TATO NANO YET TO BE LAUNCHED

TATA NANO
THE DREAM CAR OF INDIA
&RATAN TATA NEW DELHI, India -- Tata Motors created automotive history at the New Delhi Auto Show in January when the $2,500 Nano hatchback rolled onto the stage. Ratan Tata, the soft-spoken chairman of Tata Group and Tata Motors, said the Nano’s first mission is to move India’s scooter owners into the safer, cleaner and more comfortable world of four-wheeled motoring.
But even more incredible than the car’s rock-bottom price is the fact that, underneath the Nano’s cute jellybean shape, there are no hidden tricks or bizarre cost-cutting measures.
How exactly has Tata kept the Nano’s price so low? The answer isn’t nearly as complex (or draconian) as many automotive experts predicted.
A Hard Outer Shell
One big surprise is the Nano has an all-steel body. Many automotive analysts predicted the car's outer panels would be colored, injection-molded plastics, to eliminate the cost of a paint job. Instead, the Nano uses a simple welded-steel platform and steel body panels.
Another rumored cost-cutting measure was that Tata would follow the lead of Lotus Cars and use an aluminum-extrusion frame held together by industrial-strength adhesives to reduce weight and cost. But no. The Nano employs normal welding techniques.
Size Matters
At a little more than ten feet long, the Nano is nearly 20 percent smaller than the next smallest car sold in India, the Maruti 800. However, the Nano also manages to have 20 percent more interior space than the Maruti. Less weight and fewer parts mean less raw material and lower cost.
The Engine: Smaller Is Cheaper
As simple as that sounds, it couldn’t be truer when it comes to cars. The Nano’s light curb weight allowed Tata’s engineers to use a much smaller engine while still achieving performance acceptable to drivers in both congested urban areas and quiet rural markets. The Nano has a rear-mounted, 623 cc two-cylinder engine. Ultimate power is only 32 horsepower, and the top speed is said to be around 50 miles per hour.
The Transmission
What happened to the continuously variable automatic transmission? The fact that the Nano has arrived with a four-speed manual transmission was a minor shock. A CVT is compact, simple, and makes excellent use of available engine power. Those are important points when producing a small car with limited horsepower. Our guess is the CVT automatic could appear in the near future and for a slight premium over the base model.
Plenty of Patents
Much has been made of Tata's 32 patents pending for the Nano. Yet during a news conference at the New Delhi Auto Expo, Ratan Tata pointed out none of these is revolutionary or represents earth-shaking technology. He said most relate to rather mundane items such as the two-cylinder engine’s balancer shaft, and how the gears were cut in the transmission.
Plants and Partners
There is no escaping the importance of low labor costs in Nano’s $2,500 base price. But Tata Motors’ new plant in Singur, West Bengal, is far from completion and has not been without controversy. Many farmers continue to complain they were forced off their land to make way for the new factory. Barring any further delays, the Singur plant should be churning out Nanos toward the latter half of 2008 and reach a production capacity of 350,000 units per year.
Ratan Tata does not rule out the use of satellite plants around the world — most likely in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Tata Motors has also ensured that parts vendors are located close to the Singur plant. The Hindustan Times reports tough competition forced the parts suppliers to keep their prices down, and this has helped keep the Nano’s price to the promised “1-lakh” ($2,500) level.
TAKE OUT THE OPTIONS
Tata wasn’t letting anyone slide behind the wheel of the Nano show cars in New Delhi. But we managed to snap some photos of the car’s Spartan interior. As you’d expect, there isn’t a whole lot to see. The gauges are in the middle of the dashboard — making the switch from right- to left-hand drive that much easier — and there is no radio.
The dash itself looks to be one huge single mold of grey plastic. The seats aren’t exactly what we’d call richly padded, though they look durable enough. Air conditioning and alloy wheels are available on the pricier “deluxe” models. For now there are no airbags, though Ratan Tata said these could easily be added at a later date.
Nano: The world’s cheapest car
With the $2,500 Nano, an Indian car company hopes to bring motoring to the masses of India, China, and the rest of the developing world. What would that mean for the environment?
