esteem that had been doing duty for the greater part of the ’90s. And then Group A got banned in India and JK upped sticks and went to compete in the Asia Zone Rally Championship, Hari Singh clinching the championship in 2000 becoming the first Indian to win an FIA title. And his car? It was the Proton Satria which was a badge-engineered Colt, the hatchback version of the Lancer.

Motorsport politics was one reason JK pulled out of Indian rallying at the turn of the century. The other reason was the Lancer wouldn’t be competitive in Group N trim. The 1.5 engine, in stock trim, wouldn’t have stood a chance because their sworn rival, Team MRF, had got themselves the Honda City VTEC, and the engine in that was a million miles ahead of the Lancers.

That is not the car we have here, the VTEC arriving in 2001. In 1998 Honda-SIEL launched in India with the Type 1 City offered with two engines, the 1.3 and 1.5. It is the 1.3 we have here, the base model of Honda’s low-cost car for Asian markets, a car much rarer than the VTECs that enthusiasts crave. The City’s 1.5 engine was the first to push the 100bhp mark in India, the 1.3 made 89bhp but the City was a light car, both the engines had a 16-valve head, both loved to rev, both sounded fabulous when revved out, both had a brilliant gearshift and both introduced The Thrill of Driving in our lexicon. In fact the only reason we felt the 1.3 to be lacking was because the 1.5 set such a high bar, the former taking 14.7 seconds to 100kmph compared to the 1.5’s 13.1 seconds.

The chassis though, in the Gen 1 Type 1 City didn’t do the car justice. It was too soft; hit a bump when going round bends enthusiastically and you were in for the fright of your life. Little known is, Honda offered an S variant of the City with a stiffer suspension and then when the facelift came along in 2000 the rear suspension was tightened up to address that big concern. A year later the 107bhp VTEC found its way into the City, complete with twin exhaust tips, 14-inch wheels (the City VTEC was the first car in the country with 14s) and a big boot spoiler advertising its sporty intent. The City needed visual embellishments because the Lancer had a smoking hot (for its time!) variant – the SFX. There were no mechanical changes but the SFX got a spoiler and side skirts along with striking colours (red and yellow) and that got us rally nuts all hot and bothered. Evo IV stickers were liberally applied and we became desi-Makinens setting fastest stage times on our daily commutes.

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Ford Ikon

This story is peppered with motorsport references because motorsport was A Big Deal in the ’90s. Hari Singh was the original rock star of Indian motorsport and as the decade closed off a young boy from Coimbatore was making waves in British F3, qualified on pole for the Macau street race, won the Korea F3 street race and against all odds, was nudging at the doors of Formula 1. Phil Spender, then boss of Ford in India, after they’d split from Mahindra, was also a racing nut and he saw potential in Narain Karthikeyan. What followed was the Jaguar Formula 1 test, a monumental moment for Indian motorsport, which eventually led to Narain getting the Jordan F1 seat in 2005. Phil of course had to show ROI and that’s how Narain became Ford India’s brand ambassador, starring in their advertisements, and was present to frighten the daylights out of journalists at the press launch of the Ford Ikon. The Josh Machine!

Before we bang against the ROCAM’s rev limiter, it’s worth mentioning how Ford went alone in India. It started off as a JV with Mahindra with the Ford Escort being made at the latter’s factory in Nashik (which is how you will find Escort switchgear in things like the Bolero). Ford was ambitious and wanted to expand, inviting their erstwhile partners to contribute to the greenfield facility outside Chennai. Anand Mahindra and Pawan Goenka had other, bolder ideas. They knew they’d always be the junior partner and they went to the Mahindra board with a proposal — ‘give us the ₹600-odd crores earmarked for the JV and let us build our own car’. That’s how the Scorpio was born, putting Mahindra on a trajectory that would eventually see Ford knocking on their doors to rescue them in 2019 and when that partnership (which would have given us a Ford on the same XUV700 underpinnings) ran aground, Ford pulled the plug on their India ops.

To anyone following the car industry in the ’90s that would have been unthinkable because Ford fully committed to India. The Ikon was designed for India — the base was the C195 platform of the fourth-generation Fiesta hatchback onto which Ford fabricated a boot to suit Indian tastes. The underlying sparkle of the Fiesta’s chassis was left unmolested and they learnt their lessons from the Escort. There was still a 1.3 petrol but at the very same time came the ROCAM 1.6 petrol and 1.8 Endura diesel. And all variants loved to go round corners.

Those were the days when body control wasn’t super-high on the chassis engineers’ priority list and magazine cornering shots looked fabulous with bags of glorious body roll. Everything, the City, Lancer and the Ikon, all rolled massively and flamboyantly but it was only the Ikon that lifted its inside rear wheel. We didn’t know what it meant then but that was the Ikon’s torsional rigidity in action. To be clear, the Lancer had the most sophisticated chassis, with independent rear suspension (Ikon had a torsion beam) and the absolute same base as the Evolution IV, so much so that the Evo’s hardware could be bolted straight onto it. But more than the Lancer, more than the City, it was the Ikon that put sportiness at the top of its agenda. You bought an Ikon over the Accent, Esteem or Cielo because it was more fun to drive. And that’s how we wrapped up the ’90s in India, with The Thrill of Driving entering our lexicon, our gold brought back home and, mercifully, no queues outside petrol pumps.

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