World's Cheapest Car Goes On Sale In India 571
Frankie70 writes "The Tata Nano — the car that caught the world's imagination as the cheapest ever — will finally be rolled out commercially on Monday in Mumbai in a mega event organised by Tata Motors. Ben Oliver, contributing editor, Car Magazine, London test drove the car in December, 08. These were his first impressions. This was his verdict: 'CAR's first ride in the Tata Nano felt far more significant and exciting than a first drive in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because this car's importance is immeasurably greater. It won't compete on dynamics or quality with European or Japanese city cars, but it doesn't have to. What Tata has achieved at an unprecedented price is astonishing, although we'd guess it will cost Indian consumers closer to £1700 when it finally goes on sale, six months late, in March 2009.'"
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:5, Informative)
"And honestly, is it really a good idea to enable more people to buy cars?"
I assume you don't own one, yes?
"I could see it if a very low emissions small car was available to the poor to help get the nasty junk off the road..."
Nano's emission would be far more benign than 2-cycle autorickshaws, not mention being far more safe.
Re:Cheap car already tried and failed! (Score:2, Informative)
The Model T's debut price in 1909 was $850 -- about $20,000 in today's dollars. Its lowest price in 1915, $440, is equivalent to ~$9,000 today.
Accounting for inflation, the Model T was far more expensive than the Yugo, and nearly 4 times the cost of the Tata.
Re:Hyperbole much? (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe he's talking about his first ride in a cardboard box in the "exciting" traffic flows in India - go ahead and search for that in YouTube.
Rather impressive indeed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsPbLC8ppoU [youtube.com]
Re:Safety.... (Score:5, Informative)
The driving exam is a joke here. If you correctly answer 6 out of 10 multiple choice questions (mostly "guess the taffic sign" ones) you get a learners licence. Curiously, 9 out of 36 failed that in my class. 1 month later you get the full licence, provided that you can drive 100m without incident.
The traffic here is very chaotic already, but it's mostly motorbikes and 3-wheelers. Add more cars to the mix and you're asking for trouble. On the other hand the Tata Nano seems to be a scaled-up rickshaw rather than a scaled-down car.
TFA is 4 months old, and the price is way off. The base price is 100.000 rupees, or about $2000/£1350. You can still get 2 high-end scooters for that price, not one for £1700 like the article says.
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:5, Informative)
Switzerland is overrun with SUVs as well, as is Germany. The trend may have been started in the US but Europe was quick to pick it up and give it momentum.
60mpg really 50 mpg (Score:4, Informative)
Re:News? (Score:3, Informative)
It's news because it's not just a little bit cheaper than any other car, it's much, much cheaper than any other comparable family car. At less than half the price of any of it's competitors, it's definitely newsworthy.
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:2, Informative)
Section 158: Any person driving a motor vehicle in any public place, shall, on being required by a Police Officer in uniform, produce:
I think, certificate of fitness includes emission certificate which you need to get every 6 months.
India's emission standards - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_standard#Republic_of_India [wikipedia.org]
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:3, Informative)
i wouldn't call it "overrun". there are certainly many more suvs out there than 10 years ago and there are by all means too many of them (even one of them is one too many) but they are still a minority and they aren't as large as american ones.
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cheap car already tried and failed! (Score:2, Informative)
(bear in mind that the U.S. has much tougher safety and emissions standards than India).
Untrue. Did you pull that claim out of a hat? India has poorer safety standards than the US, but stricter emission standards than the US. Indian emission standards [wikipedia.org] are modeled after the Euro emission standards [wikipedia.org], which are a lot stricter [pewclimate.org] (PDF, see page 26) than the US emission standards [wikipedia.org].
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:4, Informative)
Most people in India have lived their entire lives without cars and didn't need it
The target market for this car is not people who have never had transportation. The target market is people who run their families around on scooters and mopeds, like this: http://images.quickblogcast.com/8849-8518/family_scooter.JPG [quickblogcast.com]
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:4, Informative)
Nano's emission would be far more benign than 2-cycle autorickshaws, not mention being far more safe.
The irony being if pollution doesn't kill you having an accident in this car will, far more than other vehicles.
Obviously you haven't seen the 'other vehicles' they're driving now. Ever seen a husband riding a motorcycle along a highway with his wife on the pillion seat sitting sideways holding onto a child and not a single helmet between them? I'm not kidding. This thing will be a huge improvement over the death traps people are using right now.
Re:I'm still waiting for the Tata Touch... (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, the USA isn't doing too badly (relatively speaking) at controlling pollutants, although we're not doing especially well, either. Far better than China or India, AFAIK, although I'm not happy that my country is "better than the worst"!
The problem with the USA's and the EU's record on pollutants is that they tend to solve the problem by shipping pollutants to other parts of the world or they just dump them in the ocean. There is a famous plastic patch [mindfully.org] the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean between California and Hawaii. Plastic is way to overused and totally under-recycled. Is it really necessary for every candy bar to be packaged in a plastic wrapper? Does every pair of cookies in an Oreo package have to be packaged in their own little plastic pouch? What's the deal with single use plastic bottles? I don't remember my candy tasting any worse when I was a kid and that stuff was sold wrapped in paper or the Coca Cola tasting any different when it shipped in glass bottles. Another major pollutant problem is agricultural runoff. It isn't very visible to Joe Sixpack from the porch of his suburban home and it isn't highly publicised but that stuff can cause havoc. The problem with Algae bloom is well known in the Baltic Sea. To cite a US example, agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico which in 2002 measured some 8000 square miles, that's an area bigger than the state of Massachusetts. Keep in mind that this is just due to fertilisers. We haven't even begun to consider the effect of agricultural pesticides on the marine ecosystems and we all know how much faith the agricultural community, goaded on by the chemical industry, places in the lavish application of pesticides. Of course none these problems are unique to the USA, most countries put way to little effort into recycling plastic or putting some money into research into biodegradable plastic substitutes and very few of them are ready to do anything about agricultural runoff.
Re:Judgement already! (Score:1, Informative)
Er hang on, I was there too. You're slightly off. The Japanese got quality right in the /early/ seventies, first with the Corolla and the 210, and then with the Civic. That bought them an established reputation and dealership system just in time for the 1973 energy crisis, and they captialized on it through the mid seventies along with Volkwagen's new Rabbit.
That's quite different from "nobody would touch". People argued, but they sold well, and better every year. They hadn't been flat-out strange since 72. This /does/ vary where you are, which may be our difference here. When my 74 Corolla blew a gasket in rural NY in 82, the local mechanic didn't even have metric tools.
The only Japanese front wheel drive was Honda and one failed model of Datsun. I loved the little Civic but it was too small for most folks. Volkwagen got the 'small but useful' FWD hatchback right with the Rabbit, and the Japanese and then everyone else finally started to follow at the end of the decade. I believe the 78 Trecel was the first Toyota FWD. I'm not sure about Datsun/Nissan. May not have been till 82 with the Micra.
I don't see how you can extrapolate Tata potential from all that though. The history of microcars is largely a history of failure.
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, and where are all the SUVs from those foreign car companies sold?
As I look out of my apartment window in Belgium, I count 24 cars. 9 of those are SUVs and one is a light truck.
Re:And will be unavailable anyplace else.... (Score:3, Informative)
Talk about stupid- you do know that seven-passenger minivans weigh about as much as some seven-passenger SUVs and get about the same mileage, don't you? Or that full-sized vans are *bigger* than current SUVs and get even worse mileage?
Oh, sorry, we can't let facts get in the way of America-bashing, can we?