The Gurkha Gets the Attention. Mercedes-Benz Engines Reveal the Bigger Force Motors Story.

Force Motors is best known to enthusiasts for the Gurkha, which sold 522 units in FY26. The wider company reported ₹9,057.05 crore in consolidated revenue from operations, and builds vans, ambulances and engines for Mercedes-Benz and BMW cars made in India. Where does capability deserve scale?

Key Points

• The Gurkha is not the right lens on Force Motors. Force reported ₹9,057.05 crore in consolidated revenue from operations in FY26, while its businesses span shared mobility, specialised and institutional vehicles, and automotive aggregates, including engine manufacturing for Mercedes-Benz and BMW production in India.

• Force sells into markets where visibility has very different economic value. A luxury-car engine, a government ambulance and a lifestyle 4x4 are bought on entirely different terms, and reward being noticed to very different degrees.

• Reported sales of 522 Gurkhas in FY26 look like a weakness only if Force is read as a consumer-car company. Read as a whole, the question becomes which of Force's capabilities deserve capital, attention and scale.

Nobody who follows Indian off-roading needs the Force Gurkha explained.

Low range. Differentials that lock at both axles. A factory snorkel. Its proposition makes most sense where an ordinary road stops being ordinary.

In FY26, according to SIAM model-level data reported by Moneycontrol, 522 of them were sold.

In the same year, Mahindra sold 1,26,261 Thar and Thar Roxx units, Autocar Professional reported.

Read alone, that looks like a story about a small off-roader and a very large one. It is the wrong frame.

The Gurkha looks small only if Force Motors is a consumer-car company. It is not.

The Company Behind the Badge

Force Motors reported ₹9,057.05 crore in consolidated revenue from operations in FY26. Its businesses span shared mobility, specialised and institutional vehicles, and automotive aggregates. In company disclosures, it has described itself as maintaining zero-debt status.

Its own price list is revealing. The Gurkha is not filed among personal vehicles. It sits under "Special Vehicles", after page upon page of Traveller vans, Urbania premium vans, Trax people-movers, Monobus buses, school buses and ambulances.

Force says the Traveller holds more than 70% of its segment. Those vans carry tourists, schoolchildren, employees and patients every day. The Gurkha is simply the part of Force's portfolio most visible to off-road enthusiasts.

The Engine You Will Never See

On June 17, 2026, a six-cylinder engine left Force's plant at Chakan, near Pune, and was fitted to a Mercedes-Benz GLS 450. It was the 200,000th engine Force had produced for Mercedes-Benz, in a relationship that began in 1997 and now covers engines and axles for the Mercedes-Benz cars and SUVs made in India.

A year earlier, Force's Chennai plant, opened in 2015 to serve BMW's Indian production, rolled out its 100,000th BMW engine. It went into an X5.

Force does not make Mercedes-Benz or BMW cars. It manufactures engines and automotive aggregates to standards specified by those manufacturers for their India production programmes.

The Force name does not appear on the bonnet of the GLS that receives the engine.

Some of a company's most demanding work can remain invisible to the final customer.

A Company That Began With a Problem

The pattern is older than the partnerships. Founder N.K. Firodia's early Tempo goods carrier had an unglamorous goal. "He wanted to replace the bail-gaadi (bullock cart)," his son Abhay Firodia, now the group's chairman, told Forbes India in 2016.

Force did not begin as a brand in search of buyers. It began with a transport problem. A version of that logic still runs through much of what it builds: vans, ambulances and engines made to meet someone else's operating need.

It has not always chosen well.

The Discipline of Subtraction

Force spent years spread across three-wheelers, tractors and small goods carriers, and from 2011 a personal SUV. Then Covid hit shared mobility. Consolidated revenue from operations fell from about ₹3,081 crore in FY20 to about ₹1,988 crore in FY21.

What followed, Forbes India reported in April 2026, was a narrowing. Tractors were exited, three-wheelers discontinued and small goods carriers dropped, with resources moved towards passenger mobility. "Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do," Managing Director Prasan Firodia told the magazine.

FY26 revenue from operations was more than four and a half times the FY21 level. (BSN calculation.) The return of travel after the pandemic helped, so the reset was not the only cause.

But it established the habit this story turns on: deciding where not to spend.

Same Company, Different Buyers

In January 2025, Force disclosed an order to supply 2,429 diesel ambulances to Uttar Pradesh's Medical Health and Family Welfare Department. In March 2025, it announced an order for 2,978 Gurkhas for the Indian Army and Air Force. It says the first 600 reached the Army during FY26.

These are disclosed orders, not endorsements. What they show is that Force sells into institutional markets where procurement is heavily shaped by defined operating requirements.

A Force-built engine earns its place by disappearing under a Mercedes-Benz bonnet. An ambulance is judged on whether it meets the health department's requirement and serves the patient, not on how many people admire it online. A Traveller operator counts seats, uptime and running costs.

In each of those markets, being seen carries relatively little of the value. The Gurkha sits in a part of Force's business where it carries far more: a recognisable shape, a name enthusiasts know, a reason to choose it over something else.

That is what makes 522 interesting.