Is a $2,500 car feasible? Ratan Tata certainly thinks so. He’s the 71-year-old chairman of Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate and the parent company of Tata Motors. Tata is at the forefront of a crowd of carmakers eagerly eyeing the emerging middle class in India and China, the two largest markets in the world. Close to 1 billion people in these countries are now enjoying their first taste of prosperity, and Tata is racing against Renault, Nissan, GM, and other carmakers to tap this potentially enormous market. After a few false starts, the $2,500 Nano is now scheduled to go on sale in India in April, while the other companies are at least a year away from bringing their cheap cars to market in China and elsewhere. “Now a car is within the reach of people who never imagined they would own a car,” says Tata Motors Managing Director Ravi Kant. How can Tata sell the Nano so cheaply?By cutting costs to the bone. The Nano’s tiny, 0.6-liter engine has only 33 horsepower. Its front and rear bumpers are made of plastic, not steel, and many parts are glued together rather than welded. There’s only a single outside mirror, on the driver’s side, and a single, center-mounted windshield wiper. The spartan interior features hand-cranked windows and manual steering and transmission. There are no three-point seat belts in the back seat, and no air bags anywhere. Radios and air conditioning cost extra. With car sales cratering around the world, the international automobile industry sees the Nano—and similar cars—as one of the few areas of growth on an otherwise bleak horizon. Environmentalists, though, are wringing their hands. Why are they so worried?If India, China, and other Asian nations put hundreds of millions of additional cars on the road, it will have dire implications for the environment. Indian vehicles already spew 219 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming. By 2035, India’s CO2 emissions could soar to 1.5 billion tons, thanks largely to the Nano and its ilk, according to the Asian Development Bank. Emissions on that scale would negate any projected emissions cuts in the developed world, virtually guaranteeing that efforts to halt climate change would fail. With projections like that, “I am having nightmares” about the Nano, says U.N. chief climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.How does Tata respond? It’s not the company’s problem, said Ratan Tata. “We never promised to make the world’s most eco-friendly car,’’ he said. “We only set out to make the most economical car in the world.” Besides, he notes, the Nano is much cleaner than the aging scooters and three-wheeled motorized rickshaws they’re likely to replace. Tata claims the car will get about 50 miles to the gallon and conform to Europe’s emissions standards, which are stricter than India’s. Its catalytic converter will scrub away about 80 percent of exhaust-pipe pollutants—though not carbon dioxide, which converters don’t capture. But that’s assuming the catalytic converter works as promised. Car maintenance is a foreign concept to many Indians, and the country’s pitted roads are rough on even the sturdiest components. If the Nano’s converter gives out, its emissions could increase fivefold.What about safety?The Nano certainly offers a safer ride than the motor scooters that now function as the family vehicle for millions of rural Indians. Every day in India, road accidents kill nearly 300 people—the highest traffic-fatality rate in the world. It’s not unusual to see a father driving a scooter along a pockmarked road with a child sitting in front of him on the tank and his wife sitting behind him, holding a baby. At the same time, though, the Nano promises to add as many as 2 million inexperienced new drivers a year to India’s already crowded roads. That translates to more accidents, injuries, and deaths. But despite these concerns, the company is projecting sales of 250,000 in the first year alone.Does that seem realistic?It does. The buzz over the Nano has been building for months in India, and its release in April is expected to generate huge national fanfare. “The Nano proves that the world is now India-centric,” crowed The Economic Times of India in an editorial. As for the environmental concerns, the emerging middle classes of the developing world don’t see why they should be denied the personal transportation that the developed world takes for granted. Rich Westerners, says Tata Motors boss Ravi Kant, “ask about congestion and pollution and global warming. I ask them, ‘Sir, will you stop using your car and take the bus?’”
A history of ‘people’s cars’The Nano is hardly the first car aimed at consumers who had previously been priced out of the market. Henry Ford revolutionized the industry in 1908 with the Model T. The first car to be built on an assembly line with standardized parts, the Model T was also the first car that an average working American could afford. Ford produced 15 million Model T’s from 1908 to 1927, in the process turning cars from a plaything of the rich to a middle-class necessity. Adolph Hitler adopted Ford’s idea of a car for the masses and made the development of a “volkswagen,” or “people’s car,” a priority when he took power in 1933. The VW’s distinctive beetle-like shape was not merely a designer’s whim. It was the first car to be designed using wind-tunnel testing. But the champion people’s car has to be the Toyota Corolla. The original Corolla, introduced in Japan in 1966, was priced at $1,700, within reach of the average Japanese worker. It was an immediate hit and set off a wave of private-car ownership in Japan. And the “just-in-time” manufacturing process that helped keep the Corolla’s cost low has been copied by industries from aircraft manufacturers like Boeing to retailers like Wal-Mart.