There’s only one thing worse than realizing you’re a cynical bastard: realizing you’re a cynical bastard and the world really IS that corrupt. Oh well. The truth hurts, both giving and receiving. In this case, I had high hopes for the Tata Nano. As the son of a Romanian immigrant for whom car ownership was proof positive that America is the world’s greatest country, I believe that the motorization of the world’s largest democracy would unleash that nation’s creativity, productivity and prosperity. But when Tata “launched” the Nano two days ago, without a factory to produce it, I smelled a rat[tan]. The next day, there it was: Tata’s in not-so “secret negotiations” for a billion dollar UK bailout for their ill-advised—not to say hubristic—purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover. So, there’s your timing then. Oh, and the announcement on Autobloggreen this morning that the NSFA (Not Safe For America) Tata will export the micro-car to America (with a few mods, ’natch) in 2011 or 2012 (or 2020) is not to be taken seriously. The argument that Tata’s pie-in-the-sky promise to do the same for Europe actually weakens the case, not strengthens it. Or maybe that’s just me being cynical again. One can only hope.
One of those things? Pass emissions, crash-safety, pedestrian-safety [b]and[/b] lane change?
Not by staying under 800 kilograms and anywhere remotely close to the current price, they won’t.
I’ve driven a lot of small cars that various Chinese and Indian companies have promised to send to the US. None of them have the structural integrity or chassis rigidity of a wet noodle. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tata Nano was more of the same.
They’re planning a mid year upgraded model called “The Wagoner”…it’s rumored to only run in reverse, can’t turnaround, and is greatly overvalued even with the standard external cup holder shaped like a hand. However they will allow you to stack your GM Card points with available Retired Rickshaw Runner Rupee Rebate. As an added bonus you get Slumdog Rick’s hand sewn, embroidered “RIR” on the custom COWHIDE interior, especially developed by GM’s marketing staff after extensive consumer research on the Indian purchasing public.
Savvy shoppers will of course hold out for the eventual and inevitable…”Red Dot Sale”.
Great News…
Just Announced…MARCH MADNESS on the All New Nano “Wagoner Special”!
now through March 31…
Free Caste Wheels and Bad Year Tires.
Hurry Before It Ends!!!!
another option might be our newest promo, soon to be released…
The “Bailout Bonanza” Value Package
since Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe are gone, we have opted for Hop Sing as our spokesman, which hopefully will tie in to the emerging Tibetan marketplace.
to qualify…you must first go online to http://www.CFR.com to verify you are not registered on the NO DRIVE LIST, then simply transfer your worthless American currency for the Amero which will, in turn, entitle you to free passage on the North American Superhighway.
furthermore:
We have an Electric version of the “Wagoner Special” currently under development. It is able to hold hundreds of billions in investment bank charges and guaranteed to withstand frontal impact with any and all dislocated workers and homeless individuals with proper repossession/foreclosure documentation.
Why does the cheapest car in the world have fog lights? Are they for additional front impact protection?
“I believe that the motorization of the world’s largest democracy would unleash that nation’s creativity, productivity and prosperity.”
Have you ever driven in India?! (OK, “ridden.” No visitor to India has ever taken the wheel and lived to tell about it.)
A lot will be unleashed alright, but creativity, productivity and prosperity may not be high on the list.
I think this isn’t too bad an idea actually (not saying anything about the likelihood of it happening). I see Smart cars all the time now, usually just serving neighborhood trolley duties, so high speed impact safety probably isn’t a huge concern for buyers of such tiny cars. If all they’re going to do is plug through manhattan at 20-35mph all day why not offer a cheaper option?
I also would approve wholeheartedly if an exemption could be made regarding airbags, crash tests etc… considering the low speed nature of the vehicle, and the obviousness of the personal risk involved in driving one.
@ tedward: There are already cars approved for the purposes you mentioned. Look up GEM, they’re basically glorified golf carts, but are designed and approved for operation in neigborhoods at low speeds. No airbags or any of that safety stuff is necessary because of the low speed conditions.
Have you ever driven in India?! (OK, “ridden.” No visitor to India has ever taken the wheel and lived to tell about it.)
A lot will be unleashed alright, but creativity, productivity and prosperity may not be high on the list.
It’s the Asian mindset. Give a man a bicycle and and he will eat for a lifetime. Give him a motorcycle and it’ll be a short one.
Cars, though, in India would be more a result of prosperity rather than the cause. With a trillion motorcycles on the road and an oversupply of public transport (which, honestly, isn’t much safer than being on a motorbike), it’d probably take you longer to drive to your destination than ride.
Maybe they could get it approved as a motorcycle?
No, wait, motorcycles are probably safer…
niky
I think you guys are missing something here, perhaps due to the fact that most of your travel was restricted to the ultra-crowded urban core.
The vast majority of India is rural. Traffic there is not a problem. Poverty is. Not the least of which includes, in places, at times, starvation.
Increasing transportation would allow MILLIONS of farmers a way to get their food to distant markets. Allow MILLIONS of laborers to leave their villages for more distant employment. It would create MILLIONS of jobs servicing the automotive infrastructure.
This is not effect cause. This is cause and effect. And if you doubt the economic benefits of personal (or, don’t forget, shared) transportation, let history be your guide.
As for the elimination of congestion, be careful what you wish for. Outside of large cities, the pedestrianization of America’s urban cores in the 60’s was extremely effective– at eliminating business and sending business to the malls.
The vast majority of India is rural. Traffic there is not a problem. Poverty is. Not the least of which includes, in places, at times, starvation.
A lot of that has to do with the awesome inefficiency of the Indian supply chain in the food industry. Transport isn’t a problem, but the sheer number of “cooks at the pot” is.
Automobiles won’t help this. Centralizing the distribution will, and the problem with doing that is that while it will get food where it needs to go when it needs to be there, it also cuts out a lot of people who are making a few rupees off the current distrubtion clusterf_ck.
Automobiles, without the infrastructure to support them, stand a good chance at exacerbating India’s logistics issues. Of course, telecommunications can do the same.
As for the elimination of congestion, be careful what you wish for. Outside of large cities, the pedestrianization of America’s urban cores in the 60’s was extremely effective– at eliminating business and sending business to the malls.
And yet the “rot from the centre” didn’t happen in Canada or Western Europe’s major cities, or at least not to the same degree, and several American cities have started to recover because they’re reinvigorating their cores with smart urban planning.
The American city decayed in favour of the suburbs because, quite frankly, median income started it’s dramatic downward slide and poor people found themselves trapped in cores, while the upwardly mobile left for greener pastures because the automobile enabled it. In countries where the safety net didn’t allow that kind of slide into poverty, the suburbs actually rotted and the cores gentrified because it was the suburbs where poor (and thusly crime-afflicted) people could afford to live.
This is not effect cause. This is cause and effect. And if you doubt the economic benefits of personal (or, don’t forget, shared) transportation, let history be your guide.
Interesting point. History is cyclical, and can be used as a reference, but it’s also usable as a kind of marker of progression. It doesn’t always repeat itself, and expecting it to can lead to retrograde outlook.
Personal transport was good for America, in some ways, because of America’s unique socioeconomic and geographical conditions. It isn’t quite the same for other nations, and the telecommunications boom and the centralizing and streamlining of logistics makes it much less important than it used to be.
Put it this way: in the last five years I’ve gone from living in airport lounges and behind the wheel of rental cars to behind my Blackberry and laptop. I think this is going to be more and more the case as the movement of information becomes easier, and supplants the movement of people in it’s economic benefit.
RF. The problem with your argument is that only people in cities will be able to afford cars, even $2k cars. In fact, rural India has a pretty darn good (by rural US standards) shared transportation infrastructure consisting of rickshaws and hired cars. In fact, these services employ decent numbers of people in rural towns.
As for the history of American urban design, the proliferation of the car and the suburb, not the few “urban mall” experiments you cite, precipitated the decline of urban core areas.
Sure, India no doubt wants (and who is to say it doesn’t deserve) its chance to make all the same mistakes we did. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
superbadd75
Thanks for pointing me at the GEM’s, I’d already forgotten they existed. What I had in mind was more along the lines of permission to use all roads (maybe exempting 65+mph zones, since the real speed there is likely 75+). I guess that’s a little on the laissez faire side of what’s politically viable though.
RF,
What’s Tata supposed to do? The Nano’s fully engineered at this point and ready to start production, they’ve been rolling out the publicity campaign for two years, and the Nano has gotten more press and publicity world wide than just about any new car launch that I can recall. Meanwhile, local political opposition to the deal that gave Tata land for their original Nano assy plant (the deal was cooked up, btw, by the state government which is currently held by the communists) put the plant on hiatus just as soon as they were about to install machinery and start production.
So what should Tata have done? Delayed taking orders as they arranged production in a different facility? Scrap the whole project?
Having enjoyed to drive the old Fiat Panda for several years, the Panda still appears far more convincing and not that ugly.
Could well save the fate of Chrysler, won’t it?
The cheapest car of the world has been launched on 24th March. According to the web site, the NANO is a proper car, as it offers better space than even a Santro at the front, while backseat space is quite decent.
I actually live out in an Asian province (moved out here twenty five years ago) and a suburban/urban area grew up around me.
Cars are great for empowering the blue-collar class, but not for farmers. They have rickshaws, tractors, motorcycle-powered cargo vehicles, tractor-powered cargo vehicles, trucks…
Make it a $2000 cargo vehicle, and maybe you’ve got something that will boost India’s economy. A $2000 car won’t do much that motorcycles just half-the-price aren’t already doing. It just gives those who can already afford bikes the luxury of bringing their families along to work.
The Tata Nano is interesting for the urban set, but they already have a plethora of cheap cars there. The Maruti Alto is already rather cheap, for example… though twice the price…
The big question with the Nano is whether Tata can actually deliver on its promises. Here’s a car that promises to put people on the road for half the price of the Alto, which is already quite small and crude (1980’s crude, it feels like) by western standards… and yet they’re promising to make it so that it can be sold in Europe and America… two markets which the Maruti cannot ever hope to penetrate, not without a total re-engineering of the car. How Tata propose to achieve this with a car that’s even cheaper and more cheaply assembled… well…