Socialism On Four Wheels: Romancing The Iconic 'Ambassador'

There’s a story that’s told of a team of 10 or so Indians arriving from some years ago in the US on a work assignment – and being received at the airport by representatives of their organisation in a cavalcade of cars. The supremely high per-capita automobile allocation at the US end of their journey appeared to cause them much merriment, symbolising as it did a culture of extravagance that the first-time travelers to the US were unused to. In contrast, they said, on the Indian side, the 10 of them, with bag and baggage in tow, had arrived at the airport packed to the gills in one single commodious Ambassador car – and had evidently felt no obvious discomfort.

The anecdote was probably intended to establish the ruggedness – and the spaciousness – of Ambassador cars, which at one time were considered an icon of India – an “ugly icon” (as this report noted), but an icon nonetheless. But it could just as easily be about Indians’ infinite capacity to tolerate corporate munificence – and egregious encroachments on personal spaces – with great fortitude.

In any case, the Ambassador is a virtual metaphor for India in other ways too: to this day, the white Ambassador topped with revolving red lights symbolises power that, to the accompaniment of wailing sirens, often demands that you yield the right of way on India’s roads.

So visually symbolic of power was the car that when armed terrorists drove into Parliament in white Ambassadors in December 2001, they secured unhindered access. And there’s an apocryphal story about a notorious head of a crime syndicate who was able to give inter-State police the slip for years. His modus operandi, he confessed later, was to ride around in a red-light-topped white Amby, which was for that reason not even stopped at check-posts.

Additionally, the white Ambassador is also a metaphor for the evolution of the Indian economy. It is in many ways a relic of India’s socialist economy, which survived admirably in a licence-quota raj regime when – to paraphrase Henry Ford – you could buy any car so long as it was an Ambassador. But ever since the advent of foreign marquee models on Indian shores, the trusty old warhorse has been gradually vanishing from Indian roads – except as taxis that shudder at traffic lights in Indian cities.

Business school case studies point to the success of the Ambassador brand in an earlier time as the result of what’s called the network effect – which is defined as the effect that one user of goods or services has on the value of that product for others. That is to say, practical considerations – such as easy serviceability and ruggedness of use – drove more people to buy Ambassador cars even when they could afford higher-end cars. And given the Ambassador’s longevity and ‘dominance’,  service stations could get by on maintaining lower inventory levels for spare parts.

Of course, all that changed when the foreign brands rolled in. Ambassador cars, whose back seats have been witness to countless defining moments – or at least political strategems – in history, even lost their status as the vehicles of choice for the power elite when the NDA government under AB Vajpayee switched to decidedly videshi models like the BMW for VVIPs. And although the UPA government attempted briefly to score a political point in 2004, when it returned to power, by claiming that it would revert to Ambassador cars, the swadeshi sentiment didn’t last long.

Every few years, therefore, obituaries are written for the Ambassador car. In an efficient marketplace, of course, the assembly lines at Hindustan Motors would have long ceased to roll. A 1999 report in the New York Times, for instance, described the Ambassador as being “in a fight for its survival,” with a market share of just 6 percent and no prospects of a turnaround.

But by 2007, those downbeat assessments were giving way to a grudging acknowledgement of the Ambassador’s inexplicable longevity. “Love it or hate it,” observed the Los Angeles Times, “this pug-nosed, bug-eyed, stodgy classic is a fixture on India’s potholed streets, a dinosaur that so far has managed to defy both evolution and extinction.”

Today, according to this report in Business Standard, things are positively looking up for Hindustan Motors, the manufacturer of Ambassador cars. “At a time when passenger car sales plunged to a 12-year low in February, Hindustan Motors has clocked sales growth of 166 per cent year-on-year,” it notes. Much of that supernormal sales growth rides on revived Ambassador car sales.

Today, Hindustan Motors sees the Ambassador as the pilot car of the company’s rejuvenation. In just the last six months, the company has added 20 new dealers, the report notes. Most of them are in small towns – in Bihar, Odisha and the North-eastern States.

Two things are striking about this claim of stellar sales performance in a down market. Ambassador car sales are still only in the hundreds per month – 544 units were sold in February, against 497 in January. Second, as the report acknowledges, much of this sales pick-up comes because the West Bengal government has been administering the company the kiss of life – by deferring the phase-out of BS III emission norms by a year.

By effectively shifting the goalpost for enforcement of BS IV emission norms, the West Bengal government has made it possible for Hindustan Motors to sell its BS III compliant models for the taxis market in the State. It is this, principally, that accounts for the uptick in sales.

In other words, even in this day and age of increased competition, the company relies on old-fashioned state policy to sell more of its Ambassadors.

The other driver of sales of Ambassadors today is nostalgia for an earlier time. That sentiment finds expression in popular culture as well, and is symbolised most starkly by the female protagonist in the 2008 film Ghajini, who vows not to marry until she has purchased not one, not two, but three Ambassador cars – in memory of her father.

But then, it isn’t just for Ambassador cars that such nostalgia abounds. Socialist ideas that interfere with the marketplace and help sell cars too set off wistful and delirious sighs among policymakers, in West Bengal and elsewhere.

In that sense, the Ambassador car is a throbbing 2000-cc symbol of the distance that the Indian economy has travelled since it opened up in 1991. For all the roar and sputter of the engine, the economic car hasn’t gone very far down the road.