“Where’s our Nano?” we are not searching forour newest offering from Apple. The Tata Nano is the Indian designedmicro car selling for Rs 100000. it amounts to little more than anenclosed motorcycle without a lot of safety features, but it does haveits good points.
The biggest point in its favor is the price. At Rs 100000($2500) it isaffordable to many Indian families. However with banks refusing to makeridiculously small car loans most of the time there would have to beother financing available. The sort of traditional bank thinking thatsays there isn’t enough profit margin is what got us into a lot of thismess in the first place so maybe a little government intervention wouldbe necessary.
The second big point about why we aren’t getting the Nano is none ofthe other automakers nor oil companies want us to have cheap fuelefficient cars. At an estimated 47 mpg city and a top speed of 75 mphthis little car has the mileage people want and more speed than mostdrivers will ever need it for. This isn’t a very good highway car,that is for certain. I don’t want to have a wreck on the highway insomething like this, which leads me to the next reason we will neverget a Nano.
Safety is too big of an issue for Americans. There are no rearseatbelts, airbags or ABS in a Nano. Those issues could be remedied inan American version to a point. The big issue is collision safety. Rather than saying this isn’t meant for highway driving, deep snow,slick ice, or being irresponsible we are likely to let some mommy groupwho still think SUV are the best way to go because you can run over theother guy tell the engineers how our Nano should be built. When thatcommittee is done designing the car it will two tons and get threegallons to the mile only carrying the driver.
So what should our Nano have? The seatbelts in the rear are amust. The motor must be capable of running e85 ethanol at the veryleast. The issue with older cars was always the gaskets, so that couldbe fixed from the start. A small diesel engine could also be anoption. An automatic transmission is also a must, too few Americanscan drive a stick shift. It would need to be capable of seating a 6’4”driver and passenger in the front, which would cover 95% of people incountry.
In the end we have the know how and the facilities, not to mentionthe need for an inexpensive car. In my opinion we should be pushingfor government subsidies to get a number of small manufacturers makingcars just like this. We would put people back to work, fill a marketniche and move towards saving the environment.
