Cars of the 1980s: Cars that defined a decade of India motoring

The one problem you didn’t face in the 1980s was deciding which car to buy. They don’t call it the good old days for no good reason. Everything was better. No traffic. Leafy avenues. Fresh air was free and in abundance. We didn’t look at AQI monitors, we looked at our HMT watches and went home for afternoon naps. And if you worked for the government you didn’t bother going back. The concept of a rat race didn’t exist. Whether you were a neta, babu, aam aadmi or taxi walla, you only had the Hindustan Ambassador or the Premier Padmini to decide between so what was the point of putting yourself on the radar of the taxman? And then you revelled in the unbridled joys of waiting five years for said car which you drove straight to the workshop hoping it wouldn’t break down on the way there. Ah, the ’80s. When everything was better. And these are the seven cars that defined a decade in which India went from waiting in line for a car to actually choosing one.

Hindustan Ambassador
In the early 1980s, you did not choose a car; the socialist state had decided India needed exactly two cars, one from Hindustan Motors in West Bengal and one from Premier Automobiles in then-Bombay. There was also a third, the Herald from Standard Motors but that was so rare – then and even more so now. But we start our ’80s story in the car I was born in. Okay, not literally, but I was driven home from the hospital in one. Years later the family Amby – an Ambassador Mark IV – would be passed down to me, which permanently imprinted oil and grease under my fingernails. I could – and did! – change everything from the fan belt to accelerator cable and everything in between. It taught me more about engineering than four years pursuing a mechanical engineering degree ever did.

To me the Mark IV remains the definitive shape of the Amby that traces its roots to the 1954 Landmaster, based on the Morris Oxford Series II. In 1956 the Oxford Series III arrived in Britain – and barely a year later, Hindustan Motors introduced it in India as the Ambassador. Two years later the Oxford’s fluted bonnet was put to the use it was intended for when the engine was upgraded from side valve to the Austin overhead valve. That 50bhp engine ran in the Ambassador from 1959 to 1993, straddling the Mark II that came in 1963 with a new grille and oval parking lamps, the Mark III in 1975 which got another new grille and parking lamps, and the Mark IV which ran for a full decade until 1988.

In 1980, the 1.5 BMC diesel arrived in the Mark IV, India’s first diesel car. At the time, even the Mahindra Jeeps – Jeep not jeep because they ran Jeep badging – were still running on petrol. The DX was followed by the Nova, which was exported back to the UK. In 1993 came the 1800 ISZ when HM shoehorned the 1.8-litre Isuzu engine into the Ambassador and created a car that out-accelerated a Maruti Suzuki Zen! When the 50-year-old dies had worn out HM made brand new dies in – absolutely bafflingly – the exact same shape as the original and called it the Classic. Among the 110-claimed improvements HM boasted about was Mercedes-type pull door handles.

This was followed by the Grand, Encore, Veer pickup where the back end was hacksawed off to create a load bay (the engine remained the gloriously wheezy and noisy 1.5 BMC from the Mark IV) and retro-styled Avigo. The irony of a 1950s car getting a retro-themed facelift was strangely lost on whoever was calling the shots at HM. Dilip Chabbria, India’s OG car designer even had a go, shoving a BMW V12 into the engine bay and calling it Ambierod. On their deathbed HM even produced a prototype of a sub-four-metre Ambassador compact sedan with half the boot sawed off and rumoured to have Fiat’s 1.3 Multijet diesel. It never reached production. The Uttarpara plant – the oldest automobile manufacturing facility in India, second-oldest in Asia – went quiet in 2014. In 2017, Peugeot-Citroen bought the Ambassador name for ₹80 crore. PSA is now Stellantis, and the name sits with them, ready to be revived in homage of the '80s.

Premier Padmini
Our parents were really thin. Or we’ve put on a miserable amount of weight. Either way, it doesn't make sliding behind the ’wheel of a Premier Padmini any easier. And to imagine Premier Automobiles got the Maharashtra government to grant the Padmini a taxi licence on the basis of its spaciousness. Maharashtra’s netas and babus hadn’t heard of an Amby?

Padmini fan boys will of course tell you that period-enthusiasts – in a time when being enthusiastic about anything that gave you pleasure was practically illegal – bought the Padmini because it was the sportier of the two available options. That age-old debate was recently settled by the Autocar India boys who drag raced the Amby and Padmini and the big, fat, wheezing elephant won. In all fairness though, had they kept the clock ticking through the braking zone and u-turn zone the Padmini would have inched ahead because this is noticeably more compact, lighter, agile and yanking the steering wheel elicited a response from the front tyres within the fortnight. Oh, and it sounds fabulous.

