Premier (car)

Premier Ltd.

Type	Public Company
Industry	Automotive, machine tools, engineering
Founded	1944
Headquarters	Mumbai, India
Key people	Maitreya Doshi (Chairman & Managing Director)
Number of employees	over 8,000
Website	premier.co.in

Premier Ltd. (formerly The Premier Automobiles Limited) is a manufacturer of vehicles based in Mumbai, India. The company is owned by the Walchand Group. Walchand established Premier Ltd. with the encouragement and support of architect of modern India, Sir. M. Vishweswarayya. In October 1947 Premier Ltd. manufactured the first Indian made trucks and cars rolled out onto the streets of a free India.

The company was established in 1941 and negotiatied with Chrysler Corporation for licenses to build a Plymouth car and a Dodge truck, sold under the Dodge, Plymouth, DeSoto, and Fargo names starting around 1949. In the early years, quality was considered good by both Chrysler and the Indian Department of Defense. In 1949, parts were being made in India, starting with simpler components and gradually building up to more complex pieces. Two companies made parts for these vehicles: Premier and Hindustan Motors of Calcutta. The early years of Premier and Hindustan were marked by very low sales, due to the size of the market; only about 20,000 vehicles per year were made in India, in 65 different models. To prevent foreign companies from dominating by mass-producing parts to be assembled into cars in India, the government set up steep import duties on imported parts in 1954, allowing Indian parts-makers to survive.

Premier licensed and manufactured a version of the Fiat 1100 D (beginning in 1964 continuing almost unchanged into the late 1990s). The car was initially marketed as a Fiat ("1100 Delight") and subsequently as the Premier Padmini with a 40 hp (30 kW) 1100 cc engine and manufactured at the now defunct Kurla factory in suburban Mumbai. Later models included the Premier 118NE (named after its 1171 cc Nissan A12 engine and with a transmission from the Nissan Cherry), a version of the 1960s Fiat 124 built in a then-new (but now defunct) factory at Kalyan. The 118NE was considered a mid-size luxury car in India until the influx of modern cars in the 1990s.