The people's car Nano
Tata Motors has commercially launched its people’s car, Nano, promising to stick to the Rs 1,00,000 price tag for the base model.
“From today onwards, the product will be available in the showrooms… There will be three versions – the base version, which is the one we promised to the people of India and two upper tier versions…,” Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata told a news conference in Mumbai. The higher-end versions would have air-conditioning, power brakes and power windows, among others.
“We hope this day we will usher in a new form of transport,” Tata said, adding that the endeavour was never to build the cheapest car but to provide an affordable form of transportation. He, however, hastened to add that “we made a promise and that we’ve kept the promise.”
The bookings will commence on April 9 and deliveries are expected by early-July.
Six years ago, at the 2003 Geneva Motor Show, Ratan Tata unveiled plans to launch a car that would cost just Rs 100,000. The reaction was pure disbelief. Privately, many rival carmakers – Indian and foreign – ridiculed the idea as being impossible to achieve. That, of course, was the least of the challenges that Tata has faced in his efforts to make his dream come true.
Last year, the Nano project got nearly derailed when fiery protests erupted in West Bengal, the original site for the car factory. Gujarat quickly replaced West Bengal and, save for the minor hiccup of a delay, the project was safe. Today, as the Nano is launched, Ratan Tata’s huge dream is being fulfilled.
Tata’s dominating dream was to make cars, something he has always been passionate about. Transforming Telco (now Tata Motors) from making trucks and commercial vehicles into a carmaker wasn’t an easy challenge and like the stages of evolution, Tata set about the task in phases – first building pseudo cars like the Sierra and the Estate, which were only a step ahead of trucks, in the early 1990s to 1995 when he announced the first truly Indian car that that he famously said would be “a car with the Zen’s size, the Ambassador’s internal dimensions, the price of a Maruti 800 and with the running cost of diesel”. That was the Indica, which hit the roads in 1998 and became an almost overnight success. And now the Nano, the people’s car.
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