The Fiat 1100, first shown at the 1953 Geneva Motor Show, is where the Padmini story originated. It had the then-radical and novel monocoque construction along with front suicide doors. In Bombay and Poona those early cars were called the Dukar Fiat, dukar meaning pig. Some say the curved rear haunches looked piggy; some say the central grille light resembled a snout. Premier Automobiles Limited thought that central light looked elegant and called the 1957 update the 1100 E, E for Elegant. Compression went up from 7:1 to 8:1, power to 40bhp, suspension was softened, strip speedometer added along with an ivory steering wheel and padded fascia. The Select arrived in 1958 with tail fins, America’s gift to the rest of the world.

The definitive Padmini shape arrived in 1964 with the 1100 D – D for Delight – with the bodywork and curved rear windscreen from the Fiat 1200 Granluce, Italian for Grand Light. It made 47bhp and 71Nm, the most it would ever make. When the Fiat licence ended in 1973 the 1100D was rebadged President but the government took exception to the name (for reasons that remain historically ambiguous) and PAL adopted the Padmini name after the 14th century Rajput queen of Chittorgarh, renowned for her beauty and courage. PAL also sold a roll-away chassis – half a roof, the regular front section, both doors and nothing at the rear. Dealers like Starline in Bombay built bodies on it – ambulances, police vans and the estate which was called the Safari, a rather handsome looking car.

Before the Padmini became Mumbai’s taxi, it had a full-on motorsport career, the peak of which was the Black Beauty built to Group 2 specs by Janspeed in the UK for Vijay Mallya. It had dry sump lubrication, brakes from a Chevron Formula 2 single-seater, rose-jointed suspension, close-ratio dog gearbox and centre-lock wheels. The extensive bodywork mods made it the most beautiful Indian race car and was driven by Bob Fernley in 1983 and 1984; Bob would later run Vijay Mallya’s Force India Formula 1 team. The Black Beauty has since been restored by Vicky Chandhok.

If only PAL knew what they had. 50 per cent market share! The minute things started to open up everything unravelled. PAL’s first joint venture was with Peugeot in 1995 to make the recently discontinued 309 under licence. The TU3 petrol was unremarkable, the exact opposite of the TUD5 diesel the likes of which we’d never seen. Footnote – the TUD5 found its way under the bonnet of the Zen, in Maruti’s desperate attempt to take on the diesel Tata Indica. The 309, despite strong buyer interest, quickly saw bookings evaporate due to strikes at the factory. Worse still, poor spares availability and a lack of expertise within PAL’s dealer network to service a modern car. PAL pivoted. They signed with Fiat, leaving Peugeot to walk out of the JV in a huff. PAL-Peugeot became, once again, PAL, while workers responded to the massive response to the Uno by downing tools and going on strike. It would take PAL years to refund all the booking money, the biggest automotive scandal of its time.

Meanwhile the Padmini got one last gasp of life. To meet emission norms, PAL sent the old 1.1-litre engine to AVL of Austria, who gave it a new head, sealed cooling and a catalytic converter. The S1 made around 48bhp while floor-shift versions got the gearbox from the Premier 118NE. From the 1100 in 1955 to the S1 in 2000 – that was 45 years of essentially the same car with the same engine, tracing its lineage to the late 1930s. And two decades too late came the diesel Padmini, the 137D, with a 1.3 diesel built under licence from Italian manufacturer FNM, Fratelli Negri Macchine Diesel Sud. While all that was going on, Fiat bought out Premier’s stake in PAL, sold off the historic Kurla complex in Mumbai in a juicy land deal, and moved everything to Ranjangaon outside of Pune. What was left of Premier meanwhile moved to Pune proper and launched the Rio, a sub-4-metre SUV which was also India’s first Chinese car. It was horrid, save for the 1.3 Multijet that came from their erstwhile partners. Nothing came of it. PAL folded in 2018. 50 years of legacy squandered by lethargy, apathy and absolute absence of innovation.

