The market is full of machines differentiated by seductive features like the number of cup holders or USB ports or leather armrests. This Beast is different.
BHPian UniMuni recently shared this with other enthusiasts.
Falling in Love with Segue: My BSVI Force Motors GURKHA
Executive Summary
- Fell in love with the BSVI FORCE MOTORS GURKHA
- Bought one. Named it SEGUE.
- All other marketing choice theorists, consumer buyer behavior modelers, analysts, reviewers, guru-prattle, experts, face-offs, pissing contests, road testers…can take a walk, a permanent one.
Unabridged Version :
I Fell in Love: If you have ever fallen in love, you will know what I mean. And if you haven’t ever, there is no point explaining it to you.
Nothing like it: The market is full of machines differentiated by seductive features like the number of cup holders or USB ports or leather armrests. This Beast is different. Utterly. Comprehensively. Totally. There is NO way you can mistake it for anything else in the world.
Easy to Choose – There is ONLY ONE CHOICE: All the other ‘machines’ come in ‘variants’, flavors, schemes, types, and models…… Some cootchie-pootchie variants of the inane and ultra-banal. Sunroof, vanity mirrors, dashboard trim, soft tops, internet ….irrelevant and annoying. Or some vainglorious mixture of drives, fuel, manual, auto, transcendental, engine capacity, which wheel is driven, alphabet soup (SUV, MUV, ABC, XYZ..). I do not even know if these are choices. And by the way how in hell are you going to figure out whether you got delivered what you ordered? Are there really 16 bolts in the crank-fusion reactor or is it the 12-bolt-fission reactor version?!!!
With the GURKHA there is one choice – just one -only one ALL EMBRACING CHOICE. Buy it or leave it. No versions, no choice matrices, no variants, no mumbo, no jumbo. ONE MODEL -SIX colors. Choose the color. You are done.
No accessory confusion: The GURKHA comes in ready to drive. And if at all you want to fit a few accessories, they come in, all-ARAI approved and homologated, and can be fitted at the dealer even before you take delivery.
There is a rooftop carrier with a section for a Jerrycan. I have one gifted me by my Hero father-in-law, an Artillery Vet. It was with him during the ’62, ’65, ’67, and ’71 wars. Knock me over with a feather, when I tried fitting it on, the “JerryCan Cage” on top had thick foam pre-installed for a snug fit. Did I tell you about being loved right back when you are in love?
No Wheeling Dealing: While I had test driven the GURKHA at a couple of other locations, my first serious visit was to the Ahmedabad dealer with the improbable name: MSS MediTechno Pvt. Ltd. Located in a gritty industrial suburb.
I reached, leather-jacketed, helmeted, late one cold winter evening on my Bullet. An unlikely buyer. It was already dark and my mission was to see how the Gurkha behaved in the dark. Mit the dealer/owner and Vishal from GURKHA has just returned from a day-long activity and were visibly bushed.
While waiting for them, I was chatting with the old security guard who welcomed me, sat me down, and answered most of the sneaky questions I had. How many sold? Anybody had shouting matches? How many were towed in? He answered them all. And as a seasoned interviewer, I know when someone has been indoctrinated and when someone is bullshitting. This old security guard was the best security man as a Brand Ambassador I have ever met in a looooong career as a marketer/cold-caller/researcher across hundreds of organizations.
And when Mit came in and started giving me the vehicle specs, I rudely interrupted him and asked him a couple of ultra-technical questions (Sorry: It is my job). He admitted right away that he didn’t know. I could go on…but the thing that I remember the most about that interaction was Mit telling me that there are two things I need to know about the vehicle:
A. The fuel lock is externally operated with a key. No internal pop-lever
B. The Wing Mirrors are manually operated. Not motorized.
In all my years as a Professor of Marketing, I never expected that this sort of decency would exist outside a Textbook. Over the years I have attended, and indeed designed marketing presentations in mahogany-lined boardrooms, splendid hotels, and resorts surrounded by fine food and wines, HEPA-filtered air factory floors, with digital devices, and presentation equipment beyond sci-fi.
But that evening, one old security guard, and his raconteuring, one rickety broken chair, cardboard-lined and held together by plastic packing straps, by the light of a dull mercury halogen lamp in a gritty/dusty industrial suburb; with a dealer telling me the shortcomings of the ONLY vehicle model he has, in the presence of the Company Sales Rep ……I saw the soul of what Brands really are about.
