Lahoti Family Enterprises · Gulbarga
Humnabad Road, Kalaburagi · A journey built on trust
An authorised Maruti Suzuki dealership for three districts of North Karnataka, grown since 2010 into a wider mobility business — passenger cars, commercial vehicles, servicing, pre-owned sales, a driving school, and now electric two-wheelers.
The Enterprise
Lahoti Motors is a family-led automobile enterprise headquartered at Gulbarga — officially Kalaburagi — in northern Karnataka. It was founded in 2010 by Srikant Lahoti and Usha Lahoti, and incorporated in Karnataka the same year.
It grew as an authorised Maruti Suzuki dealership for the districts of Gulbarga, Bidar and Yadgir — a territory covering a substantial part of North Karnataka, much of it small-town and rural, where a car is bought carefully and expected to last.
In a region like this a dealership is not a transaction. It is a twenty-year relationship with a family that will be back for the next car, and the one after that.
That has shaped how the business grew. Rather than chasing volume, it widened — from sales into servicing, accident repair, insurance, driver training and pre-owned vehicles, so that a customer’s entire relationship with a car sits under one roof. The board remains a family one, with a second generation now serving alongside the founders.
It reflects a practical Lahoti habit that is a good deal older than the company: read what a changing region actually needs, invest for the long term, and earn confidence through service rather than promise it through advertising.
Four Channels
The enterprise runs four distinct channels from two showrooms on the same road — the first car a household buys, the premium vehicle it moves up to, the van a business runs, and the scooter a student rides to college.
01
Four-wheelers
The mainstream passenger range, from first-time owners to growing families. At Lahoti Garden, Humnabad Road, near the KMF dairy.
02
Premium
Maruti Suzuki’s premium retail channel, at the second showroom opposite the Gunj Bus Stand on Humnabad Road.
03
Business mobility
Goods and passenger carriers for traders, entrepreneurs and transport operators — the Eeco Cargo, the Super Carry mini truck and the Tour range, in petrol and CNG.
04
Electric
Gulbarga’s authorised outlet for Ather electric two-wheelers, operated through Lahoti Automotives Private Limited from 2023.
Complete Care
Selling a car takes an afternoon. Keeping it on the road takes a decade, and in a region where the nearest alternative workshop may be two districts away, that second part is the business.
The enterprise runs its own service network, including a dedicated service centre, and covers the whole span of ownership — scheduled maintenance, accident repair, genuine accessories, insurance assistance, and resale through Maruti Suzuki True Value.
It also teaches people to drive, which is a curious thing for a dealership to do until you notice it is the first step of the same journey.
2023 · Lahoti Automotives
In 2023 the family incorporated Lahoti Automotives Private Limited and took on Gulbarga’s authorised Ather Energy outlet, opposite the Gunj Bus Stand on Humnabad Road.
It is a deliberate step rather than a fashionable one. Electric two-wheelers are the first form of electric mobility that makes plain economic sense in a tier-two Indian city: the daily distances are short, the running cost against petrol is decisive, and the buyer is often a student or a young household making their first vehicle purchase.
The first electric vehicle most families in North Karnataka own will not be a car. It will be a scooter.
Taking on a new-technology franchise also carries a specific obligation: charging, software updates, battery service and a category of question no petrol dealership has ever had to answer. It is the same trade as before — sell it, then stand behind it — applied to a machine that did not exist when the company was founded.
Gulbarga, Continued
Gulbarga is where this family’s Deccan story took root. It was here that the house of Dayaram Surajmal moved from financing industry to running it, at the Mahboob Shahi Kulbarga Mills, which for years anchored the cotton economy of the district and employed thousands of its people.
It was here too that the family’s giving began in earnest — a law college in 1960 that is still the oldest in the region, and a medical research centre carrying the name of the man who paid for the college.
Lahoti Motors belongs to that continuity rather than standing apart from it. The commodity has changed — cotton, then textiles, now mobility — but the position has not: a family business embedded in the commercial life of one town, over generations, dealing with the same families repeatedly.
The showroom stands on a plot called Lahoti Garden. The address itself has been in the family longer than the company has existed.
1960 · Gulbarga
The oldest law college in the Hyderabad–Karnataka region, founded on a family gift a few kilometres from the showroom.
The institutions →The Mills
The textile mill that made a Rajasthani trading family into a Deccan industrial one.
The family story →The Gulbarga Branch
Seth Shankarlal Lahoti, Rameshchandra Lahoti and the line that made Gulbarga the family’s first foothold.
The people →Continue
Hyderabad
The gallery, the archives, ArtCafe and the Krishnakriti Foundation — the family’s cultural enterprise.
Kalakriti India →1860s to Today
Banking, cotton, mills, education, medicine and mobility — a hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →Since 1956
Where the returns of enterprise have gone for close to seventy years.
The trusts →