Maruti 800 SS80
What the Volkswagen Beetle was to Germany, Fiat Cinquecento to Italy, Citroen 2CV to France and the Mini to the UK – the Maruti 800 was to India. And the story starts not with the 800 we all grew up with, but the SS80. 14 December, 1983. On a cold morning in Delhi the then-prime minister Indira Gandhi handed the keys of the very first Maruti to Harpal Singh, an Indian Airlines employee, who had won the lucky draw. The ex-factory price was ₹47,500, at a time when an Ambassador or Padmini cost around ₹80,000. And the date was her late son’s birthday.

Sanjay Gandhi was a car enthusiast who had interned at Rolls-Royce and was convinced that India needed a people’s car. In 1971 he established Maruti Motors Limited in Gurgaon, a village outside of Delhi, on 297 acres of land given by the Haryana government at a throwaway price. In pro-max levels of nepotism Maruti got a licence to make 50,000 cars without so much as a properly functioning car. A prototype was shown at the International Trade Fair in 1972 on a chassis built by hand at a workshop near Gulabi Bagh in Old Delhi, using parts sourced from the Jama Masjid spare parts market, and powered by a Triumph motorcycle engine. It was sent to VRDE in Ahmednagar where it failed the feasibility test. When the Janata party came to power after the unsavoury emergency episode, Maruti Motors was liquidated and that would have been it, except in June 1980, Sanjay Gandhi’s aerobatic plane crashed over Delhi during what witnesses described as an unnecessary low-altitude roll. His mother nationalised Maruti Motors as Maruti Udyog Limited, a 100 per cent government-owned PSU, assembled a team of the best bureaucrats, and gave them a clear brief – get a car on the road by December 1983 to honour her son’s legacy.

V Krishnamurthy and RC Bhargava had two years to deliver and started off with a copy of The World Car Guide, an annual listing of every car made everywhere in the world. The Renault 18 was shortlisted, slightly bigger than the Amby, which would also be made as a pickup that Renault would buy back from MUL for export. Except the export price was more than the landed cost of just the components. The duo visited the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1981 and had discussions with Fiat, Renault, Peugeot and Mercedes-Benz. The only one that moved somewhat ahead was with Volkswagen who offered the Gol (not a typo, you read that right) hatchback they were making in Brazil and the Jetta sedan, also offering to buy back the engines thus reducing the foreign currency outgo of the project. A month later the British flew the Morris Ital to India, even offering to sell the existing plant to Maruti. That was a secondhand plant, so that’d be the whole Ambassador story being repeated.

In October 1981 the team went to the Tokyo Motor Show and looking at all the small, fuel efficient Kei cars decided to partner with a Japanese company. Except Toyota weren’t interested. They met Mitsubishi and came away intimidated, apparently Mitsubishi’s budget was more than India’s GDP then. Daihatsu strung them along. And then a Suzuki director, on a flight from Chennai to Delhi after a meeting with TVS about a motorcycle partnership, read the India Today cover story on India’s small car saga. He alerted headquarters who in turn sent a fax back to Maruti’s Delhi office. VK and RCB went to Japan to meet Osamu Suzuki who, in a remarkable leap of faith in the untested Indian market, offered the SS80 at a price lower than anything anyone else had quoted. Osamu Suzuki came to India to sign the MoU on April 14, 1982, the joint venture was completed on October 2 1982 and 14 months later – on schedule, on Sanjay Gandhi’s birthday – the SS80 was launched.

Based on the Suzuki Fronte launched in Japan in 1979, it introduced India to things we had never seen. Front-wheel-drive. Front disc brakes. Floor shifter when everything else had a column shift; even synchromesh on first. Bucket seats. And Japanese quality, which wasn’t just new, it was transformative. With Ambys and Padminis we spent an absurd amount of time at workshops. With the 800, you didn’t even need to know how to open the bonnet. It simply did not break down. Maruti changed our fundamental expectation of what a car was supposed to be. That expectation – that a car should work, every time, without drama – traces back to this 620kg, 3-cylinder car whose piddly 37bhp placed it amongst the fastest cars of its time. The hype was real and it was enormous. My grandad went to the State Bank of India to book one, and I still remember allocation was via random picking by – shock! – computer. In two months, three years of production was sold out. Black-market premiums exceeded ₹1 lakh, for a car priced at half that. And that price was thanks to the government’s benevolence, cutting import duties from 120 to 25 per cent. A mother wouldn’t be denied her son’s legacy.

