It may sound like carrying coal to Newcastle. But that is what has happened. A Coimbatore-based company would soon manufacture 100 Ford Quadricycles to be sold to avid car collectors and museums all over the world including the USA. For those uninitiated into the world of automobiles, the quadricycle (built in 1896) was the precursor to Model A, the first ever car manufactured by Henri Ford in 1903.
The Indian prototype of the Ford Quadricycle was designed by the students of the Ge Dee Institute of Technology in Coimbatore after carefully going through the replica imported by GD Gopal, chairman, GD Naidu Charities, who runs the elite Institute. Car aficionados were so impressed by the quadricycle assembled at UMS Technologies ltd owned by the family of Gopal and orders started pouring in.
“This is the second replica developed by us. Our company assembled the replica of the 1886 Benz Motorwagen, the first ever automobile in the world, last month and it successfully completed the 500 km long Coimbatore- Chennai stretch. Experts from Germany and Britain rated the replica made by us superior than others,” N Ramaraj, assistant general manager (operations), told The Pioneer. He said UMS Technologies has the capability to assemble 100 replicas per year. The factory is busy assembling the first lot of 1886 Benz Motorwagens to be sold to car museums. The price tagIJ It varies from `three million to `five million.
The main brain behind this venture to make replica of classic and vintage cars is 76-year-old G D Gopal, son of the legendary GD Naidu who took India by storm from 1940s to 1970s with his innovations and revolutionary ideas. Gopal says UMS can make the replica of any classic or vintage cars and deliver them at one’s doorsteps. “But it costs money and material. Our mission is to make our students to be innovative so that they could approach problems with out-of-the-box solutions. The best cars have been designed there is nothing more to design. The challenge lies in innovations like solar powered cars and precision engineering,” said Gopal. He said the Benz Motorwagen could be assembled because of the students of his institute.
“They took it up as a project work and each group of ten students made drawings and designs of 428 parts which constitute the Benz Motorwagen. My engineers and technicians assembled it and here we have the replica,” he said. According to Gopal the most challenging task was the design of the engine cylinder and the wheels. “We had the cylinder X-rayed. The wheel has a perfection which will put the original way behind,” smiled Gopal. The Ford Quadricycle assembled by UMS Technologies too was of excellent quality and it put the original in a shade.
UMS Technologies may not sound familiar to the new generation but for titans in global engineering industry it is a name to reckon with. The low profile company manufactures the critical engines for drones and unmanned aerial vehicles. So next time when you hear about drones and UAVs, remember that there is an element of Coimbatore powering them.