It's the 14th of August, which means we're exactly 364 days or just one day short of
the anniversary of the unveiling of the second generation Thar, which obviously was done
on the 15th of August, Independence Day, 2020.
Now, we all know what a massive success, the new Thar has been with, a whole bunch of people
asking us for allocations out of turn, sadly, we just can't help you.
Now this though, is a great time to tell all of you, a probably unheard
and for most of you, an unknown story of how the Thar actually came to be.
This then, is the story of the Thar.
While most of you know me as Cyrus Dhabhar from PowerDrift or from
other publications in the past, what some of you don't know, is that I grew up in a proper
automotive family or motorsport family, some might call it and my dad, well, my late father
was in some way or the other, sort of, the father of the Thar,
now I've said this in other videos I've done in other places,
but this is a more personal approach,
this is a more personal storytime for all of you to really know what went on behind
the scenes of when the Thar was made, a perspective that you probably won't get anywhere else.
Now, to tell you the story of the Thar I need to actually
rewind everything to the late 70s
or, in fact, let's start off at the early 80s. Now the early 80s were the absolute heyday
of Indian motorsport with the Himalayan rally, a world rally stage for some, with some of
the greatest rally cars and some of the greatest rally legends coming to India and driving.
Now this was a great chance for automakers in India to prove their mettle against some
of the more privately owned race teams or some of the more international race teams
and some of them did, one of those manufacturers were backed
or works teams as we would call them,
was Mahindra, now in 1983 Mahindra entered as a works team in the Himalayan rally and
they entered a team of three people, my dad, Behram Dhabhar, Sunil Shanbhag,
and of course Farad Bhathena, who then went on to win many national championships.
They started 73rd on the grid, and they finished overall at the end of the rally, which is
the most gruelling rally India has probably ever seen in 13th place.
The first 11 cars were imports, they were international full blown rally cars, the 12th finisher was
a Premier Padmini and so was the 14th.
Now the jeep in question, was a CJ4A,
it was a petrol power CJ4A but without four-wheel drive because honestly you didn't
really need it, the sort of momentum was better because the weight was lower
in the two-wheel drive vehicle.
Now this win was when my dad was actually a part of Mahindra right in the early 80s.
This was also, you could say, the beginning of this dream that he had, a very very powerful
jeep, which looked like a jeep but was very capable
with a bigger engine, more powerful engine and his desire to go off road was still there,
so he wanted four-wheel drive to be standard.
Now of course he didn't want the extended Jeep chassis like CJ4A was, he wanted
the more compact MM 540 and later became the Thar. Our SUV's engines undergo a lot of stress,
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Let's fast forward though to the mid-1990s when in 1996 Mahindra introduced something
called the Great Escape.
Now, Mahindra Adventure, as it is today, is essentially an evolution of what the Great Escape was.
The Great Escape was basically a whole bunch of absolutely bonkers off-roaders going on
some insane trails and going on some insane adventures, completely off-road and making
a day or weekend out of it in some cases.
This purpose he had what was a CL 340, which is a short wheelbase jeep, which is actually
modified by DC with a custom body and that short wheelbase meant it could go anywhere.
But that one thing that was lacking was a whole bunch of power.
Those engines, the diesel engines were archaic at best
and they honestly just weren't enough, they were enough off-road, because obviously you don't need
a lot of power or momentum off-road, but getting to and fro from the off-road location,
it just didn't cut it for my dad. Fast forward even more and maybe in the mid or late 2000s
a little bit of a seed started to sow and a little bit of a tree started to sprout in
his head.
He wanted to take an MM 540, put the Bolero VLX or the Bolero CRDe front underneath it,
put a big 2.5-litre CRDe engine in it, over 100hp and go off-roading and thus was
born the legendary MH01V521, the godfather of all Mahindra Thars' in India.
Now this jeep is essentially the first ever prototype jeep that was used for all the testing,
all the off-road drives, all the highway trials
and everything else in between that you can imagine,
and I have spent days and days and days in the passenger seat of this vehicle driving
across the length and breadth of the country, on road, off-road, where there's no trails
at all, getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, and everything in the middle.
Now this is also what prompted the Thar as we know it today.
But there are of course, a whole bunch of things that we need to mention before we mentioned
the launch, which was in December 2010.
Now the Thar story is honestly incomplete without mentioning the Team-BHP forum, because it was
on Team-BHP, that my dad put out a thread asking people what they wanted in their ideal MM 540,
he collated all those answers, which incidentally there are more than 300 of
and more than 150,000 or 200,000 views or something,
he collated all those answers, made a spreadsheet and presented it to the board saying, look,
there is a market for an enthusiast, jeep like vehicle, which looks like a jeep, but has a
modern engine, please let's make it, obviously, he was met with a little bit of hesitation,
but he soldiered on and went on developing it and on developing it, till he got the green
light from none other than, Anand Mahindra, one day. That said, what did happen was
come 2010, the Thar officially was launched in India in two variants.
Now the first variant, the more affordable variant, was the two-wheel drive DI or the direct
injection motor, still 2.5-litres, little bit of horsepower,
it was meant for the agricultural audience and it was meant for somebody who wanted to move
around a bunch of stuff in the back, somebody in the village area, somebody wanted to go
farming and wanted a jeep, or something that looked like a jeep just as a rugged vehicle.
The other one of course, the one we know and have come to love, was the Thar CRDe.
This was launched, and wait for it, 5.99 lakhs ex-showroom.
Yep, you heard it right, 5.99 lakhs in 2010,
and incidentally, if you go and try and get one from 2010 today,
they haven't depreciated a lot either.
That said, this one was of course the 2.5 CRDe, made 105hp, just a smidge under 250Nm of torque,
had four-wheel drive, had a soft-top cabin, did not have AC to begin with.
Now, Mahindra officially claimed, and I know this is going to be,
maybe a controversial statement,
officially, Mahindra claims that the allocation, or the budget for the Thar
was about five crore rupees to begin with.
In comparison, the XUV500 or the XUV five double O, as it is known,
was several thousand crores, but the moulds were all ready,
the chassis was ready because the Bolero, the Bolero VLX
used a front chassis, the Double Cab Bolero used the rear bits,
so what it was, was an amalgamation of parts, all sort of got together like a piece of Lego,
and it made into something that was really, really cool.
Now, as I mentioned, this is going to be a little controversial, Mahindra claims it was
five crore rupees, I can tell you for a fact, and I can put my neck on the line,
that, that figure was much, much less.
Now yes, it shows, the dashboard was, well, a moulded piece of single plastic,
and it just wasn't going to cut it with the urban audience,
but a whole bunch of people still went and bought it,
because it was cool, it was extremely, extremely cool.
A jeep like vehicle that could do a 140 kilometres on the highway, but could still go off-road,
still look cool, you could still put a bunch of hell hours in the front, you could still put
a big set of wheels on the side, put big tyres and look like, well, if you want to look cool
on Marine Drive doing it, you could look cool there,
if you want to look cool in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Pawna,
mud plugging, you could look cool there as well.
That's the audience it targeted and of course it went straight through the roof.
Mahindra thought they'll sell, at most, a couple of 100 cars, a month, if even that,
what they ended up selling is in a period of about 10 years over a lakh vehicles.
Now there was a facelift, or well not a facelift, but an update that came out in 2012
that had air conditioning,
and that of course was the start of another big wave of people who really could not have
a car without air conditioning, like me for example, I would have never bought the first
generation one even if I could have afforded one because a car without AC in Mumbai,
are you kidding?
There's no chance that's going to happen.
But 2015 though was when another facelift came out and this time,
Mahindra knew they had a winner on their hands.
Now remember this, you think there's a waiting period now for the new Thar?
There was a waiting period for the old Thar as well almost also its life cycle.
They were doing, on an average about 800 or 1000 units a month give or take
and that for a car which is a recreational toy,
is a great figure, I mean there are full fledged SUVs,
sedans and hatchbacks that even today don't do that kind of figure,
even though they are an absolutely great
mainstream product, so for something that agricultural and archaic,
and honestly something that didn't appeal to everybody but appealed to people like me
who want to have, chest hair and who want to dream of having a ponytail and a cowboy hat
and a gun all the time,
that's the kind of audience that it appealed to, but it also appealed to people
who were normal family people who wanted this vision of being cool
and that's what the Thar did so well.
Obviously, it's done even better now, but let's still rewind that back.
2015 is when that first facelift came out, you had a different bumper,
and most importantly, the interior was finally upgraded to a better dashboard.
Now, there are some other stories, which maybe we can get into.
Again, a bit of a rewind, I know I'm jumping through the timeline a little bit but, this one,
this one is important, because this is what appealed
and what told all the hardcore off-roaders out there, that the Thar was not a mall crawler,
it was the real deal.
It's 2009, it's the rainy season,
it's a event called the EXAMM or the extremeoffroaders annual monsoon mania,
and the day after that is the AKC or the alfa kilo challenge.
At it's time, the biggest, most difficult and the best off-road challenge
India had ever, ever, ever seen.
MH01V521 was to come down from Nasik,
it was of course that's where R&D Mahindra and a secret Mahindra special vehicles division,
it's not talked about but, it did exist, was based.
The night before it was supposed to come,
they've checked the car, they're very at the car, well the evening before,
and then they found out that somebody's actually gone and filled a whole bunch of oil in the
car rendering the engine absolutely useless because somebody cranked it over
and the engine went kaput.
The engine was changed overnight with a new one.
They did a thousand kilometres of running in through the night,
and at seven in the morning, MH01V521 was ready to rock and roll
on the road leading up to Aamby Valley in Lonavala.
I remember this huge smile on my dad's face when he drove in, completely drenched in sweat,
even though it was raining outside, completely tired having not slept for,
god knows how many hours, but he was raring to go.
He wanted to show the world what the Thar could do
and it's at that event, that the Thar opened everybody's eyes to watch sheer horsepower
and sheer torque as compared to what the Gypsies were putting out or CJ3Bs or early CJ4As etc, etc,
were putting out, could actually do off-road.
The first obstacle, CJ3B goes through, no issues, Gypsy starts going through,
almost every single one of them has to be towed, or winched back, because they just
can't make it through.
I remember, dad asking me to hop into the passenger seat,
going on that first obstacle, and absolutely slaughtering it.
Now this was done on highway tyres,
this was done for a point to prove, that even on highway tyres, this car could do a lot
more than what the idea of an off-roader could in general terms.
I might look like I'm glorifying the car a little bit,
but this is the kind of stuff that you wouldn't know
if you weren't a part of a certain few forums back in the late 2000s.
And it's my job, and it's my duty, I think, to bring these stories out to you.
So there you have it,
it's the story of the Thar in, as well as a, sort of format, that I could have told you.
Do you have any more questions?
Leave them in the comment section, I will answer every single one of them.
If you want to reach out to me personally, you can do it on my Instagram.
And again, I will answer each and every question, personally.
A big shout out I think is relevant to everybody who worked on the Thar at Mahindra at the time,
to all the off-roaders who supported and well some who didn't support the movement
back in the day and to everybody who of course, went and bought the Thar.
I'm sure my dad is smiling down all of you proud of what he did.
So there you go.
That's the story of the Thar,
it's me signing off from PowerDrift.
As always do remember, subscribe, press the bell icon and leave all those questions below.
I will answer every one of them.
Thank you so much for watching.