For decades, buyers of the Bajaj Chetak scooter had to book and wait. “The wait for a Chetak stretched into years,” Autocar Professional recalls. A Chetak on the open market fetched almost double its showroom price. Buyers who paid in foreign exchange could move ahead in the queue.
Rahul Bajaj, the company’s chairman, once said: “A 10-year delivery period is not a joke.” In 1990 Bajaj ran a newspaper advertisement with two words: “NO WAITING.”