CJ340 Export Names — Indian Brave, Indian Chief, Bahia, Bushranger

One chassis, many badges

Mahindra licensed the Willys CJ-3B in 1947 and kept building versions of it long after Willys itself had moved on. The CJ340 is the short-wheelbase diesel version of that lineage, produced from 1987 to 1994 and renamed CL340 in 1995. The CJ540 is the same vehicle stretched roughly 200 mm to seat four more people in the back.

Export markets renamed the vehicle for local tastes, and importers sometimes renamed it again. The result is a model with no single canonical name — which is exactly why parts hunting is harder than it should be.

The mechanical package is common to all of them: the 2,112 cc Peugeot XDP 4.90 diesel with an aluminium cylinder head, the KMT90 four-speed gearbox, the two-lever Spicer transfer box Mahindra designated T18 with its 2.46:1 low range, hypoid axles at 5.38:1, and 11-inch drum brakes on all four corners.

Indian Brave and Indian Chief — the British names

In the United Kingdom the short-wheelbase CJ340 was sold as the Indian Brave and the long-wheelbase CJ540 as the Indian Chief. The MM540 also appeared under the Marksman name, and CJ Classic and CJ Deluxe show up on trim variants.

Both names remain live categories in DVLA records, which means the British survivor population is countable rather than guessed at. How Many Left tracks quarterly licensed and SORN figures for the Mahindra Indian Brave and the Mahindra Indian Chief separately. The counts change every quarter, so check them there rather than trusting a number written into any article, including this one — but the order of magnitude is low hundreds across both nameplates, with the large majority registered SORN rather than taxed for the road.

That ratio is the interesting part. A vehicle recorded SORN is retained but not driven, which is the signature of a project sitting in a shed rather than a vehicle that has been scrapped. For anyone hunting a donor or a restoration candidate in Britain, those figures describe a real and reachable population.

Practical consequence: if your V5C says Indian Brave, search for CJ340 parts. If it says Indian Chief, search CJ540 and MM540. The vehicle does not care which name you use, but the parts catalogues do.

Bushranger — Australia

Australia took the CJ340 as the Bushranger, sold through local distributors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Specification was typical export: olive drab or British Racing Green, khaki canvas soft top, white steel rims frequently wearing 700×16 tyres.

Be aware of a naming collision when searching. Bushranger 4x4 Gear is a well-established and entirely separate Australian accessory brand, and it dominates search results for the word on its own. Adding "Mahindra" disambiguates reliably.

See the Mahindra Bushranger owner guide for the Australian specifics, including import pathways and the parts routes owners actually use.

Bahia — and the Greek connection

Bahia is the name most often attached to the European-market vehicle. What is less widely known is that a substantial share of European supply did not come directly from India at all.

Balkania, an Athens firm, had been building Mahindra-based jeeps with Peugeot diesels since the 1970s. Mahindra & Mahindra took a stake in the business in 1984, and it continued as Mahindra Hellenic Auto Industries S.A., assembling CKD kits for European markets until the operation closed in 1995.

So a European Bahia may have been assembled in Greece rather than at Igatpuri or Kandivli. This is worth knowing when you are looking at build quality, trim variation and paperwork on a continental car — and it explains inconsistencies between European examples that would be puzzling if you assumed a single point of origin.

Werdau — the German assembly line nobody mentions

The German chapter is the most thoroughly documented and the least known. HCL Steel of Düsseldorf began importing the vehicle into Germany from the Greek assembly plant in 1991. Quality was poor enough that warranty costs became a problem, and the response was to assemble in Germany instead.

Production moved to the former VEB Kraftfahrzeugwerk "Ernst Grube" at Werdau in Saxony. After Kögel Fahrzeugwerke took the site over there was still hall space available for vehicle assembly, and in early 1993 CKD production of the CJ 340 and CJ 540 began there with 24 staff. Engines came from Igatpuri near Bombay — a plant built in 1979 specifically to produce this Peugeot-licensed diesel.

Output was modest and the split is revealing: roughly 200 CJ 340s against roughly 600 CJ 540s. The longer six-seat car simply sold better, because the short-wheelbase CJ340 is cramped by central European expectations. Production ran until 1995.

German engineers documented the problems candidly. Hot-dip galvanised panels were trialled to fight corrosion and then abandoned because paint adhesion suffered. Axle leaks recurred through corrosion at the axial shaft seal faces. From 1994 a revised soft top was offered to improve weather sealing. If you own a European car with any of these characteristics, you are looking at known history rather than a one-off fault.

Details of the Werdau operation are documented on the German Wikipedia article for the Mahindra CJ 340, which cites Kittler and Rönneberg's reference work on German off-road vehicles.

Working out which one you have

Start with wheelbase, because it separates the two families immediately. The short-wheelbase car is the CJ340 — Indian Brave, Bushranger, or Bahia depending on market. The long-wheelbase car roughly 200 mm longer, with rear seating for four more, is the CJ540 or MM540 — Indian Chief or Marksman.

Then check the numbers. Chassis numbers on these vehicles commonly read in the form CJ3B-4 DK followed by a serial, where the CJ3B-4 element records the Willys CJ-3B lineage directly. Engine numbers commonly carry a DJ prefix. Later and export-market cars also appear with seventeen-character numbers of the kind seen on classified listings.

Our chassis and engine number decoder will break down what each documented segment of your number means — and will tell you plainly which segments are not publicly documented, rather than guessing.

Finally, check the paperwork against the vehicle rather than the other way round. Registration documents record the name the importer used, which may bear no relation to what the factory called it, and on a vehicle now thirty to forty years old the badge may have been changed at some point in between.