By Divya Kamboj
Technology as always comes into force when someone’s indolence grows more & more. Funnily enough, since their inception, cars have changed the meaning of life for people. It has managed to obtain a very essential place in our day to day activities that it is now a mere necessity for all. A wonderful and caring relationship has developed between a men & cars. People now really love, not only to invest in this non-appreciable asset but also have tenderness towards maintaining it.
Well let’s once probe it out that how this vehicle came into existence & made its entry into India:
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was the first person to build the self-propelled car in 1769 which could attain the speed of up to 6kms/hr. These steam engines were heavy and so the wagon was slow and hard to control.
In 1807 Francois Isaac de Rivaz designed the first internal combustion engine. This was subsequently used by him to develop the world’s first vehicle to run on such an engine. Some cars in the early 20th century were also powered by electricity but they were slow and heavy and so went out of use until the idea was revived late in the century.
Although many people tried to make a good car that would work well and sell well, people say that Karl Benz invented the modern automobile. He used a four-stroke type of internal combustion engine to power his “Motorwagen”.
Benz may have invented the first modern car, and Duryea the first commercial car, but Henry Ford sold the most cars to the most people. In 1910 he began making and selling his Model T, which was a huge success. Since then, many different kinds of cars have been designed and built, from Minivans to Sports cars to SUV’s to Sedans to Jeeps to Limousine to Hatchbacks & so on.
Transformation led by Cars
Cars have made a revolutionary change in the life of people. Starting from being a luxury at its inception, today it is a necessity for all.
Before the automobile, people both lived and worked in the city, but because of the automobile, the growth of suburbs has allowed people to live on the outskirts of the city and were able to work in the city by commuting. It has radically changed city life by accelerating the outward expansion of population into the suburbs.
Automobiles have allowed people to travel over long distances in short amounts of time; they provide transportation to work, school, grocery stores and doctor appointments. Without access to an automobile some lives are hindered greatly.
Cars’ entry into India
The first car ran on India’s roads in 1897. Until the 1930s, cars were imported directly, but in very small numbers. Later in the 1940’s, an embryonic automotive industry emerged in India & with that Hindustan Motors was launched in 1942.
The first car launched by an Indian company Hindustan motors was named as “The Ambassador” around 1954-1956. Tata was the second company whose car you can see in some old movies like Don in 1978. After this, Mahindra & Mahindra was established by two brothers in 1945, and began assembly of Jeep CJ-3A utility vehicles.
Eventually multinational automakers, such as, Suzuki and Toyota of Japan and Hyundai of South Korea, were allowed to invest in the Indian market ultimately leading to the establishment of an automotive industry in India. Maruti Suzuki was the first, and the most successful of these new entries.
As India began to liberalize their automobile market in 1991, a number of foreign firms also initiated joint ventures with existing Indian companies. By 2000, there were 12 large automotive companies in the Indian market, most of them offshoots of global companies.
Today India manufactures low-priced cars for markets across the globe & now, we have a complete list of car brands available, but still few are yet to enter the market. Tata, specifically by acquiring Jaguar & Range Rover has taken a step for proliferating that standard of automobiles in our country. We now have Brands such as Morris, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW, Datsun, Ferrari, etc.
SUM UP
The auto industry is an ever-changing, competitive industry which is continuously improving & enhancing. Compare today’s vehicles with vehicles that drove off the assembly line just 100 years ago. Today’s car lasts a lot longer, get better gas mileage and provides the owner with a comfortable ride. Cars offer unprecedented freedom and are one of the great industrial success stories of the 20th century.
There are over one billion vehicles worldwide today, and in another 40 years, this number could double. In America, there is one car for every 1.3 person. While this is good news for the automotive industry, it is a bad omen for our planet.
Today, the pressure on car engineers is to design an environmentally friendly vehicle in an environmentally friendly process. This raises some serious environmental concerns about car production and final vehicle disposal that cannot be addressed through improved technology alone. One effect of new production is the increased use of resources that harm the planet. More cars also mean more pressure for oil and more oil exploration. Adding more plastics to reduce the weight and improve fuel consumption makes it more difficult to recycle the vehicle at its end-of-life cycle.
Yet, the story of the automobile is a love story between man and machine. Where we once loved our horses, we now love our machine, and now the automotive industry in India is one of the largest markets in the world.