It’s worth noting the quality of the people at the helm of Maruti. The SS80 was already four years old and Suzuki’s plan was to foist this old car on India. The Maruti team did not even know there was a replacement in development and had already begun localising the SS80. Legend has it that V Krishnamurthy, on hearing of the new model, banged on the boardroom table in Japan to make clear that Maruti had not entered this collaboration to sell outdated models. Osamu Suzuki listened. In June 1986 the SB308 generation arrived, the car we all grew up calling the 800, priced at ₹63,900. The straight lines became curves. A proper tailgate replaced the rear window that opened. The wheelbase was up by 25mm. It became wider and taller though calling it a five-seater is pushing things. It got better suspension, a more sophisticated dashboard and became India’s people’s car with two generations of Indians learning to drive in one. With the SS80, Maruti Udyog did not just offer Indians their first modern car, it created the Indian auto industry. The component suppliers that Tata, Hyundai, Toyota and everybody else rely on exist because Maruti needed them, built them and demanded quality from them. The expectation that a car should simply work – that came from here, and in turn mobilised the nation India is today.

Hindustan Contessa
Unlike Europe or America, India never really had muscle cars. The Padmini was our sports car! And then in 1984 came the closest equivalent and it came from, of all places, Uttarpara. The Hindustan Contessa traces its roots to the Vauxhall Victor, designed by Wayne Cherry in 1972, a car that bolstered his portfolio enough to eventually rise to chief designer at General Motors where he delivered the C5 Corvette. Vauxhall discontinued the Victor in 1978 after which Hindustan Motors acquired all the tooling for 1.5 million pounds, even agreeing to supply body panels if Vauxhall still needed them, and launched the Contessa in India in early 1984.

As a child, seeing a Contessa was an event; invariably it was driven by somebody important. Netas, babus and safari-suited businessmen, fed up with their standard-issue Ambys, eagerly adopted what was then an inescapable sign of conspicuous consumption – socialist mindset be damned. From the inside and compared to a Premier Padmini, driving a Contessa felt like a Rolls-Royce. You were not sucking in your paunch to fit behind the steering wheel. Your head was not compressed against the headlining. Standard issue bucket seats, a floor-mounted gearshift, air-conditioning and power windows. And you could actually stretch out in the back seat – it was the equivalent of today’s long wheelbase E-Class. It was India’s first genuine luxury car. Except it got an engine from the 1950s, and that was the original sin. Hindustan Motors plopped, into this magnificent body, the 1.5-litre BMC B-Series engine from the Amby. 1970s body and a 1950s engine and gearbox making 50bhp – sold in 1984 when Maruti was ushering in the future. The Contessa looked the part but drove the part not at all.

Contemporary road tests praised the interior and the ride quality and were diplomatically quiet about the performance. Completely against form, Hindustan Motors listened. In 1986, they signed with Isuzu to locally manufacture the 1.8-litre 4ZB1 petrol along with Isuzu’s five-speed gearbox. The Contessa Classic arrived in 1987 with 88bhp and a top speed of 165kmph making it an obvious candidate for what was a vibrant Indian motorsport scene (perverse as it sounds the popularity of Indian motorsport is inversely proportional to the number of cars being sold). But the Contessa was made by Hindustan Motors, in much the same fashion as they made Ambys, and it never finished anything of note. The Maruti Suzuki Gypsy become the car to have if you wanted to win while the Contessa remained the preserve of the very few.

And no matter what you did, it didn’t want to slow down. Rather than adding brakes, HM slowed down the Contessa. The locally-built engine put out 77bhp – whether that was due to manufacturing tolerances, component substitutions, or fuel efficiency tuning, is anybody’s guess. The same Isuzu engine went into the Ambassador 1800 ISZ in 1993 and inadvertently created one of India’s fastest accelerating cars, with the Amby being lighter and shorter geared than the Contessa. The 2-litre, 68bhp Isuzu 4FC1 diesel engine followed in the 1990s. And in 2000, the engine got fuel injection to meet emission norms, except power saw no bump and neither did sales. Total production across 18 years was just 13,463 cars with the best being a shade over 5000 cars sold in 1988. By then the writing was on the wall. The period car magazine scene had dropped enough hints and two years later came the Maruti 1000 that kicked the Contessa in the proverbial nuts. The 1000 might have been dog-slow, needing you to switch off the air-con compressor to accelerate smartly up a bridge, but it had the Maruti badge, Japanese reliability, and modern engineering. The Maruti Esteem came in 1994 with the fabulous 1.3 engine and finished off whatever was left of the Contessa’s market. The diesel Contessa in the 1990s was partly an attempt to find a reason for buyers – and Bollywood – to stay.

Through the late 1980s and ’90s this was Bollywood’s car of choice for villains. The long bonnet, low roofline, the way it filled a frame wrote the roles for itself. Baazi, Kismat, Nazar Ke Samne, Chamatkaar, Aakrosh. If only directors had heard of turbocharging they could have found a second life for the Contessa as a stunt car, since the base package came with everything – rear-wheel-drive and the Isuzu engine was strong enough to handle a bit of boost. Slap on some nice rear tyres, weld the diff and you’d have a beautiful drift car, until HM’s quality control stepped in and the rear axle snapped. Now that would have been a fitting legacy for the Vauxhall Victor that was finally put to rest, in India of all places, in 2002.

Premier 118NE
If HM was shopping around the world for tooling for long-dead cars, why should we be left behind, asked the powers that be at Premier. They had the Padmini, the faithful old 1100, humming along and unchanged since the 1950s but they needed a step-up. Something that acknowledged the decade it was being sold in. What they came up with was the Premier 118 NE and – just like the Contessa – it was a genuinely handsome car.

The 118NE was the Fiat 124 in Indian clothes, specifically the second Pamplona series of the SEAT 124 from Spain, discontinued in 1980. Fiat licensed the 124 design to manufacturers across the world after discontinuing it in Western Europe in 1974. The Soviet government got the VAZ-2101 Zhiguli from 1970, built at the massive AvtoVAZ plant in Togliatti that Fiat helped construct. Turkey got the Tofa Murat 124. South Korea got the Fiat-KIA 124. Poland got the Polski Fiat 125. Spain got the SEAT 124 and when SEAT had no further use for the tooling after retiring it in 1980 they sold it to Premier Automobiles Limited.

As for the engine, the name is literal and tells you exactly what it contains: 118 is the engine displacement rounded up, NE stands for Nissan Engine. The Nissan A12, 1171cc, four-cylinder borrowed from the Nissan Cherry, along with its gearbox. 52bhp was nothing extraordinary but the gearbox – oh my god. People who owned the NE still talk about that gearbox, and we’d already been exposed to Maruti’s full-synchromesh gearboxes. The NE had the slickest, sweetest shift on any Indian car. In an era when shifting from second to third on the Amby’s column shift was considered an acquired skill, the 118NE’s gearchange was a revelation. In a market starved of options buyers queued up and beseeched PAL to take their money. And so their worker unions responded in the only way they knew how.

Launched in 1985 the 118NE was enthusiastically received. Most testers found the Nissan engine smoother and more willing to rev than anything they had driven in an Indian car – SS80 included. And then Premier tried to actually deliver cars. Some customers who booked in 1985 received their cars in 1991! The line bought from SEAT was new, the processes were unsteady and the quality problems persistent. Early cars had issues with rusting. Six years between booking and delivery was not PAL heading into the ’90s, it was PAL reversing into the ’70s.

But what a car it was. The suspension was superbly comfortable. The dashboard was moulded with a – shock! – clock in it. It had a floor shifter and bucket seats. And – even more shocking! – it got factory fitted air-conditioning with a badge of honour on the boot. That NE was retired soon after the Maruti 1000 arrived but PAL kept at it. In the early ’90s came the 138D, the NE powered by the Italian-designed FNM (Fratelli Negri Macchine) 1367cc diesel producing around 41bhp. And in the honeymoon years of the PAL-Peugeot era, the latter offered the TUD5 diesel from the 309 to create the Viceroy. But it was all a case of too little, too late. Not long after came the PAL-Peugeot divorce, and production of the desi-Lada ended in 2001.

Mahindra Major

This is not the Mahindra we wanted to shoot for this story. What we wanted was the MM540 – the definitive 1980s Mahindra, the one you remember from every movie, hero yanking the ’wheel left, right and every which way while the Jeep carried on straight ahead. Yes, Jeep. Until the mid-’90s all Mahindras carried Jeep badging, a proud reminder of their legacy that predates Independence. During World War II, a thousand Jeeps came to India and just when hostilities ceased, another thousand odd landed. The US army’s dilemma was simple: ship everything back to America, or hand over serviceable vehicles to allies and scrap the rest. To save on cost of shipping they chose the latter which, a Jeep Corporation vice president in the 1970s called, “the greatest free sample in automotive history”. That’s where Mahindra steps in. Two brothers, Kailash Chandra Mahindra and Jagdish Chandra Mahindra along with Malik Ghulam Muhammad incorporated Mahindra & Mohammed on October 2, 1945. In 1948, Ghulam Muhammad moved to the newly formed Pakistan as finance minister but a lot of stationery had already been printed with the M&M initials and in a newly independent nation every naya paisa saved was a naya paisa earned and so the name changed to Mahindra & Mahindra so that no printed material needed to be scrapped.

