Tata kills the world’s cheapest car that nobody wanted.
I worried about its implications in 2008.
Daniel Kessler worried:
But in fact, the Nano never did catch on, and according to Bloomberg, it is now dead. They are blunt: “While consumers may be value-conscious, cutting costs to the bone in pursuit of a gimmicky claim to fame is no use if the end result is a second-rate vehicle with a tendency to catch fire.”
That is unfair; it actually was an impressive bit of engineering, the same kind of design thinking that went into the Beetle. Smaller tires used less rubber and only three lug nuts instead of four, every component was designed to be cheaper and easier to put together. The company got 35 patents on its innovations. It was all about “frugal innovation”, a term we love here at TreeHugger.
The problem is that it was, in fact, too cheap. Mahendra Ramsinghani wrote in 2011 in the MIT Technology Review that it was already a bust:
Today, Bloomberg is pretty much confirming that opinion, suggesting that the car was misconceived. They say Tata is considering a relaunch as an electric car, given the government’s push for electric cars, and conclude “that’s misguided. Ultimately, the barrier to electric cars is high costs, making the technology unsuitable for an ultra-low-price brand.”
I think that’s misguided. The Nano was light and small and had a top speed of 43 MPH; that makes it easy and cheap to electrify compared to a full-sized car. But it raises the same questions we had about the original Nano, and our April Streeter gets the last word from her prescient post in 2009:
