$3,000 Tata Nano Car Coming To US

walterbyrd writes "The Nano is currently powered by a 37 hp two-cylinder engine and lacks common safety features such as power steering, traction control and airbags. It was originally designed to compete in the Indian market against scooters and motorcycles. . . Along with added safety equipment, it's likely the car will get a larger, less polluting engine for export markets. Unfortunately, that means the price will increase, as well, possibly tripling by the time it goes on sale in the U.S.."

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[timeOday]

In 1990 the number of deaths per mile driven was 30 percent higher [wordpress.com] than it is now.

Re:A lack of market knowledge?

[Aguazul2]

<<Smart cars are small because that's what the technology required for electric cars at the time.>> Complete nonsense -- Smart started out as a petrol car. (By 'petrol' I mean the gas that is a liquid -- for those in the US)

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

"A tiny Euro Smart Car gets great MPG but it's nearly unsurvivable in a serious collision."

Citation needed. Crash tests I've seen for Smarts show that they are quite survivable.

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[ehud42]

Just to be pedantic - in most situations, ABS will NOT decrease your stopping distance, in fact, by definition not locking your tires reduces friction and actually increases stopping distances. What ABS does do, is enable you to stear around objects, etc while slowing down - which you cannot do if your tires are locked.

Power steering is actually a safety hazard - if you engine fails you will quickly lose the ability to safely steer the vehicle - especially if you are applying the brakes.

Re:A lack of market knowledge?

[Joce640k]

Smart cars are designed to make parking easy in European cities. That's it. That's the design goal. That's why they're as long as a normal car is wide.

I live in Spain. Most of the Smart Cars I see driving around here are company cars with logos on them. Sales reps, that sort of thing. Very few people buy them for themselves, they're way overpriced for what they are.

I've driven one and I wouldn't buy one even if they were cheaper. They drive OK but the suspension's awful for something that's supposed to be a city car.

Re:Sorry guys...

[CastrTroy]

Bombardier/Skidoo [brp.com] already makes something like this. The problem is that their version costs $18,000 for the cheapest model. If you could make one for $3000, I suspect that quite a few people would be interested in them. The Bombardier one has a 998 cc engine. You could make something suitable for booting around town in with something as small as as 250 cc engine.

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[Gordonjcp]

So lift off the throttle a little for a moment, let the gap open up a bit, and resume your previous speed. It's not hard.

Re:OK, triple the price

[TheSync]

The VW Beetle came to the US, if memory serves, at $1666 in 1960s dollars.

Inflation Calculator [westegg.com] says "What cost $1666 in 1960 would cost $12476.90 in 2011."

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

They get subsidized by the government, get rent controlled housing, minimium wage is higher, etc.

Oh and they get public transportation too and do not need to spend 50% of their paycheck just to show up to work.

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[AuMatar]

Bullshit. I'll bet you 1K that you can't stop on an icy road within 10% of the distance ABS can with 95% confidence. A human being is just not capable of making that judegement fast enough, and it doesn't have the sensors to tell the small differences the car can in traction. The very fact you think you can means that you're completely fucking incompetent as a driver.

The reason race cars don't have it is that races are canceled if the conditions out are going to be unsafe. They don't have races in sub-optimal conditions, so special safety equipment for it is unneccessary. In the real world, we can't stop going to work because of ice or rain.

Re:Good

[artor3]

What a load of nonsense. There are plenty of used cars to be had. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], there are around 200 million passenger cars registered in the US. And that doesn't include the 8 million motorcycles and 40 million light trucks.

So, around 0.3% of them were destroyed, and you're gonna spout some conspiracy nonsense about evil Islamo-Commie Obama making it impossible for poor people to find used cars?

I don't know where you got that crap from, but you need to stop listening to that source. They're poisoning you with lies.

Re:Good

[dkleinsc]

... there is no supply of used cars in reach of their serfs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpoor people's spending power.

I just did a quick search for used cars for under $3000, and found quite a few of them on the market within a 50 miles radius. (Like everything else, if you're in a more rural area, you have to travel further to find stuff.) I mean, there are reasonable objections to Cash for Clunkers (e.g. it costs too much), but yours doesn't seem to be based in reality.

if someone cuts in front of you

[Chirs]

hit your brakes to give them room.

Studies show that ABS brakes do NOT reduce accident rates, but electronic traction control does. (It's more complicated and expensive though.)

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[Chickan]

ABS can actually increase stopping distance. ABS just prevents the brakes from locking up the wheels so you can still steer and dodge things. Without ABS you slam on the brakes, the wheels lock up, and you slide like you are on ice - no control at all. With ABS you slam on the brakes, the ABS system senses a wheel starting to lock up, and actually releases the brakes a bit to prevent it - so you still get control, but stopping distance may increase.

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[Zalbik]

Citation needed. Crash tests I've seen for Smarts show that they are quite survivable.

Correct. Crash tests against fixed barriers (the standard test quoted by manufacturers), indicate good survivability.

However, crash tests against even mid-sized sedans indicate very poor results for a smart car:
  http://www.iihs.org/news/rss/pr041409.html [iihs.org]

Keep in mind that cars are typically manufactured to specifically perform well on the standardized barrier crash-test. It's similar to how CPU's are designed to specifically perform well on standardized benchmarks.

Damnit, I just used a computer analogy in a story about cars....somehow, that just...feels....wrong.....

Re:Good

[tgd]

Your unsupportable political opinion aside, there are still more than enough used cars out there. The problem is not a lack of used cars, the problem is a consumption-driven culture that goes out of its way to teach people who most need to be responsible with their money to be irresponsible with their money.

So....poor people are overly easily influenced, and can't think for themselves....

Yes. It is, in fact, an example of causation and not correlation that spending more money than you need means you have less money than you could've, and last I checked, poverty is pretty strongly associated with a shortage of money.

And, if you really want to educate yourself on it, there's more published literature than you'd ever have time to read through on the psychology of poverty, and just as big of a collection of literature on the ways that psychology is used by marketers for political and commercial gain and population control.

Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature.

[jabberw0k]

You need to leave even more space. Two seconds behind the car in front of you. And if he is tail-gating, his two seconds; and if the car in front of him is tail-gating, another two seconds again. Once you leave that six seconds in front of you, not enough cars can pass you to fill the space, so you can easily keep a five or six second gap. Try it. Works for me, has for decades.

Re:Good

[dkleinsc]

Unrelated issue: You have a right to vote, and attempts to deny that right by requiring you to pay a certain amount of money to exercise it is unconstitutional. You don't have a right to pay only a certain amount for a car.