Hi, welcome to the Optional Extra video for the Hindustan Ambassador, and after doing the
whole video and processing I realised that this sign which is a really nice Morgan
sign, it's made of metal, it's very nice. I put it up here and you can you can see that
it just like reflects all the lights that I've got here, so it looked terrible. So I thought well,
I'll take it off for the Optional Extra video. Anyway on to the actual part of the video. So, the
Hindustan Ambassador obviously is based on the Morris Oxford, and those early Alec Issigonis
styled cars really shouldn't be underestimated. So, he made the Morris Minor. He made the Morris Oxford
and they're both very similar looking but they were very, very popular cars after the war,
particularly the Morris Minor of course went on to sell very well. Both models went on to sell
very, very well. Very good designs. Used the B-series engine which was used up until 1986,
partly because BL was doing so badly, but also because it was an engine that worked and
just kept on going. There was that one minor - uh minor Morris Minor snafu with the fact
that the body had to be widened to make the car work, and you can actually see that not
just in the line that goes down the car, and it's a very famous story, but also the bumpers -
the front and rear bumpers have these little extra plates on them to make them just that little bit
wider. It's one of those slight problems that they managed to
fix and get working, but ended up being a problem for the Minor throughout its life. So,
in researching this video there was a lot of websites that talked about the corruption between
Hindustan Motors and the Indian government, and I didn't really include it in the video because
there's no real evidence for what was going on, but it certainly is true that there's
a lot of corruption in India and backhanders are given to different people, and preferential
treatment is given to different companies, and of course it's interesting that Hindustan Motors with
the Ambassador basically getting a monopoly in the market during the the 1950s. But even so
the the Padmini and the Triumph Herald both became competitors to the Ambassador. They were
both very good cars but they didn't outsell it. So, there was obviously something about the
Hindustan Ambassador that people liked and wanted to do so despite all the potential
corruption issues which again I have no evidence for. There may or may not have been corruption
but the Hindustan Ambassador was a hit with customers. And so we moved to the 1990s and
Hindustan Motors try to import the Ambassador into the UK and there's all these
problems with rust and stuff, because of course in India there isn't so much of an issue with rust.
A company called "Karma Kabs" end up taking a whole load of these Ambassadors and making this
custom taxi service, this cool taxi service. Their logo on the website is based on the Taoist
belief that the journey is more important than the arrival, and they have all these flowers on
the car, and it's all very cool inside. They've been around since the late 1990s and it's a really nice
idea, and they're still going today. It's a fun change from doing a regular Uber I suppose.
But by the time in the early 1990s when these cars were being imported the Morris name had
already disappeared from British roads. The last Morris to appear in the UK was the Morris Ital
in the 80s so it was interesting that the Morris Oxford, this thing from the 1940s and 50s which
had been created back then they sort of reappeared in the late 1990s.
Hindustan Motors obviously were trying all all the time to try and move to the next generation
vehicle and it's interesting that they didn't do better with the Vauxhall/Opel Corsa. I can understand
why the Astra didn't sell well - it's a fairly large car, and people were going for the Maruti Suzuki
Alto, the 800 that sold very, very well, and if you go to India all you see even today there's so many
little Maruti Suzuki's zipping all around the country. You would think that the Corsa
would do really well. It's a very similar sized car, it's a very reasonably priced car,
but for some reason didn't do that well. Not sure why. If anyone knows why then please
let me know in the comments. It was only when putting together this video that I got that
spy image of what the new Hindustan Ambassador would look like the the new Citroën version,
and then I started going looking for pictures of the Citroën C-Elyseé not the Elysee as they call it,
the Elyseé, and I find literally exactly the same photograph. So, if you notice in the video I sort of
I merge - I merge?!? I fade from one - the mock-up to the Citroën C-Elyseé and so it's
interesting it looks like basically someone's just done a Photoshop job on the thing. So, whether
Citroën are actually working on it, whether this was a concept that they did.
Who knows what this massive Stelantis group will do with the whole Ambassador
branding. At the moment there's no evidence that they're doing anything, but hopefully in a few
years maybe we'll see something interesting. As far as Hindustan Motors go, I think
officially they're still around. I'm not exactly sure about that because their website
just hasn't been updated. The last media reference - news reference is from 2013,
and there's still links to the Ambassador site which doesn't exist anymore
so I'm not exactly sure what's going on with Hindustan Motors. So, I found this promotional
footage of the Morris Minor where the car goes along the road does a 180 and then stops right by
the camera, and it's obviously a shot they were trying to establish. But they tried so many
times to get it right, and I'll hit play here. So, first of all they try and it hits the curb.
OK, not perfect. Second time, okay ah there's pedestrians in the way, so that doesn't work.
Third time we'll try again, see if we can get it right and it goes and hits the curb again! Fourth
time and this car's coming, so and then we also hit the curb. So let's try somewhere else try somewhere
in a different street, but no still hits the curb. So finally, finally they're trying to do it and
there's so much traffic that the car just has to stop! So, if you've been watching my videos
for a while you noticed that at one point I was doing bloopers at the end of videos and
I stopped doing them because they got rather repetitive. I only make the same kind of mistakes
and I only say the same kind of things after making mistakes, so eventually it was just
getting a bit silly. But there were a couple of bloopers that I made in this video which I
thought I would share with you now as a little bit more interesting. Hindustan Motors leapt on the
chance to buy up the old tooling for the series 2 car and sell it as the new Hindustan Lambaster
It was imported back to the UK as the Fullbore mark 10
hoping to appeal to those who remembered the original Morris Oxford, or expat injuns - injuns!!!
In 1994 deal was done again with General Motors to produce the Volkswagen... the Volkswagen???
Probably not with General Motors! Well I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you enjoyed the Hindustan
Ambassador video and the Optional Extra, and I'll see you in the next video!