Skip to main content

An update on India's Tata Nano


It has been a few months since I checked in on the buzz surrounding the imminent production of the world's cheapest car: Tata Motors Nano--a four-person mini- with a two-cylinder engine and a base price around $2,500.

Several items of note:

1) Rising prices are also pushing at Tata Motors; while it will still be the cheapest car in the world, the Nano probably won't stay under $2,500 by the time production ramps up.

2) You won't find the Nano available in America any time soon, according to Auto Observer. The vehicle doesn't have air bags, doesn't meet US crash test requirements, and has an emissions profile equivalent to EU III, which places it about 2-3 years behind what it needs to have to be certified in the US. Tata Motors promises to it EU IV pretty soon, but it will need to get to EU V to be considered for US entry. (And the crash test hurdle may also be overcome soon, as well.)

3) Environmentalists are still up in arms about the Nano, because it will encourage several million more Indians to drive automobiles, and that's not seen as a good thing. According to an article at Truthout:

Many environmentalists believe the new vehicle, with a price tag half that of India's current cheapest car, will simply clog up already busy and broken roads and add pressure to an infrastructure that is badly buckling. They stress the need to develop efficient, modern and affordable public transport, especially in cities such as Delhi, which now has a new metro system but where the bus service is overloaded and often deadly.

"My first reaction when someone says they need to buy a car is to say don't buy it," said Soumya Brata Rahut, a spokesman for Greenpeace India. "But people are buying cars, I cannot stop them. The revolution in small cars means there will be more and more."

Asked yesterday whether he thought India had adequate infrastructure to handle the hundreds of thousands of new Nanos that Tata hopes to shift when it goes on sale in a few months, Mr Tata said: "I think there definitely needs to be more investment in public transport [and] I think that India does not invest in our infrastructure." But he said such things were not the responsibility of his company.


4) Indian infrastructure aside, Mr. Tata may well have the last laugh on his critics, as his company is known to be moving ahead with the world's first non-polluting, compressed-air automobile engine for a future version of the Nano. Here's the scoop from EcoFriend:

In addition to the 33hp (25kW) petrol version, Tata is expected to release an air-powered model running a compressed air engine from MDI Enterprises. The engine emits one-third the carbon dioxide of conventional motors of the same size. Cold air, compressed in tanks to 300 times atmospheric pressure, is heated and fed into the cylinders of a piston engine. No combustion takes place, so technically there is no pollution actually produced by the car. But the compression of gases might still do that.

Even then the new engine is an absolute boon to the planet and hopefully all those buying this car will buy one with this type of an engine to power it. A Nano featuring the air-powered engine would be able to travel up to 200km for just $3 worth of electricity. This will also please the environmentalists who have been worried about more pollution since the Nano hit production. Tata has no official word on this yet, but it is just a matter of time.


This raises an important point: while it can't solve everything, market innovation can produce unexpected (and positive) shifts in technological trends that upset the predictions of the high and the mighty. Climate change modelers have always had to deal with the difficulty that their models do not (cannot!) take into account technological changes. If, instead of hybrids and electric cars, another option like the compressed-air engine becomes viable, even if only in the massive markets of China and India, the change to carbon output would be massive. So while some environmentalists were castigating Tata Motors for trying to meet an obvious market need, the company's engineers have been conducting research on a technology with potentially world-changing implications.

And for profit, too.

Will wonders never cease.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...