Saturday, January 12, 2008

Tata's new $2500 people's car.. Nano

I read the NY Times article about the Tata nano car. It is a good read, however the part about Elephants is wrong. We hardly get to see any Elephants in India nowadays. All references to India contain either Elephant or snakes, however it is so sad that they are not easy to find nowadays :( . I would have preferred them to the malls that are opening up every other day here .

But its true that the road discipline is non-existent. I imagine that after the nano, the roads will be used only as car-park in Mumbai .. and there will be only pedestrians.. all walking on top of the nanos 'parked' on the roads .

The car is good but the roads here are really bad. People here do not participate much in adventure sports, I used to think that it is because of some other reasons, but now I understand that an average Indian gets enough dose of adventure in his daily commute to office. After that, he is mostly content with watching the Americans jumping off the mountains or planes in search of adventure on TV :) and wondering why would somebody want to do that after a day out in the traffic???

Still, people have to travel in very unsafe transport. Seeing a family of a man , woman and an infant and maybe another child , all riding a scooter in such traffic is nostalgic ( as I used to be in the role of that infant once ) as well as worrying . A small affordable car can be of great use. However it will be a disaster for Indian roads . The cities here can be hundreds of years old sometimes and were never designed for any kind of cars..

That's why I am looking for the next Tata innovation .. a people's airplane  . I know it seems so incredible, but a 1 lakh ( $ 2000 car at that time's exchange rate) seemed as incredible at the time when Ratan Tata expressed his dreams.