World�s cheapest car arrives

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: Monday, 28. January 2008

At a price of about 100,000 rupees (about U.S. $2,500), Tata Motors' 4-door, 4-seater Nano is about half the price of its nearest rival, the 25-year-old Maruti Suzuki.

Introduced at the New Delhi Auto Show on Thursday, the Nano will go on sale in India later this year. The car has a 625 cc engine and gets about 50 mpg, or about 20 km per litre. The all-aluminium engine produces about 33 brake horsepower and it has a top speed of over 80 km/hr. (50 mph). It's rear-wheel drive with a multi-point fuel injection petrol engine.

Tata Motors is India's largest automobile company and is currently negotiating to acquire the Jaguar and Landrover brands from the Ford Motor Company. It sees the Nano as its version of "the people's car," following the legend of Germany's Volkswagen of the 1930s.

Speaking at the unveiling ceremony at the Auto Expo in New Delhi, Mr. Ratan N. Tata recounted how he observed families riding on two-wheelers, "the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby." It led him to conceive the Nano as a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family.

It took Tata Motors� engineers and designers about four years to develop the vehicle, Mr. Tata said.

Drivers.com article, June, '07

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