oh wow.. 😮 goes to show the CORRUPT practices of how Japanese car makers operate, should open the eyes of our resident fanboy who leaves no chance to drop his pants in supporting Suzuki & the Japanese

glad to know you’ve been following my content but above all its always more of a joy for me to interact in a healthy conversation with someone across the border.. in most of my experiences, I have some very respectful interactions with Indians in contrast to the spats we usually see on social media or mainstream media.

coming back to the point it’s an irony that we moved backward, the reasons are too political to be discussed here but in short, I believe the lack of civil supremacy is one of the major reasons for our downfall. We have so-called political parties which were/ are engineered into existence to protect the interests of their masters and they bring the most corrupt & inept on top of every institution.

secondly, the nationalization program of the 70s stabbed the industries quite badly, below is just a short glimpse of what happened to the leading industries of our country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqYgLN25ixc from there on, we have been cascading into problems & bad decisions and the story continues even today.. 80s look fine because the damage was just started (10/15 years ago) and was yet to show its imprints… but then things started to slide too quickly..

also Indra Gandhi in India and Zia ul Haq in Pakistan inaugurated Suzuki plants in their respective countries pretty much in parallel, as the Maruti 800 (Suzuki FX in Pakistan) was the fist locally produced Suzuki in both countries, but in 40 years Maruti has achieved much more in India but its a complete opposite in Pakistan, though Suzuki holds a majority market share in PK like it has in IN

https://images.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_800x600/HT/p2/2015/12/13/Pictures/maruti-car_a295c8fc-a151-11e5-87cb-5268f82dcaeb.JPG

Also, Suzuki plays very dirty to protect it’s turf at any cost. Over the table, under the table, conspiracy against competition, you name it. Remember Tata Nano cars were catching fire “randomly & mysteriously”. Also Suzuki had a legend selling at the same time at the same price bracket (Maruti 800/aka Mehran there) Tata group being an absolute behemoth still took a decade to come out of it. Proficient motors just took baby steps, and Suzuki enters the scene. No prizes for guessing what happened after that!

I’m glad you found my comment useful. I’ve been following your content for the past 5+ years. From the time you started authoring articles in PW Blog till date. If i remember correctly, Indian media in the late 80s used to lament about how an Indian who got a chance to visit Karachi, can’t ignore the fact that the average purchasing power/wealth of ordinary citizens and the variety of goods available for sale is much, much higher than what was available in any Indian metro city of that time. From 60s till late 80s, not much had changed in the Indian auto scene, same old ambassadors and Padminis were all the choice that was available. Believe it or not, Vespa scooters produced under licence by Bajaj had 3 year waiting period. But, countless international car brands were operating in Pakistan. How times have changed!
Indian market is still not perfect. In the Indian auto scene, if Maruti sneezes, everyone catches cold. The Indian crash testing norms, BNVSAP, was to be implemented on OCT 2015, the govt is still dragging it’s feet. Absolutely silly rules like the 10-year NGT rule implemented in Delhi to impose blanket ban on private cars to control pollution etc are still plaguing the country. The audience is ultra sensitive to cost, which led to some international brands shutting down (Ford, Chevrolet, Harley Davidson). But, great strides have been achieved by Desi players Tata and Mahindra in terms of quality, fit and finish, safety, new technologies, EVs, design, etc.

Thanks for the info friend. Much appreciated! 👍

I wish our governments over the years had also followed such aggressive localization policies. Our local auto industry would be flourishing instead of being as it is right now.

that’s impressive… because here our Auto Policy incentives allow local assembly by new entrants at a mere 5% localization which caused a big hit to the national kitty due to a whopping import bill of CKD & SKD parts. Most newcomers have barely achieved around 10% localization during the last 5 years of operations. The damage to the import bill has also been done by the existing assemblers who had been introducing new models with a very small number of locally made parts. Even decades-old models of Suzuki have achieved max 72% localization while most have local content about just around 35%..

https://carspiritpk.com/higher-localization-fails-to-deliver-cheaper-vehicles/

It’s mainly due to the good policies that have made India a competitive market. we were once well ahead of India in automobiles but look where we stand now. not to mention our bureaucracy killed the home-grown Proficient brand in favor of imported Suzukis in the 1980s

https://carspiritpk.com/remembering-the-proficient-pakistans-first-locally-produced-automobile/

Hello, from across the border! Localisation levels for brand new products introduced by foreign brands are atleast 70-75% at launch, example Volkswagen virtus/Skoda kushaq and increases to as high as 98% within the next 2 years to price cars competitively. If the product is in budget segment, like Renault kwid or Citroen C3, then anything less than 95% localisation, competitive pricing is lost and the product will be dead on arrival. So companies here make almost everything locally except for few critical components like semiconductor chips and premium products sometimes have their turbo petrol engines imported as CKD kits initially. In short, the market is ruthless (Maruti controls almost 45% market share and is very, very quick to react to competitors. They excel in everything, except safety factor of their cars) and a small mistake in pricing will kill the product/brand.
As far as Tata motors is considered, all their products have atleast 98% localisation because it is a desi brand.