The world’s carmakers are to be given a novel way of keeping ahead of rivals: sending their competitors’ vehicles to a $125m (£66.1m) engineering centre in India where they will be dismantled to reveal their technical secrets.

Mahindra & Mahindra, an Indian industrial conglomerate, is building the “tear-down” in Chennai as part of a larger complex that, when finished early next year, will employ 1,000 engineers.