Word: carlies
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...car, which has four doors and seats four adults, doesn't feel like a lightweight on the road. I drove one on an empty test track at Tata Motors' main plant in the western Indian city of Pune and found that, while the interior is spartan, the Nano handles as well as any of the other low-end minicars available in India. The brakes lack feel and there's little storage space, but the car turned heads. Our photographer drove a bright yellow Nano - this one fully equipped with air-conditioning - through the highways, cobbled avenues and side streets...
...Tata Troubles While the company seeks to redefine the low end of the market, Tata Motors is struggling with its attempt to gate-crash the luxury-car segment. Last year, the Indian carmaker made auto-industry waves when it spent $2.3 billion to buy Ford Motor's lossmaking Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) business. Since then, demand for luxury vehicles has tanked, sales of Tata Motors other models have softened, and the company faces a looming deadline to refinance $2 billion in loans for the JLR deal. "That's a major cash-flow crunch for them," Jajoo says. The company...
...Nano's development could translate into a healthier bottom line down the road. One of these innovations is "distributed manufacturing." Instead of investing in expensive factories and hiring additional workers as sales volumes increase, Tata Motors plans to limit Nano production at its central plant to 500,000 cars every year. Beyond that, it will use satellite plants to build the car's components and distribute these in Nano "kits" to independent entrepreneurs - trained and monitored by Tata Motors - for final assembly and distribution. "They will become our dealers," Ratan Tata explains. He hopes the Nano will push the auto...
...This bold idea may take years to realize, but the Nano is a first step. Tata hopes the car's launch will encourage similar innovations throughout the Tata Group. Others envision the Nano as something even more: a way to connect and mobilize India's declining rural economy, creating new jobs, new infrastructure and a culture of innovation far outside the big cities. "It's kind of like the iPod," says Tarun Khanna, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the Tata Group for years. The Nano is a blank slate, he explains, that makes people think, What...
...millions of people in the developing world, their shiny new Nanos could greatly add to traffic congestion and air pollution in major cities. Tata doesn't see it that way, calling complaints about the potential environmental impact of widespread Nano adoption "somewhat ironic." "It's almost like a car is O.K. for some people, but don't spread it to the larger base of the population," he says. "Why are we denying the masses comforts that we enjoy today?" There are millions of other families still in India, still piled onto motorcycles, who have asked themselves that question...