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NEW DELHI — India's Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled its much anticipated $2,500 car, an ultracheap price tag that suddenly brings car ownership into the reach of tens of millions of people across the world.
While the price has created a buzz, critics say the vehicle, called the Tata Nano, will lead to millions more cars hitting already clogged Indian roads, adding to mounting air and noise pollution problems. Others have said Tata will have to sacrifice quality and safety standards to meet the target price.
I disagree - At this snapshot in time I feel like I can safely state that Tata isn't concerned about people's safety. They have a well established history of chasing profits at whatever cost (environmental, slave-wages/poor working conditions, political payoffs). It's a giant Indian conglomerate into nearly every industry with a world-wide presence and fundamentally as crooked as mega-large corporations can be. What they're doing is trying to break into the US, Chinese, and European Automobile markets. Since no one else has created such an affordable automobile, this might actually work. Even when you tack on the current costs of emissions equipment and tarriffs imposed upon imported automobiles there's a chance that this vehicle could be marketed in the US more affordable than others. Once tarriffs are lifted (assuming that our pro-Indian, pro-outsourcing political/economic stances strengthen as they have been over the years), US automobile makers will have a very tough time competing against Tata indeed.
NEW DELHI — India's Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled its much anticipated $2,500 car, an ultracheap price tag that suddenly brings car ownership into the reach of tens of millions of people across the world.
While the price has created a buzz, critics say the vehicle, called the Tata Nano, will lead to millions more cars hitting already clogged Indian roads, adding to mounting air and noise pollution problems. Others have said Tata will have to sacrifice quality and safety standards to meet the target price.
I wonder how many of those critics proffer their criticism from the the comfort afforded to them by a first-world post-industrial lifestyle. Righteous hypocrites.
I disagree - At this snapshot in time I feel like I can safely state that Tata isn't concerned about people's safety. They have a well established history of chasing profits at whatever cost (environmental, slave-wages/poor working conditions, political payoffs). It's a giant Indian conglomerate into nearly every industry with a world-wide presence and fundamentally as crooked as mega-large corporations can be. What they're doing is trying to break into the US, Chinese, and European Automobile markets. Since no one else has created such an affordable automobile, this might actually work. Even when you tack on the current costs of emissions equipment and tarriffs imposed upon imported automobiles there's a chance that this vehicle could be marketed in the US more affordable than others. Once tarriffs are lifted (assuming that our pro-Indian, pro-outsourcing political/economic stances strengthen as they have been over the years), US automobile makers will have a very tough time competing against Tata indeed.
Can you say "Yugo?"
The point being that the flop of the Yugo in America is evidence that even notoriously deal-chasing Americans have a limit at which they are no longer willing to trade off affordability against quality, at least when buying a large-ticket item like an automobile. Additionally, there is also a point where Americans are not willing to trade off safety (or the perception thereof) for price, which is partially why many European and Japanese sub-compacts never make it to market here. On a similar subject, you also omit one crucial barrier to entry to the U.S. market, and that's crashworthiness. It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to get a chassis/platform design to pass U.S. crash protection standards. There's no way an Indian version of the Citroen 2CV is going to end up in American dealer lots any time soon. In short, there are reasons why you can't get an "affordable" new car in this market any more, at least not "affordable" in the sense that Tata means it; and Tata isn't going to change that, ever.
I concur with Drover, the Tata Nano is not meant to be a car that will lead that company into the US auto market, nor the car markets of other large industrialized countries. It is a car that is designed and priced for attracting first time car buyers in the south Asia markets, which alone contains more people than Europe and North America combined.
I don't think the Tata Nano is quite the environmental disaster that some predict. If it replaces a few million of those horrible motorized three wheel carts (which I liken to hornets) with two stroke engines that belch out choking clouds of blue exhaust, that won't be such a bad thing. The specs on the Tata Nano say they are equipped with a catalytic converter and burn unleaded gas, and evidently meet the European Union smog emissions test. So at least in theory, they should be an improvement if they result in a reduction of the two stroke hornets.
The Tata Nano meets the Euro 4 standards so enviornmentally speaking it is not a disaster. BTW, we as Americans churn out the most green house so on the environment front we are in no position to dictate to anybody in the world.
In terms of safety I think the average speed of vehicles in Indian cities would be like 10-15 miles an hour. So "safety" is a relative term. At 10 miles an hour I think the Nano would hold up well. I don't think it is meant to compete on the US roads yet.
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