M&M began importing CJ-2As in the mid-1940s and started local assembly at the Mazgaon docks in Bombay in 1949. By 1954, with the go-ahead from the Indian government to collaborate with the Willys-Overland Export Corporation under a phased manufacturing programme, they had transitioned to the Hurricane F4 petrol, a 2199cc unit producing 74hp, which was more reliable than the old Go Devil unit. That Hurricane engine would remain in production with M&M right through the 1990s; makes HM’s flogging of the Amby’s BMC engine seem rather progressive. By 1960, localisation had reached 70 per cent, rising eventually to 95 per cent when Mahindra finally moved to right-hand-drive. You read that right. From 1949 to 1968, every single Mahindra was left-hand-drive and through its entire life, nearly half the production went to the Army, police or security forces, playing a vital role in keeping our nation safe.

On the night of December 4, 1971, Pakistan launched an entire infantry brigade across the border at Longewala – 50 tanks and four infantry battalions of the 22nd Armoured Regiment, with a plan to breakfast in Ramgarh, lunch at Jaisalmer, and await further orders before rolling on to Jodhpur. What they did not account for was the 120 soldiers of the Alfa Company, 23rd Battalion of the Punjab Regiment and their two CJ-3Bs with 106mm recoilless guns. As soon as the Pakistani T-59 tanks crested the sand dunes, the CJ-3Bs knocked two down immediately and then began moving. Through the night the Mahindras kept repositioning, creating the illusion of a larger force, causing panic and confusion and thus holding ground until dawn broke and the Indian Air Force Hawker Hunters came and knocked down 23 tanks. Today a Pakistani T-59 and Sherman, turret down to signify defeat, can be seen at the Longewala war memorial, alongside the Mahindra that held them back.

Diesel came to the Mahindra range in 1975 with the CJ500, the MD2350 engine adapted from the International Harvester tractor. Three cylinders, 2345cc and 35hp! It was slow but very dependable and claimed 12kmpl at a time when any fuel efficiency was a selling point. Then in 1979, Mahindra and Peugeot signed a technical collaboration for the XDP 4.90 diesel for a one-time upfront payment of 15 million francs. Within four years the 2112cc, 62hp engine was fully localised and that would go into the MM540 and define a generation.

The MM range itself came about in 1981 when Mahindra faced the same problem as Hindustan Motors – their press tools were three decades old and needed replacing. HM made new dies in the exact same shape as before and called it the Ambassador Classic. Mahindra asked a different question: if we’re investing in new tooling anyway, why not design a new body? It was the first time in M&M’s history that they had ever attempted a design and manufacturing exercise at this scale – they never even had to think about proper doors before, because CJs had always had canvas tops. The result, internally designated MJ-5 before the marketing department renamed it MM-5, became the most prolific range in the company’s portfolio. 95.5-inch wheelbase, all-Mahindra design and manufacture from chassis to body. The MM540 with the Peugeot 2.1-litre diesel was as indigenous as things got in the ’80s and it went to paint every highway, forestry road, and cantonment in India.

Which brings us to the Mahindra Major. In 1994, Daimler-Chrysler sent M&M a firmly worded letter asking them to stop using the Jeep brand name so Mahindra not only dropped Jeep from the name, they changed CJ to CL – which stood for Civilian Legend. The Major, launched in 2004, was the finest and most evolved representative of the extended-wheelbase CJ-3B, the CJ-4 line that Mahindra had been making since 1955. An All-new chassis of thicker box-section steel, a host of mechanical upgrades and the MDI-3000 engine at 2523cc, 50 horsepower and one thousand decibels. Cranking it up in a crowded parking lot and car sirens go off left, right and centre. The non-assisted steering needs a legend to drive it. Before overland driving was a thing anyone talked about, before Instagram, before rooftop tents and matching luggage, there were these Mahindras carrying three times their payload and going to places nobody dreamed of – because it was a Monday and the plantations needed attending, supplies needed replenishing and borders needed manning. In 2010 when the Major was discontinued, it became the last flat-fender jeep to go out of production anywhere in the world. The line that began with the Willys CJ-3B in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945, ended in Nashik, Maharashtra, 65 years later.

