India’s Ambassador car - a bygone symbol of wealth and power

Hindustan Motor’s Ambassador once symbolised wealth and clout in socialist India, but went into decline for lack of demand and competition, writes Foreign Correspondent Amrit Dhillon

Surjit Gill next to his Ambassador on Lodhi Road in New Delhi. Since the heady days of the 1960s to 1980s, the car known — affectionately as the ‘Amby’ — has fallen on bad times and its manufacturer, Show more

NEW DELHI // The end has been a long time coming. Now it’s here — the end of the road for the famous Ambassador car in India that for decades stood as a symbol of wealth and power. If you could afford a car during India’s era of socialist austerity, it meant you were rich and important, because it was the vehicle of the political class and a symbol of the state. The white Ambassador with a red beacon on top was synonymous with politicians.

Since those heady days of the 1960s through to the 1980s, the car known affectionately as the Amby, has fallen on hard times. Now the final blow has come with its manufacturer, Hindustan Motors, selling the iconic brand to French car maker Peugeot for US$12 million (Dh44m). It is not known what Peugeot’s plans are but it is unlikely to start making the model again.

In fact, no Ambassador has rolled off the assembly line at Uttarpara in West Bengal since 2014 when Hindustan Motors stopped production because of lack of demand. The car’s slow decline began in the late 1980s when Maruti Suzuki introduced a low priced small car, the Maruti 800, ideal for the middle classes. Almost three million of these cars were made.

Then, with economic liberalisation in 1992, the Ambassador’s decline accelerated. For the new India, the Ambassador seemed too slow, old-fashioned and frumpy, and the acceleration was a joke.

Another blow came when global automakers began setting up plants in the country, offering cars with contemporary designs and technology. Hindustan Motors was also partly to blame in letting the Ambassador slide. It treated the car like a museum piece instead of updating it. It made only tiny improvements, such as a new steering wheel or improving the brakes and beefing up the engine.

For Indians of a certain age, the Ambassador was once as ubiquitous on the roads as cows. Just as Henry Ford famously declared buyers of his Model T could have any colour car as long as it was black, Indians could buy any car they liked … as long as it was an Ambassador.

With a design based on the British Morris Oxford, the car’s capacious interior were perfectly suited to the large extended Indian family and its sturdy exterior to potholed roads. Just as the Citroen 2CV (sorry, Peugeot) embodies everyone’s idea of rural France, so the Ambassador symbolised India. Every year, around 25,000 of the curvaceous car — though the curves were matronly rather than nubile — were manufactured.

It was cheap to run and even cheaper to repair.

“It was an all-weather, all-terrain car. The acceleration was slow but the good thing was that any mechanic on the roadside, no matter where you were, could fix the engine with a screwdriver and spanner,” says New Delhi car dealer Ram Chand.

Amby-lovers make all sorts of claims about it. Some say they have seen 13 people from three generations packed inside — three of them in the seat next to the driver. Motoring columnist Murad Ali Baig says his favourite is the one about the policeman who was giving evidence to a district magistrate after catching a driver carrying 25 people in the car. “Not believing the policeman, the magistrate demands a demo. The driver duly shows how he squeezed everyone in. This involved the driver sitting on someone’s lap. The judge let him off in sheer awe,’ says Baig.

By 2014, the year production stopped, only 2,200 Ambys were sold. The icon was still loved but nobody was buying it. The old models still in use were primarily black-and-yellow taxis, or funky, retro pieces for collectors or nostalgia-seeking tourists. The luxury Lodhi Hotel in New Delhi keeps a gleaming silver Ambassador parked in the courtyard to take foreigners out for tours of the city.

For the few taxi drivers who still depend on it for a living, the Ambassador is like a favourite aunt: reliable, comforting and offering stability in a world full of change. “I wouldn’t throw out an old relative so why would I throw out a car I’ve grown up with and raised my family on?” asks taxi driver Jaswant Badal.

Baig does not see Peugeot reviving the car. “It’s about 200 kilos overweight, a rattletrap, and doesn’t meet either road safety or pollution standards,” he says.

But, he adds, it is worth noting that Peugeot has not bought the plant that makes Ambassadors, only the brand. Instead, it has acquired another Hindustan Motors manufacturing plant near Chennai. “What may happen is that Peugeot will come out with a new car from this plant, a general purpose car, maybe like the Toyota Innova, and give it the Ambassador name.”