Where Attention Counts

The Gurkha does not lack credibility within its category. Yet recognition there has coexisted with very small volume.

The first four months of FY27 were busier. Industry data reported 327 Gurkhas sold from April to July, roughly 63% of the FY26 total. Four months are not a trend. They are a reason not to treat 522 as a ceiling.

Price alone does not explain the scale of the gap. At ₹17.58 lakh ex-showroom, the five-door Gurkha sits among 4x4 versions of the Thar OG (from ₹15.60 lakh), the Scorpio-N (from ₹18.03 lakh) and the Thar Roxx (from ₹19.42 lakh). It is competing for serious household spending.

For a buyer considering one vehicle for daily use as well as travel and recreation, the equation extends beyond off-road hardware. The Gurkha is sold only with a manual gearbox. In 2024, Force said a change as significant as an automatic could require 18 to 24 months of development; its official price list today shows none. A specialist product can ask buyers to accept compromises that a broader one is expected to remove.

Mahindra's path is instructive, not as a model to copy but as evidence of a choice. Autocar Professional has attributed much of the modern Thar's success to pairing off-road appeal with everyday usability and automatic options, and the Thar Roxx added a five-door body. Two manufacturers began with capability. They chose very different commercial expressions of it.

A Clue From a Kerala Workshop

In 2017, Indian Autos Blog reported on a Kerala workshop that turned a Gurkha into a Mercedes-Benz G-Class lookalike. The first build reportedly took five months and about ₹8.5 lakh. Later conversions were quoted at about ₹6.5 lakh and ₹7.13 lakh, excluding the vehicle.

The styling made the headlines. The work list is more telling: sound-damping sheets, heat insulation, rattles eliminated, a leather-wrapped dashboard and new seats. No mechanical changes were reported.

One build proves nothing about owners at large. It does raise a question. Was at least part of the aftermarket adding precisely the layer of experience that a specialist factory product had not prioritised?

What Force One Could Not Buy

In August 2011, it launched the Force One SUV at ₹10.65 lakh through a new Personal Vehicles Division, with Amitabh Bachchan as brand ambassador. Autocar India reported that its design drew on China's Foday Explorer III, while Force developed the chassis in-house and brought in Lotus Engineering to tune it. It sold 3,008 units between November 2011 and January 2016. By 2016, Autocar Professional reported that Force was winding down the Force One effort while continuing with the Gurkha.

Force One entered needing to establish a new consumer identity. The Gurkha begins from an off-road identity built over years.

That does not mean a new consumer push would succeed. It means the starting point is different. Force One had to ask consumers to notice a new Force SUV. The Gurkha already has attention within its tribe. The unanswered question is what that attention is worth outside it.

The Question Force Can Afford to Ask

A consumer start-up must first prove it can build. Force has already built for Mercedes-Benz, BMW, a state health department, the armed forces and fleet operators across India.

Its strategic question may run the other way: which of the things it can build are worth turning into larger consumer businesses?

Scaling the Gurkha would take more than product work. It would mean retail and service reach, financing and marketing, in a segment where the leader already operates at scale. That would carry opportunity costs alongside Force's other priorities, from Traveller and Urbania to exports, specialised vehicles and aggregate manufacturing.

So the Gurkha's volume does not, by itself, prove poor strategy. It could be an underdeveloped opportunity. It could be a deliberately specialist position. Its value could lie beyond showroom sales, in defence work, exports or recognition for the Force name. Or it could be a platform Force chooses to expand later.

These are possibilities, not explanations. Force has not said which applies.

Where Capability Deserves Scale

The Gurkha's 522-unit year looks small beside India's largest lifestyle SUVs. It looks very different beside a ₹9,057-crore industrial business.

Force Motors does not need the Gurkha to prove that it can build. It has already done that across shared mobility, specialised vehicles and engine programmes for Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

What may have changed is the market around it.

When the Force One arrived in 2011, SUVs were still becoming aspirational. Today they account for roughly two in every three passenger vehicles sold in India, according to a Rubix Data Sciences report cited by IANS, and Thar and Thar Roxx sales rose 49% in FY26, Autocar Professional reported. Many of those buyers are paying for presence, identity and capability, qualities the Gurkha has carried for years without becoming a large consumer franchise.

That does not mean Force should chase volume for its own sake. It means the strategic equation may look different now.

The question is no longer simply why the Gurkha is small. It is whether a market that has moved decisively towards SUVs has created the conditions for one of Force Motors' most distinctive products to become a much larger consumer business.

Sometimes a company does not need a new capability. It needs the market to catch up with one it already has.

DISCLAIMER:

This article is published for news, analysis and commentary purposes and is based on publicly available company disclosures, regulatory filings, manufacturer information, industry data and reporting by established news organisations. Company statements, market-share claims and sales figures are attributed to the relevant source and are not independent findings by Business Story Network.

Business Story Network's calculations are based on disclosed figures and are not company-reported results, forecasts or profit estimates. Strategic observations in this article are analysis and should not be interpreted as statements of Force Motors' intentions. References to defence orders, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and the G-Class do not imply endorsement, affiliation or equivalence. If you believe any factual information requires correction or clarification, please contact info@businessstorynetwork.in with supporting details.