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Transportation

RIP Tata Nano, the World's Cheapest Car (cnet.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the RIP dept.
From a report: Well, you guys, pour one out for the Tata Nano. The world's cheapest car is all but dead. According to Bloomberg, Tata Motors built one single Nano in June 2018. During the same month in 2017, Tata produced 275. As a final nail in the coffin, Tata told Bloomberg the car "cannot continue beyond 2019." The Tata Nano entered the Indian market in 2008 priced from just 100,000 rupees, or about $1,500. The price increased over time, and according to Tata Motors' website, an entry-level Nano starts at 236,447 rupees today, or $3,435 based on current exchange rates. Right from the get-go, the Nano was plagued with production issues, not to mention poor safety and dismal crash test results. The cars were also known to catch fire, which, uh, isn't good.
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RIP Tata Nano, the World's Cheapest Car More

RIP Tata Nano, the World's Cheapest Car

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  • Poor Safety and Dismal Crash Test Results (Score:3)

    by careysub ( 976506 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @04:57PM (#56931538)

    You don't get the cheapest anything without cutting corners.

    • Re:Poor Safety and Dismal Crash Test Results (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:02PM (#56931566)

      iPhones prove that cutting corners might not help with the cost anyway.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        iPhones prove that cutting corners might not help with the cost anyway.

        Jony Ive: iPhone corners are not cut. Rather, they are carefully extruded, given form and substance precisely, almost miraculously, ensuring that every iPhone's fit and finish is of the calibre that our users expect from Apple.

        • Cutting corners with big words doesn't really change the net result. Well, ok, it changes the price tag, but aside of that...

      • Cutting corners is low-cost. Make them rounded is a lot more expensive.

    • More to the point things are expensive for a reason.
      When you sell a product to the wider market, even for cheap you need to have a particular quality standard. And the cost to run a business is more then the cost of the parts.
      Quality/price often falls on an exponential scale. Such as the difference between a Timex watch and a Rolex watch.

      I can write a program to solve a problem I have in a matter of minutes. But I wouldn’t be able to sell the program or would have any interest in the open source ma

    • Technically you're right, but you have to see what the market they aimed for was. They targeted that thing at families where the whole family was before that sitting on a motor scooter made for a single rider. Compared to that, it had glowing crash test results.

      Dying with a 50% chance is superior to dying with a 99% chance...

  • Easy to scoff, harder to respect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rh2600 ( 530311 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:04PM (#56931576) Homepage
    It's easy to scoff at a cheap car that cut obvious corners and was far behind what we expect for first-world motor vehicle transport that costs an order of magnitude above what millions of people in developing nations can affort...

    It takes some mental effort to respect that fact that Tata brought car-based mobility to a new generation of people that otherwise couldn't afford the level of vehicles we enjoy in more developed nations today... it wasn't too long ago (~50 years) that we were driving cars worse in quality and safety than the Nano... and they cost a pretty penny even for first world nations at the time...so why begrudge and scoff at another developing nation's progress on the same path we also walked (albeit earlier)?

    • Re:Easy to scoff, harder to respect (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dryriver ( 1010635 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:21PM (#56931662)
      Nano was created to cut down on the huge number of motorcycle deaths in India. It was supposed to be a motorcycle priced car that gives you SOME chance of survival (whereas a motorbike in India gives you pretty much none). Which is precisely why Tata was eventually pressured into shutting down the Nano before it evolves into a cheap AND safe ride a few years down the road. That would have cost dozens of other bigger car makers hundreds of thousands or eventually millions of car sales every year. The fact of the matter is that in the world we live in, trying to create something that is cheap AND usable will often get you into trouble.
      • In case you don't believe me, the first Nano manufacturing plant had to be moved due to farmer protests: "However, the car faced setbacks one after another. Tata Motors had to shift the manufacturing plant of the car from its original site at Singur in West Bengal due to farmers' opposition led by Trinamool Congress to Sanand in Gujarat." So the very people who might have bought a Nano were opposed to it being manufactured at all. How convenient. Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/... [huffingtonpost.in]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Tata was eventually pressured into shutting down the Nano before it evolves into a cheap AND safe ride a few years down the road. That would have cost dozens of other bigger car makers hundreds of thousands or eventually millions of car sales every year.

        That wasn't the big concern. The concern was that there would be millions and millions of more cars on the roads in India, leading to ever worse congestion and even worse pollution. When you talk about congestion and pollution, India knows levels of those that you probably can't even imagine.

        No conspiracy theories required.

      • How could a big company like Tata be pressured into shutting down its product to suit its rivals? That makes no sense at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kenja ( 541830 )
      It's even easier to scoff at a car named tiny tits.

    • ...Tata brought car-based mobility to a new generation of people that

      Corpses don't count.

    • > It takes some mental effort to respect that fact that Tata brought car-based mobility to a new generation of people that otherwise couldn't afford the level of vehicles we enjoy in more developed nations today.

      Not really. The car was a flop from almost the beginning.