Maruti Omni

One year after the M800 came the Maruti Van with the same engine but a completely different idea. And rear-wheel-drive. There were two versions – high roof and flat roof – and both had the 796cc three-cylinder mounted under the front seats and driving the rear wheels. It had five seats, expandable to eight, and Maruti had high hopes on the back of its popularity in the home market. Except those hopes were not entirely fulfilled. Sales soon began dropping. The Van had no bonnet and both the driver and the front passenger were not too happy about having no buffer between them and the world. That’s why most vans had massive bull bars, in the misguided notion that that would save anybody in a crash. Drive one today and it is the strangest, weirdest, and most horrifically unsafe experience you’d have from the driver’s seat; your nose to the windscreen, your ass on the engine, steering angled like a light truck, acceleration that is surprisingly sprightly and no weight over the rear axle. The high-roof version, a collectible now due to its rarity, had a tendency to fall to its side if corners were taken too enthusiastically – a problem the first Maruti Gypsy also had before the 'wide-track' version was introduced. And many potential customers felt that owning something perceived primarily as a commercial vehicle was beneath them.

So in December 1987 Maruti called in their advertising agency, Rediffusion, who did a market survey and recommended repositioning the vehicle as a car that provided maximum space at minimum cost. The name was changed. From Van to Maruti Omni, sales rose 21 per cent the following year. The power of a name and of correctly understanding what you are actually selling. In parallel Maruti addressed the pain points – rear seat comfort, suspension tuned for passengers rather than payload, and a tweaked carburettor to improve fuel efficiency. The brochure read, “If you have a need, we have an Omni.” School vans, green-and-yellow LPG taxis, cargo carriers, even the Omni ambulance – India’s default first-response vehicle for places where a proper ambulance could not reach in time, or when a budget hospital needed to move a patient fast.

The Omni saved lives. Which is ironic because the Omni was unsafe at any speed. Sales eventually stopped in 2019. The flat front that made it so spacious made it physically impossible to add the crumple zones that safety regulations required. And yet right up to that point Maruti were still selling 6000 – 7000 Omnis a month. Bollywood’s kidnapper vehicle of choice was discontinued after 35 years and 1.57 million units not because the market didn’t want one but because the glacial pace of safety legislation finally caught up with it.

Standard 2000 & Rover Montego
Back in the ’80s, there was nothing in the way of a luxury car – except two that slipped through the cracks. Back then there were three licensed car manufacturers – Hindustan Motors for large cars, PAL for medium-sized, and Standard for small. The latter, based in then-Madras, was the least consequential of the three and started with something genuinely interesting: the Standard Herald, a Giovanni Michelotti design from Triumph’s stable, brought to India in 1961. Standard sold it as a four-door saloon, the two-door British original didn’t suit Indian families, and in the mid-1960s, they did something no Indian manufacturer had done before – they designed a new four-door body entirely in-house. The Gazel of 1972 was the first car re-engineered in India including swapping its problematic swing axle for a live rear axle. This was not nothing, this was a small company in Madras teaching itself to design cars in an era when the government did its best to maintain the status quo.

Then came the Standard 2000 in 1985. The ministry of industry had a problem – smuggled Hondas and Mercs were being seen on Indian roads and somebody important wanted domestic luxury. Standard had been talking to Rover, now the distressed remnant of British Leyland, and obtained the rights to assemble the Rover SD1. Designed by David Bache, the SD1 was a genuinely beautiful car – fastback, five-door and Ferrari Daytona silhouette applied to an executive saloon. It was European Car of the Year in 1977, with a V8 under the bonnet making 155bhp. But while Standard got the body panels Rover wouldn’t give them (or did Standard not ask them, that answer is lost in the fog of time) either the V8 or the in-line six. What they made do with was the 2,061cc four-cylinder from the Vanguard that Standard began their story with in 1951. Producing just 83hp for a car weighing 1335kg it was not just woefully slow (100kmph took 20 seconds, top speed was 145kmph on a good day with a tailwind) while the claimed 12-13kmpl was in reality 5-6kmpl. And the price! ₹2.1 lakh in an era when the Contessa cost ₹84,000 and the Maruti SS80 was ₹47,500. The ministry claimed the Standard 2000 would suppress the black-market price of imported luxury cars and advertising built off it, claiming in the brochure, “The only thing the Standard 2000 comes without is your driving licence”. The copy though did have a caveat, “Air-conditioning unit can be fitted at specific dealer points”.

