NANO
01-13-2008, 04:12 AM
The Tata Nano is an automotive Post-it note, a pint-sized but breathtaking innovation.
With its single windshield wiper, lightweight aluminum parts and puny 33-horsepower engine, this Indian vehicle looks more like a circus clown car than a techno-sensation.
Yet, in The News and on the news, it's upstaging the sleek, ultra-powered vehicles even now rolling up the ramps into Cobo Center, generating international buzz with its $2,500 price tag and bare-bones attitude.
By all accounts, Tata Motors plans to put India on four wheels, touting the car as a breakthrough that will enable once-impoverished Indian families to become mobile and on-the-go. That vision isn't original: It's exactly what Henry Ford had in mind, and accomplished, here 100 years ago.
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<!--endclickprintexclude-->At $2,500, the car is cheaper than a Segway, the electrified and pricey pogo stick that was touted as the mysterious "It," then unveiled as an amazing American invention when it was introduced in 2001.
The Segway, balancing on two wheels to move one person around, is the conceptual opposite of a Nano: It's beautiful, sophisticated, so costly that its $5,000 price is rarely advertised.
The Nano isn't the car we Americans want. Instead, it reminds us how much we've come to expect.
In India, an emerging middle class wants nothing more than four wheels, a roof and a working engine. You need a catalog for our American wants: a regulated climate, heated and cooled seats, discrete places for purses, sporting gear and coffee cups. Seats that slide eight ways are nice. So's a DVD player for the kids in back.
In India, vast masses of people pine for transportation to get to work or to a park on the weekend. The Nano, to them, is a giant step up from a bicycle or a motorcycle: It's freedom for four.
Americans expect vehicles that are equipped like small residences, capable of mastering any terrain or social situation. To entice us, automakers depict our wagons and trucks fording roiling waters, perched on Western buttes, eluding snowy avalanches.
The Nano lacks a radio. We seek cars that soothe us with directions when we get lost, or beam us music from a distant satellite.
When your car says, softly, "Turn right at the light, 100 yards," why would you turn to look at a bottom-of-the-food-chain car that wouldn't stand a chance against a stiff breeze on the Mackinac Bridge?
We turn to look because the Nano is a car for the moment.
The moment when oil costs $100 a barrel, gas is veering toward $4 a gallon, and our American love affair with the car as land-lubbing cruise ship is wearing thin.
Simple. Plain. Audaciously economical. Look out.
Cute and cheap, it's Wal-Mart as wheels.
Laura Berman: Commentary
With its single windshield wiper, lightweight aluminum parts and puny 33-horsepower engine, this Indian vehicle looks more like a circus clown car than a techno-sensation.
Yet, in The News and on the news, it's upstaging the sleek, ultra-powered vehicles even now rolling up the ramps into Cobo Center, generating international buzz with its $2,500 price tag and bare-bones attitude.
By all accounts, Tata Motors plans to put India on four wheels, touting the car as a breakthrough that will enable once-impoverished Indian families to become mobile and on-the-go. That vision isn't original: It's exactly what Henry Ford had in mind, and accomplished, here 100 years ago.
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<!--endclickprintexclude-->At $2,500, the car is cheaper than a Segway, the electrified and pricey pogo stick that was touted as the mysterious "It," then unveiled as an amazing American invention when it was introduced in 2001.
The Segway, balancing on two wheels to move one person around, is the conceptual opposite of a Nano: It's beautiful, sophisticated, so costly that its $5,000 price is rarely advertised.
The Nano isn't the car we Americans want. Instead, it reminds us how much we've come to expect.
In India, an emerging middle class wants nothing more than four wheels, a roof and a working engine. You need a catalog for our American wants: a regulated climate, heated and cooled seats, discrete places for purses, sporting gear and coffee cups. Seats that slide eight ways are nice. So's a DVD player for the kids in back.
In India, vast masses of people pine for transportation to get to work or to a park on the weekend. The Nano, to them, is a giant step up from a bicycle or a motorcycle: It's freedom for four.
Americans expect vehicles that are equipped like small residences, capable of mastering any terrain or social situation. To entice us, automakers depict our wagons and trucks fording roiling waters, perched on Western buttes, eluding snowy avalanches.
The Nano lacks a radio. We seek cars that soothe us with directions when we get lost, or beam us music from a distant satellite.
When your car says, softly, "Turn right at the light, 100 yards," why would you turn to look at a bottom-of-the-food-chain car that wouldn't stand a chance against a stiff breeze on the Mackinac Bridge?
We turn to look because the Nano is a car for the moment.
The moment when oil costs $100 a barrel, gas is veering toward $4 a gallon, and our American love affair with the car as land-lubbing cruise ship is wearing thin.
Simple. Plain. Audaciously economical. Look out.
Cute and cheap, it's Wal-Mart as wheels.
Laura Berman: Commentary