      People preferred to buy a better 2nd hand car which was at the same price as the Nano.

    • It would have brought India's roads to a total standstill. Haven't they learnt from the West the peril in building your transport around cars?

  • Better that than RIP all those future Tata Nano drivers...

    • Was it really more dangerous than a motor-scooter though? Because that seemed to be it's what it was positioned to compete against. A scooter with weather protection and quad-wheel stability seems like a big step up to me.

  • So Big Industry Shut A Small, Cheap Car Down? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dryriver ( 1010635 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:05PM (#56931590)
    The Tata Nano was supposed to cut motorcycle accident deaths in India, not compete with BMWs or Audis. In India, quite often multiple poor people will ride on a motorcycle together, sometimes mommy, daddy and three kids, and then die in a horrific way when there is a collision with a car or a roadside barrier. So Tata tried to create a very cheap car to replace those deadly motorcycles. This was about cutting motoring deaths, not creating the next big thing in motoring. In my opinion Nano didn't die at all because of poor sales numbers. The family that owns Tata motors simply got threatened by bigger car manufacturers into killing their sub 4K automobile before it can evolve into a cheap AND relatively safe ride. The big motor companies wouldn't threaten Tata you say? Really? The people who cheated on everything from safety standards to Diesel emissions wouldn't threaten an Indian conglomerate that has nobody protecting it? And where is the rest of the automobile industry's answer to the Tata Nano? There's dozens of poor countries that are pretty much "motorbike death city". The people who can built Peugeots, Seats, VolksWagens and Skoda's can't make a cheap car for these countries? (Hint: They can, but they simply won't. Too risky for their higher priced cars' future sales.)

    • Re: So Big Industry Shut A Small, Cheap Car Down? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Tata IS big industry.
      They own Jaguar, Land Rover, they run an airline, have retail stores, make trains.
      They have over 100 subsidiary companies.
      Their revenue last year was over $100 billion USD.
      That's more revenue than Boeing, about a third less than Ford or GM

  • 2 of Them (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @05:14PM (#56931640)

    I got two Tata Nanos so I could have my own pair of tatas.

  • Tata Nanooooo (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can you name the car with no wheel drive,
    smells like a cow and seats three-point-five.
    Tata Nano! Tata Nano!

    Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down,
    It's the country-fried truck endorsed by clowns!

    Tata Nano! (Yah!) Tata Nano!

    [CPI(M)] : Hey Hey

    2 meters long, half a lane wide,
    65 kilos of Indian Pride!

    Tata Nano! Tata Nano!

    Impossible to export,
    Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!

    Tata Nano! Tata Nano! (Yah!)

    The driver is blind 'cause of her super weak beams,
    She's a squirrel powered, deer sized, dri

  • RIP Tata Nano, the World's Cheapest Car

    Or in other words: tata [wiktionary.org], Tata.

  • Prices sound comparable to a motorcycle. I wonder how safety compares. You'd climb into the Nano wearing shorts and nothing on your head. You wear ATGATT on a motorcycle if you've got sense. ie, the Nano might lull you into a sense of complacency with what looks like a safety cage but really isn't.

    It seems like a moot point anyway. If you want cheap (or can only afford cheap) transportation there and are willing to cut corners on safety, don't most Indians opt for a scooter anyway? And they ride witho

    • You wear ATGATT on a motorcycle if you've got sense.

      You've never even seen pictures of India have you...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )
        Or even pictures of transportation in India, I would presume. Ah, India, the place where a bus with a seating capacity of 35 can have an accident with over 40 fatalities. (There were actually 85 or so riders. You can guess where they were "seated".)

      • I literally wrote "they ride without helmets". If anything, I expected people to blast me for implying that Indians don't have sense. And the truth of the matter? It is indeed a nightmare but there are more people wearing helmets than I expected [youtube.com]

  • Hey, hey, we're Adobe! The little car that's made out of clay

  • We hardly knew ye.

  • Nano was the car which brought down Tata Motors (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frankie70 ( 803801 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @03:24AM (#56933216)

    Tata Motor was the #2 car company in India after Maruti Suzuki before they introduced the Nano. Nano was their CEO Ratan Tata's pet project. Ratan Tata assumed the car would sell on it's own without much marketing & advertising expenditure. But the car didn't. People preferred to buy a 2nd hand car which cost the same as a new Nano but was a much better car. Ergo, the Nano was a flop. But because it was the CEO's pet project, the company wouldn't let it go, they spent a lot of money & effort over years to make sure the car doesn't die. Tata Motors went to losses because of the time, effort & money they spent on the car. They lost their position in the market. It was only after Ratan Tata resigned & a new CEO took over that the company was turned around again. And now they have at last stopped production of the car - something which should have been done 5-6 years back.

  • What fun are crashes without the requisite fireball?

  • There will always be a world's cheapest car, as long as there are cars.

  • The cars were also known to catch fire, which, uh, isn't good.

    That depends. Is there a widow [wikipedia.org] in it?

  • Save the Tatas!

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