Ruing Hindustan Motors? decision to stop production for now, taxi unions in Kolkata said it was bad news for commercial vehicles as it will be difficult to get Ambassador parts if the shutdown continued.
Bimal Guha, general secretary of the Bengal Taxi Association, said: ?About 33,000 yellow Amby cabs ply in Kolkata apart from the 8,000 new blue-and-white taxis running in the city and other districts.? Guha said his association had anticipated this kind of situation and advised taxi owners to shift to brands such as Maruti and Tata Motors. He, however, said Ambassador auto parts were cheaper and Amby cabs are the best for Kolkata?s bad roads, especially during the monsoon. Hindustan Motors (HM) sources said Ambassador is now getting a decent demand only from Kolkata.
According to a Kolkata car dealer, around 100 Ambassador taxis are sold a month in the city. With production of the car stalled for now, he and two other HM dealers in the city had stocks for only a month.
Economist Dipankar Dasgupta feels the end of the road for the Ambassador was on the cards as HM was not mentally or technologically ready for competition. ?The company should have prepared for the shocks of modernisation and redesigned the Ambassador when Maruti Suzuki started operations in the 80s. But it didn?t. So after making huge losses for years, it had to stop production,? said Dasgupta, a former professor at Indian Statistical Institute. ?These things will happen more and more in the market economy if you don’t go in for modernisation. But the darker side of this is job losses, which are painful,? he averred.
While the Uttarpara plant in West Bengal?s Hooghly district can manufacture 1,500 vehicles a month, the recent monthly production figure was 150. The carmaker sold only 2,500 Ambassadors in the last financial year due to lack of demand.