It’s time to say ta-ta to the world’s
cheapest car
The idea of the
world’s cheapest car was
conceived by Ratan Tata on a rainy day after he saw a family of four on a bike.
“The
fact of unsafe travel was bothering me,” Tata, the erstwhile chairman of the
Tata group recalled in an interview
in March 2011. “What really motivated me…was constantly
seeing Indian families riding on scooters, four or five on a scooter, maybe the
child sandwiched between the mother and father…on slippery roads in the dark.”
Now,
after a nine-year run, the Nano is ready to drive into the sunset, with the
Tatas announcing
earlier this month that the car will henceforth be
produced only on demand.
It was
in 2003 that Ratan Tata set out on his quest for the affordable
car—later christened the Nano—using the
resources of the group’s car company, Tata Motors.
Nano
did not just rewrite the story of affordable cars, it also altered the
34-year-old political history of the Indian state of West Bengal. The company
decided to build its plant
in Singur in 2006, about 50 kilometres from the state capital
Kolkata. Tata Motors planned to invest up to Rs2,000
crore and turn Singur into an auto city.
To set
up its sprawling factory, the then Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM)
government of West Bengal sought to take
over 997 acres of fertile farmland, sparking
a severe
backlash.
Widespread
protests broke out across the state, leading to the ouster of the communists
after over three decades in power. The state soon got its first woman chief
minister in Mamata Banerjee who had spearheaded the Nano protests.
Given
the political turbulence in West Bengal, the Tatas, in
October 2008, shifted the Nano factory to Sanand in
Gujarat whose chief minister Narendra Modi reportedly approved the
project over
just an SMS.
Finally,
in 2009,
the car was launched in two variants: a basic model priced
at Rs1,12,735 and the luxury version costing Rs1,70,335.
The
launch of one of the world’s smallest cars sparked unprecedented euphoria in
India and significant excitement across the world.
In
2010, around 9,000 units of
the Nano were sold. Since then, however, things have been on a
downhill.
By
2011, Tata Motors was selling a mere 500 units a
year. This drop in sales can be attributed to
various reasons, the foremost being safety. In 2010, a Nano caught
fire in Mumbai and over the next few
months, several such
incidents were reported.
Moreover,
the stigma of buying the “cheapest car” proved to be its undoing.
“It
became termed as a cheapest car by the public and, I am sorry to say, by
ourselves, not by me, but the company when it was marketing it. I think that is
unfortunate,” Tata
later admitted.
In
June 2018, only three
Nanos were sold and just one
produced at Sanand. The curtains may have
finally come down on a grand experiment in the Indian automobile sector.
An idea born on a rainy day
seems to have broken down irreparably by the rains in 2018.
Kamalika Ghosh
July 13, 2018 Quartz
India
https://qz.com/1326635/tata-nano-the-slow-death-of-the-worlds-cheapest-car/
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