Tata Motors Nano Review

Tata Cars Reviews

Finally Tata Motors has launched their Nano Car , here are some more detailed news about it.

Meri News :

THE MUCH-awaited people’s car Tata’s Nano was unveiled today at The Auto Expo being held in New Delhi by Ratan Tata. Addressing an august gathering, he revealed that the car would be priced between one to one lakh twenty five thousand. This has already led to Tata Motors’ stock price going up by a good three to four percent.

If the car lives upto the dreams of the common man, then very soon the streets of the country would be teeming with Nanos. The car is aesthetically appealing, can accommodate four to five passengers, and has 21 per cent larger inner space than its nearest rival, Maruti 800 and 18 per cent smaller – bumper to bumper from the outside.

“After all a promise is a promise,” said Tata, “I had promised the people of our country a one-lakh rupee car. Here, it is.” He added that the car would provide real value for its price and would be cheap, considering it would cost only one lakh rupees to the dealers, exclusive of VAT.

The cute-looking car has been developed by a young group of engineers of Tata Motors using latest technologies. Suzuki, manufacturers of Maruti 800 had earlier quoted that building one lakh rupee car would not be economically feasible at all and how Tata’s would maintain the production momentum, by making it a commercially viable project, would have to be seen in the near future.

Nytimes.com

The company has kept its new vehicle under wraps, but interviews with suppliers and others involved in its construction reveal some of its cost-cutting engineering secrets — including a hollowed out steering-wheel shaft, a trunk with space for a briefcase and a rear-mounted engine not much more powerful than a high-end riding mower.

The upside is a car expected to retail for as little as the equivalent of $2,500, or about the price of the optional DVD player on the Lexus LX 470 sport utility vehicle.

The downside is a car that would most likely fail emission and safety standards on any Western road, and, perhaps, in India in a few years, when the country imposes tougher environmental standards.

But Tata is not looking to ply California’s highways. Instead, the company wants to provide four-wheel transportation for the first time to people accustomed to getting around on two, including hundreds of millions of Indians and others in the developing world.

Even so, the “People’s Car” (a nickname, since Tata has kept the real name under wraps, too) may ultimately affect what many people drive around the world, since it is part of a broader trend among carmakers to try to build less expensive cars.

“It’s basically throwing out everything the auto industry had thought about cost structures in the past and taking out a clean sheet of paper and asking, ‘What’s possible?’” said Daryl T. Rolley, head of North American and Asian operations for Ariba, which helps supply parts to Tata, BMW, Toyota and other carmakers. “In the next five to 10 years, the whole auto industry is going to be flipped upside down.”

The French-Japanese alliance Renault-Nissan and the Indian-Japanese joint venture Maruti Suzuki are trying to figure out how to make ultra-cheap cars for India. And struggling Western automakers are looking to see where the cost-obsessed ethos of the developing world can help their bottom line. In the most recent example, Ford was expected to announce Tuesday that it would make India its manufacturing hub for low-cost cars.

Some analysts are predicting that just as the Japanese popularized kanban (just in time) and kaizen (continuous improvement), Indians could export a kind of “Gandhian engineering,” combining irreverence for conventional ways of thinking with a frugality born of scarcity. Or, as Indian auto executive Ashok K. Taneja describes the philosophy, “When I need silver, why am I investing in gold?”

Some of the few people who have seen the car describe a tiny, charming, four-door, five-seater hatchback shaped like a jelly bean, small in the front and broad in the back, the better to reduce wind resistance and permit a cheaper engine. “It’s a nice car — cute,” said A. K. Chaturvedi, senior vice president of business development at Lumax Industries, a supplier in Delhi that developed the car’s headlights and interior lamps.

Driving the cost-cutting were Tata’s engineers, who in an earlier project questioned whether their trucks really needed all four brake pads or could make do with three. As they built Tata’s new car, for about half the price of the next-cheapest Indian alternative, their guiding philosophy was: Do we really need that?

The model appearing on Thursday has no radio, no power steering, no power windows, no air-conditioning and one windshield wiper instead of two, according to suppliers and Tata’s own statements. Bucking prevailing habits, the car lacks a tachometer and uses an analog rather than digital speedometer, according to Mr. Taneja, who until recently was president of the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India, representing many of Tata’s suppliers as they signed deals with the company.

Frugal engineering pervades the car’s internal machinery, too, with even greater implications for the vehicle’s safety and longevity.

To save $10, Tata engineers redesigned the suspension to eliminate actuators in the headlights, the levelers that adjust the angle of the beam depending on how the car is loaded, according to Mr. Chaturvedi of Lumax. In lieu of the solid steel beam that typically connects steering wheels to axles, one supplier, Sona Koyo Steering Systems, used a hollow tube, said Kiran Deshmukh, the chief operating officer of the company, which is based in Delhi.

Economic Times :

“Infrastructure is a major concern with India and I accept that we are behind our neighbours in the area. And India is working towards it with a new roads policy. But in the next five year, Tata Motors is only targeting to have 500,000 small cars that will constitute just 2.5 per cent of the total number of passenger vehicles in the country. With those numbers, the small car can hardly be an infrastructure nightmare as it is made out to be,” Ratan Tata said unveiling the company’s pride at the Auto Expo 08 on January 11 on Thursday.

The Nano with a 624 cc engine, will give a mileage of 20 kilometers per liter (50 miles a gallon). As per the safety norms, it has passed the full frontal crash test, the offset and side-crash test to meet the international safety norms. The legroom is expected to be 21 per cent more than Maruti 800. The car meets the Bharat 3 (Euro 4) emission standards.

The car that will come in two variants – AC and non-AC, will come at a dealer price of Rs one lakh plus VAT and transport charges.

“The car will cost one lakh and only because a promise is a promise,” he said brushing aside concerns over cost escalation and increase in raw material prices.

However, it needs to be seen, how Maruti Suzuki reacts to the challenge. It’s already offering its Maruti 800 at an ex-showroom price of 1.8 lakh. The winning edge will depend on Nano’s ex-showroom price that would be inclusive of dealer margins, taxes and transportation charges. The actual story is yet to unveil. On road prices of Nano will also include insurance and road tax component. So, the on-road price may actually go much beyond one lakh.

For the Tata Motors’ team, this just seems to be the beginning. The company is busy polling its prospective consumers on how best to pack the car with the features desired by most. On the company website, consumers have the option to exercise their choice regarding the air-conditioning, metallic hues, body coloured bumpers, front two power windows, central locking, fog lamps and more.