Maruti 800

The Maruti 800 is an Indian hatchback car built by Maruti Suzuki, originally Maruti Udyog, a joint venture between the Indian government and Suzuki, introduced in 1983 as a licensed version of Suzuki's Japanese small-car platform. Built to be affordable, fuel efficient and simple to maintain for a market that had almost no modern small-car options at the time, the Maruti 800 became India's first genuinely mass-market car and for many years the country's best-selling vehicle, effectively motorizing a generation of middle-class Indian households. Its low price and Suzuki's manufacturing and parts-supply expertise let Maruti Suzuki dominate the Indian passenger car market for decades, and the 800 remained in production, largely unchanged in basic form, until 2014, a remarkably long run for a design introduced in the early 1980s.