Mileage: Mileage or fuel efficiency is quoted as km/liter of diesel. Will you please quote it in Rupees/Kilometer? Because if you do so, for BSVI, you will also have to add the cost of the AdBlue !!!!!!! Every other vehicle needs AdBlue. Dunno AdBlue? Go ask the Pintle-Puntle Gurus. The BSVI GURKHA does not need AdBlue and meets BSVI emission norms via a clever alternative system.
Instant: for some strange reason, vehicle marketers believe that Waiting Time = Brand Prestige. How about NEVER?
I have an insane allergy to this very idea. I have been through this. I have had to beg an unloved uncle for US$ 500 in foreign exchange to book a scooter that took 6 years to come in. The alternative was Indian money and 20 years !!! I have been through this and I hate it with all my heart. My very first question about any product I wish to buy is: waiting time? Anything beyond reasonable logistics is completely unacceptable and unless there is NO WAY out (like a passport or visa), I am out of it.
A new Green GURKHA was waiting to be named SEGUE sitting inside the workshop. A Grey one would take 15 days to come in from Pithampur, MP. So there.
BIG and Only-3Door: Yes, it is big. And tall. This enables me to put a ladder on top and trim trees at home more conveniently. Transcends the limitations of my TATA Xenon pick-up truck. Do you have a problem?!
And yes, it is 3 doors. One too many for me actually. Just me and my wife – 2 doors. If I wanted to ferry my village, I would buy a tractor and a trailer, why bother with doors? By the way, this door proliferation hegemony: my refrigerator/vehicle/house has more doors than yours is puzzling indeed.
If one is so hung up on doors, Jim Morrison is at your service, it is Doors all the way!
OFF-ROAD CAPABILITY: As far as I am concerned, ALL Indian driving is off-road quality. Check this out.
Except for the magnificent new superhighways, all Indian driving comes with potholes/slush/mud/water, etc as standard. I DO NOT WANT TO SEEK THEM OUT.
Do not even get me started on water wading capability, manual diff-locks, 4H/4L, and else. I have seen those videos. Leh-Ladakh-top-of-the-world-ultra-off-road-mega-altitude-conquest videos with testosterone-charged, insanely modded 4X4s. And if you watch the videos carefully you will also see, ordinary, simple, tiny family cars patiently slogging the SAME roads just as easily. Please.
And please stop this chattering about ground clearance. What is yours? If one insists on walking with legs on either side of an obstacle that will certainly annihilate one’s crotch, what is needed is brain surgery, not leg extension. I want a JCB 225 LCM backhoe too. To do my serious off-roading on…hell, making ‘off-roads’! And do call me for any obstacle course, tug-of-war and other such contests. Let’s play off-road: off-road with my BackHoe.
Luggage capability: For reasons, I am unable to fathom, people want to leave their snug homes and get away from it all. And to achieve that they need a ‘car’ with many, many doors. And then they want to fill it up with people and all their household stuff including the sofa and the 42” LCD TV. Remember these are the people and the stuff they wanted to get away from in the first place.
The GURKHA has PLENTY of space for me, my wife, and a couple of unicycles I always have with me. And the back seats are the place where I keep the unicycles so that there are NO pesky people who will sit on them.
RAZOR-thin Service Network: Yes, the GURKHA does have an exceptionally slim network but that’s the dedicated GURKHA dealers. FORCE MOTORS, the mother company, has an extraordinary network rivaling the Indian Post Office and they have been around forever. The GURKHA engine is derived from the legendary Mercedes OM 616 workhorse engine that powers virtually ALL Force Motors vehicles. You know where this is going….
Case in point: I recently drove down from Ahmedabad to Raipur moments after I took delivery of SEGUE. Some 1250 km. I wanted a routine check at Raipur. Problem: the nearest dealer is at Bilaspur, 2.5 hours away. Called up the local FORCE Motors dealer. They said ‘come over’. Vivek the area guy, emailed Anjan & Dhara the local specialists, the service checklist. Anjan and Dhara rounded up their team who first admired the first GURKHA they had seen. They hoisted the machine up, raced through the checklist, and were done in an hour. A small bill later and I was on my way. But then being a 31-year-long owner of a Royal Enfield Bullet 350 cc machine, I know what Family Love is!
The 6 A° Pintle Puntle: Any poor guy checks out the reviews when they want to buy a machine. This is exactly the ‘victim’ the wannabe gurus are praying for. And so with the information they have extracted from the sales brochure, random websites, back issues of Top Gear and other ‘gurus’, they go to town with all manner of irrelevant, annoying stuff that they think makes them sound so ‘guru’. Mule, lift, departure angle, diff lock, ECU, sway, NVH, TPMS, and soft shackle….are all grist to the mill.
The newbie reverentially learns that the Trepidator-Soft Top-Two crandik QTXR version is superior to the Annihilator -Titanium Bash Plate-Cowdung Annealed – MQXY because its Pintle-Puntle is tuned 6 A° closer to the Terculator Spindle. ( Note: 1 A° = 1 Angstrom Unit = 0.1 nanometre). This obviously is a critical feature when you wish to zipline your off-road 4×4 from the top of K-2 directly into the depths of the Mariana Trench, which is something you do every evening.
5 such reviews later your ordinary nice guy turns into a spec vampire that haunts showrooms and has dark circles under his limited-slip differential. Worst case scenario he turns into a guru perpetuating this Pintle-Puntle nonsense. The horrible thing is that the REAL guys with the REAL info remain virtually unheard, unread, and unheeded.
MORBID Dealership: The first thing that strikes you when you hit a Gurkha dealership is a yard filled with Ambulances, Dead Body Vans, Blood Donation Mobiles, and School Buses, and in the middle, there are a couple of GURKHAs. It is disconcerting. And anyone would suggest to the dealer to cover these off. I did too. But then is a deeper thing here.
This FORCE Motors Company has been around forever. Some of us would remember the ‘scooby doo’ Matador and even the Tempo. With a minimum of fuss, this company has been moving the country accomplishing hard-core transportation for decades. Yes, most ambulances, hearses, dead-body vans, school buses, and the ubiquitous airport-pickup buses are all FORCE MOTORS. Overwhelmingly. Tempo, Traveler, Trax, Gama, Judo and Toofan….are all FORCE MOTORS. And each one of them is powered by the very same OM616 Mercedes variants. If you have ever seen a TEMPO TRAX, the improbably long vehicle with over 25 people perched all over and grain sacks and goats and lumber and coal and everything else stacked in between climbing up a hill with the driver on the outside of the vehicle, you will have some idea of the utter dependability of these vehicles. And from birth via ambulance to school via bus and death via the dead body van – The FORCE is with you always; to dreadfully mix a metaphor.
I am also a professional woodworker (www.neoteny.in) and this is a favorite of mine: https://bit.ly/TAMASHA_LAKDI_KA a song about how ‘wood’ is with you through all the stages of life: from cradle to ‘Gulli danda’ to wedding palanquin to bed to a walking stick, and finally a funeral pyre. As a writer and poet, I see FORCE Motors also paralleling one through life from birth to death !!!! Sentimental and treacly and cloying, but true no ??!!! The GURKHA is but part of this cycle.
The Parents leave you alone:. With many other machines, the Parents gate-crash everything including the honeymoon and anniversaries. They force you into clubs, communities, associations, owner’s groups, etc. For many of these, they will arm-twist compulsory attendance and insist on what my friend DiNgo calls “Enforced Gaiety”.
With the Gurkha, you step out of the showroom and your ONLY connection is the 24×7 helpline which as you know is practically useless since you will be out of range: of cellphone or service networks. You are on your own.
Case in point. The SEGUE was driven down from the Pithampur, Indore plant one week to the dealer. The next week I was taking it to Raipur. Pithampur is on the way. And so out of sentiment, I drove via the Plant to show SEGUE its home! It was a Sunday and the plant was closed. The guards were adamant that I do not take pictures of MY SEGUE outside THEIR PLANT. It was impossible to explain the context. I had to threaten them saying I was taking a picture on a public road, for which I had paid Road Tax, it was MY vehicle and if they didn’t want their blasted factory in the background, they could move it out of sight! Baby out of sight, out of mind. I kind of like it that way.
Seguing Out :
And ladies and gentlemen if you think this is some macho male rant…think again. My daughter has fallen in love with the SEGUE. She has offered me her luxury-sub compact in exchange. Maybe I need to buy another GURKHA. I think I will name it RIFF.
Keyword: Force Gurkha: Why I never considered any alternatives while buying mine