Hindustan Motors, makers of the Indian car Ambassador, have sold the iconic brand to French car manufacturer Peugeot for a price of $12 million—800 million rupees. The C.K. Birla Group that owns Hindustan Motors said it had signed an agreement with Peugeot SA, an agreement that virtually signifies the end of an era in India’s motoring history. First manufactured in 1948, the Ambassador was the only luxury car available in India till the mid-1980s. By the early 1990’s, economic reforms had opened the country’s doors to many small car manufacturers. Hindustan Motors stopped making Ambassadors in 2014 after about 2,200 cars were sold in 2013. Peugeot has recently also signed an agreement with Birla to invest $107 million in a Hindustan Motors manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu. That deal includes hiking manufacturing capacity to 100,000 vehicles a year, to take advantage of the rapid growth in India, where car sales expanded 7 percent to 2.96 million cars last year. What the French car maker plans to do with Ambassador, though, remains a mystery.