Film stars and politicians bought them. Sports icons were gifted one, notably P T Usha who had notched up four gold medals and one silver at the 1986 Seoul Asian Games and, two years prior, had agonisingly missed out on an Olympic medal by one-hundredth of a second. Appropriately for the top Indian athlete of the ’80s, the Kerala government gifted her the expensive India-made car. Approximately 3,408 were built before the factory closed in 1988 and the company dissolved in 2006. Years later, Rover SD1 body panels that Standard had imported but never fitted, some 12,000 sets, were eventually sold to a British parts supplier for use by English enthusiasts restoring their own SD1s. India exported its automotive failures back to Britain.

The second manufacturer we must talk about is Sipani. In 1973, R K Sipani obtained a licence to manufacture cars under conditions explicitly designed to prevent him from doing so – no foreign collaboration, no imported components, no consulting with anyone outside India. Sanjay Gandhi received the same licence, with considerably more state support behind him, and produced nothing. Sipani built the Badal, a three-wheeled fibreglass car with a 198cc scooter engine that the government promptly classified as an auto-rickshaw. 331 were sold in its best year. Then Sipani found a loophole, signed a deal with Reliant of Tamworth, UK, and in 1982 launched the Dolphin: a copy of the Reliant Kitten with an 848cc all-aluminium engine, fibreglass body and weighing just 505kg. It was light and powerful enough to win rallies and on a smooth circuit with a skilled driver, the Dolphin was genuinely, objectively fast. Peak sales were 930 units in 1984 before Maruti happened and given a choice between fibreglass and steel, two doors and four, a plucky Bangalore startup and a Japanese joint venture with government backing Indian buyers chose accordingly. Dolphin sales dropped to 55 units in 1986 and 40 in 1987.

What followed was the Montana that was on the same Reliant Kitten wheelbase but with five doors integrated into a squared off and more upright body. It was slightly larger than the Dolphin and also got a proper tailgate. And to tap into the diesel-mania in 1989 it got a 901cc 3-cylinder K3C diesel from VST Tillers, built under licence from Mitsubishi and originally designed for mini-tractors. Peak output was 24bhp at 2700rpm, weight rose from 530kg of the petrol to 585kg and claimed top speed was 85kmph. It was sold almost exclusively in Bangalore and immediately surrounding areas, and had an assembled-from-whatever-was-available character with Sipani sourcing components from whatever Indian parts were available – Maruti 800 taillights, Mahindra chassis hardware and Daihatsu Charade styling photographs that were in the brochure but not on the factory floor.

The final flourish, the Rover Montego launched in 1995 at seven times the price of an Amby. Apparently there was a prior agreement with authorities that local content would be progressively increased (with eventual local production as the target) but customs imposed higher-than-expected import duties pushing the price up to ₹11-13 lakh. Rover had built these cars in Oxford, UK in 1994 – complete cars minus a handful of items like batteries and air-conditioning units that would be locally sourced and added in Bangalore – hence the claim to SKD (semi-knocked down) manufacturing. Around 500 units total were shipped to India, split 50/50 between saloon and estate body styles, all with the 80bhp, 2-litre Perkins Prima 4-cylinder diesel. Air-conditioning, power steering and power windows were all part of standard equipment; deleted was the Sipani name.

Recognising its own name was a liability, the car was marketed not as the Sipani Montego but as the Rover Montego. The Rover badge however did not work. The ’90s was the worst possible time for a single-product luxury entry with no dealer network. In its first full year, just 236 Montegos were sold, and its appeal rapidly faded with the last 51 selling in 1998. Sipani renamed itself Maestro Motors, after the Montego’s hatchback sibling, which tells you something about the quality of advice being taken, and went bankrupt in 2000 – a mere spectator to an era that we will dive into in the next parts of this series – an era when India exploded with joint ventures. DCM-Daewoo kicked off with the Cielo. Mahindra-Ford with the Escort. Honda-SIEL with the City. Hindustan Motors stitched up agreements with both General Motors and Mitsubishi. Hyundai bravely and in hindsight, smartly came in on their own. Liberalisation opened the doors for big names to step in and offer the one thing we lacked when choosing a car in the ’80s. Choice.

Watch our full video on cars in India in the 1980s on the evo India YouTube channel!