World’s Cheapest Car Gets 56 MPG; First Delivery On Schedule - Today
Today, the first customer to get a Tata Nano will take delivery of the world’s cheapest car, at $2,053 - and right on schedule. Tata had announced the first deliveries would be in July of 2009 when orders were first taken earlier this year.
For a gasoline car; the Nano has astounding mileage ; 56 mpg while producing emissions of just 101 grams of CO2 per km, lower than even European requirements, forget about the U.S. (We have none: the sky’s the limit - literally)
Even more surprising, just old fashioned simple tech makes this price and mileage possible:
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While many industrial designers fall over themselves to create more and more uselessly elaborate products, the Nano is based on the simple ways. It’s almost like a car the 19th century Quakers might build:
It uses some pretty lean design principles. You roll down your own windows. You do without a trunk door. For those who can’t imagine how that is done; you open the back door and lean in with your groceries, pulling the back seat forward and placing the groceries behind it.
Ratan Tata points out none of the fuel saving technologies are revolutionary or represent earth-shaking technology. He said most relate to rather mundane items such as the two-cylinder engine’s balance shaft, and how the gears were cut in the transmission. Embodying a “contrarian philosophy of smaller, lighter, cheaper” the Nano weighs only 1,300 lbs, and gets by on the amount of horsepower needed to move 4 people and no more. Revolutionary.
Ratan Tata has gone back to the visionary example of Henry Ford who wanted to make a car affordable on the salaries that people actually made.
As we in the first world all gravitate down to a low third world income standard, Ford’s idea is more salient than ever.
Ford’s Model T debuted in 1908, well before banks figured out how to fleece wannabe-consumers with usurious credit in order to even afford the technology they built. Nano brings us back to Pay As You Go prices for transportation.
The Nano recently passed European crash tests and will come to the U.S. once we get desperate enough.
Photo by Shrawan Raja for India’s Autoblog
Via Autoblog Green
Finally, it looks like a car that actually gets great mileage can be VERY affordable. I think they will sell like hot cakes (in the US). If the price of gas were at $4.00/gal. the Nano wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough. First customer? Mr. Ashok Raghunath Vichare of Mumbai. From Tata’s website:
” About Tata Motors
Tata Motors is India’s largest automobile company, with consolidated revenues of Rs.70,938.85 crores ($14 billion) in 2008-09. Through subsidiaries and associate companies, Tata Motors has operations in the UK, South Korea, Thailand and Spain. Among them is Jaguar Land Rover, the business comprising the two iconic British brands. It also has an industrial joint venture with Fiat in India. With over 4 million Tata vehicles plying in India, Tata Motors is the country’s market leader in commercial vehicles and among the top three in passenger vehicles. It is also the world’s fourth largest truck manufacturer and the second largest bus manufacturer. Tata cars, buses and trucks are being marketed in several countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South East Asia and South America. (www.tatamotors.com )”
I think this will be a great transition car until electric vehicles or hydrogen vehicles come into the mainstream and get affordable.
And here we are in the USA still “laggin’ ‘n draggin’”. It’s quite embarassing to say the least.
http://www.tatamotors.com
A fascinating start but let’s hold off the applause ’til they publish their HC, NOx and CO emissions. Anyone can make a $2k riding lawnmower (sans blades).
Ok, so we are builting new cars for the future, has any body thought, can these cars travel up hill??? can they pass other cars safely, with 4 people, how fast do they travel??? I don’t see these questions being asked……….. can they be answered????
Hi Susan, I was busy writing and then I decided to follow the old rule, “if you can’t say something nice then it is better to say nothing at all”.
I am not whatsoever impressed with the ‘thing’! 624 cc’s and a max speed of 65!
In the Nano, Tata’s built the the dream car of Rajiv Gandhi - the one lakh Rs car and is intended to make cars affordable to the lower middle class of India. For the lower class 2,000 USD is still a fortune.
Congestion will get worse.
The sense of community in small towns will be degraded as people start working farther from home.
More good farmland will be paved over causing more water pollution.
But if a society had to choose between smaller families or the liberating and empowering results of personal transportation, I’d go with the latter.
I will take my 92′ Dodge 250 PU. Only 12 miles to the gallon, BUT I DON’T USE IT TO COMMUTE, it is a tool
for my small ranch. I doubt if I put more than 3,000
miles on it and the ‘tata’ will not pull my small
horse trailer uphill! I’m working on a hydrogen-powered motorcyle right now and am switching my 67′
International Firetruck to propane, ’cause it is cheap right now AND they deliver it to my ranch with a smile on their faces and call me ’sir’…go figgur!
It’s a great boon for India, but it wouldn’t fly here because of safety and emissions standards. Buy a used 3-cyl Geo/Chevy Metro hatchback (GM/Suzuki made them from 1989-2001) and you’ll get a taste of the Nano. It’s USA’s most recent version of basic transportation and nothing more and it gets 50-55 mpg with manual transmission (buy a ‘95+ to get dual front airbags).
Ya, I don’t get it I don’t see anything eco-friendly about this. Did the author of this article totally miss the news about the new Tata port at Dharma? “TATA’s giant port at Dhamra, which threatens the nesting grounds of an endangered turtle species.” For more about the Tata’s environmental destruction check out: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/tata-turtles-nano-debut-031909
i think it is a piece of garbage
the most ill ever use it for is an ATV cause its cheaper
ill be too embarrassed to drive it
I can see it now a world full of tiny little cars all trundling along like a colony of soldier ants looking for food,in this case its oil, the roads in india will have to be made much better or that little car needs to have good suspension to cope with pot holes and animals everywhere.
The 200o bucks in the USA will be 2000 pounds in the UK and very few people will be able to afford one of these cars, people will soon be able to buy a decent second hand motor for about half that price, all our scrap will simply return as a TaTa, after wasting much of our remaining energy being transported half way around the world.
Bring back some of the older skills and save much of the remaining oil and ready energies for a rainy day not acid rain which will destroy most of China’s crops and forests, like it was in the early 20th century.