Many of us respect Tata, but are worried about the everlasting problem that has always bedevilled the UK motor industry - will there be enough investment to do it properly? Bear in mind that Tata borrowed to pay for Jaguar/Land Rover (JLR)!
If Tata do indeed leave JLR to make their own decisions on what you might call 'cultural' matters, then that is good. I had some small insight into the way Tata works when I researched the CityRover press kit for MG Rover. I spoke to some engineers at Longbridge who had been working with Tata to derive the CityRover from the Indica. They all expressed some frustration with the difficulty they had persuading Tata that certain aspects of the car needed improving to suit Western tastes. In Indian terms, the Indica was pretty good - tough, well equipped and well-suited to Indian road conditions. But they found the European obsession with detail finish and 'finesse' a bit hard to get their minds around. It could be argued that MG Rover were wrong to even attempt to upgrade the Indica, but I guess, after they'd tried everything else, that it was their only available route to providing a supermini to their dealer network, which had been bleeding ever since BMW failed to replace the Metro/100 Series in 1997. Ironically, Tata did concede several significant improvements for a MkII CityRover, and the first batch of these arrived at Portishead just as the administrators walked into Longbridge. These cars were in limbo on the dockside for a while while their ownership was sorted out, and they eventually got sold via a car supermarket, at sensible prices £1k below MG Rover's somewhat misjudged prices. (The programme pricing had been far more realistic, but the number-crunchers raised them substantially just before launch - just as John Barber did with the Allegro back in 1973!!). My next door neighbour ran a MkI CityRover for a year and was happy with it, but she preferred the Rover 25 Streetwise that replaced it.
Good luck to JLR, anyway ...
Ian Elliott
The Indians produced an Armoured Carrier Wheeled, Indian Pattern (ACV-IP) built by Tata Locomotives, and called it a 'Tatanagar'. At the outbreak of the World War II the United Kingdom was unable to meet the needs of the Commonwealth for armoured fighting vehicles. It led many Commonwealth countries to develop their own AFVs. As production of heavy armoured vehicles, such as tanks, required advanced industry which those countries lacked, most of the developed AFVs were armoured cars, often based on imported chassis.
In India a series of armoured vehicles was developed, known as Armoured Carrier, Wheeled, Indian Pattern or ACV-IP. These vehicles utilized Ford / GMC Canadian Military Pattern truck chassis imported from Canada. Armoured hulls were constructed mainly by Indian Railways (Tata). The armament typically consisted of Bren light machine gun, in some variants mounted in a small turret, and Boys anti-tank rifle. In production from 1940 until 1944, a total of 4,655 units were built.
The ACV-IP was used by Indian units in the Far East, Middle East, North African Campaign and Italian Campaign, typically in divisional reconnaissance regiments, as reconnaissance vehicle, personnel carrier, AA weapons carrier or Forward Observation Officer's vehicle.
John Weinthal
I bet there's a club for these! Amazing. So many strange things happened in wartime. (Like Longbridge making Lancasters and so on).
Odd Ode No 1: When my Father-in-law died, I helped clear out some of his junk. He'd been a self-employed coachtrimmer, so there were lots of things like 'Lift the dot' fasteners. Some of these were in a weird bluish/matt finish. No one in the car trimming business had ever seen anything like them. I wasted a lot of time researching this (well there were 140 - one-four-oh - kg of the damn things, and they cost a bomb to buy individually today - and just as scrap brass they were valuable!). I even made contact with the American company that took over making these fasteners from Carrs in the UK, and was impressed by their historical knowledge.
However, I eventually found a grubby label in amongst one bag of them - 'Daimler Motor Company'. To cut a long story short, we came to the conclusion that they were used on the canvas top of the Daimler Dingo Scout car - which looks a bit like those Tata armoured cars, and hence my reason for boring you with this. The special finish was military-style to avoid giveaway reflections, of course. I found a specialist out in the sticks near Ludlow who made canvas tops for classic military vehicles, and he took the lot off me, which helped to pay my Mother-in-law's care home fees...
Ian Elliott
Our thanks to Ian Elliott and John Weinthal for their fascinating insight into our motoring past.
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