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World's Cheapest Car Goes On Sale In India
Frankie70 writes "The Tata Nano — the car that caught the world's imagination as the cheapest ever — will finally be rolled out commercially on Monday in Mumbai in a mega event organised by Tata Motors. Ben Oliver, contributing editor, Car Magazine, London test drove the car in December, 08. These were his first impressions. This was his verdict: 'CAR's first ride in the Tata Nano felt far more significant and exciting than a first drive in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because this car's importance is immeasurably greater. It won't compete on dynamics or quality with European or Japanese city cars, but it doesn't have to. What Tata has achieved at an unprecedented price is astonishing, although we'd guess it will cost Indian consumers closer to £1700 when it finally goes on sale, six months late, in March 2009.'"
It will be available in Europe in 2011. Link.
"And honestly, is it really a good idea to enable more people to buy cars?"
I assume you don't own one, yes?
"I could see it if a very low emissions small car was available to the poor to help get the nasty junk off the road..."
Nano's emission would be far more benign than 2-cycle autorickshaws, not mention being far more safe.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The driving exam is a joke here. If you correctly answer 6 out of 10 multiple choice questions (mostly "guess the taffic sign" ones) you get a learners licence. Curiously, 9 out of 36 failed that in my class. 1 month later you get the full licence, provided that you can drive 100m without incident.
The traffic here is very chaotic already, but it's mostly motorbikes and 3-wheelers. Add more cars to the mix and you're asking for trouble. On the other hand the Tata Nano seems to be a scaled-up rickshaw rather than a scaled-down car.
TFA is 4 months old, and the price is way off. The base price is 100.000 rupees, or about $2000/£1350. You can still get 2 high-end scooters for that price, not one for £1700 like the article says.
Switzerland is overrun with SUVs as well, as is Germany. The trend may have been started in the US but Europe was quick to pick it up and give it momentum.
It's a British rag, so the gallons they refer to in the article are imperial gallons. In US terms, it gets 50mpg, not 60.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Ahahaha. Japanese SUVs are designed for the US. Go to japan or most countries in europe. The average car is half the size of what you see in the US. Coming back from Italy and Japan on my return I thought I entered a land of giant novelty sized vehicles. Japan also doesn't really use vehicles in the first place. I was on the road twice compared to the numerous times I was on trains, shinkansen and buses.
Most people in India have lived their entire lives without cars and didn't need it
The target market for this car is not people who have never had transportation. The target market is people who run their families around on scooters and mopeds, like this: http://images.quickblogcast.com/8849-8518/family_scooter.JPG
Nano's emission would be far more benign than 2-cycle autorickshaws, not mention being far more safe.
The irony being if pollution doesn't kill you having an accident in this car will, far more than other vehicles.
Obviously you haven't seen the 'other vehicles' they're driving now. Ever seen a husband riding a motorcycle along a highway with his wife on the pillion seat sitting sideways holding onto a child and not a single helmet between them? I'm not kidding. This thing will be a huge improvement over the death traps people are using right now.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Of course, the USA isn't doing too badly (relatively speaking) at controlling pollutants, although we're not doing especially well, either. Far better than China or India, AFAIK, although I'm not happy that my country is "better than the worst"!
The problem with the USA's and the EU's record on pollutants is that they tend to solve the problem by shipping pollutants to other parts of the world or they just dump them in the ocean. There is a famous plastic patch the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean between California and Hawaii. Plastic is way to overused and totally under-recycled. Is it really necessary for every candy bar to be packaged in a plastic wrapper? Does every pair of cookies in an Oreo package have to be packaged in their own little plastic pouch? What's the deal with single use plastic bottles? I don't remember my candy tasting any worse when I was a kid and that stuff was sold wrapped in paper or the Coca Cola tasting any different when it shipped in glass bottles. Another major pollutant problem is agricultural runoff. It isn't very visible to Joe Sixpack from the porch of his suburban home and it isn't highly publicised but that stuff can cause havoc. The problem with Algae bloom is well known in the Baltic Sea. To cite a US example, agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico which in 2002 measured some 8000 square miles, that's an area bigger than the state of Massachusetts. Keep in mind that this is just due to fertilisers. We haven't even begun to consider the effect of agricultural pesticides on the marine ecosystems and we all know how much faith the agricultural community, goaded on by the chemical industry, places in the lavish application of pesticides. Of course none these problems are unique to the USA, most countries put way to little effort into recycling plastic or putting some money into research into biodegradable plastic substitutes and very few of them are ready to do anything about agricultural runoff.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow