Cheap car coming to India
Industrialized nations that have launched themselves into the automotive age have most always done so by introducing a cheap, simple, reliable machine that put the car within reach of average working people. Ours was the Ford Model T that took motoring out of the hands of the rich. India rather skipped a step in that process by mastering the urban dark arts of pollution before building a car that was within reach of the great mass of its people. That, it appears, is about to change with the introduction of a car that will retail for a base price of $2,500.
Do not expect it in American car showrooms anytime soon. For one thing, it hasn’t a prayer of meeting our crash-and-emission standards; for another, it may be a little too minimalist for American motorists, whose idea of frugality is vinyl seat covers.
The budgetmobile by India’s Tata Motors has no radio, power steering, power windows or air conditioning, only three instruments on the dash, a single windshield wiper, a belt-drive transmission, no trunk to speak of and cheap bearings that begin to wear out if the driver exceeds 44 mph, not that there’s a lot of danger of that with a 30 horsepower motor.But, as any impecunious American college student will confirm, any car is better than no car, and a true people’s car could reach sales of Model T proportions in India. And like the Model T did here, the joys of independent mobility could have quite a social impact on India’s heavily regulated society.
Not to disparage the development of the car – an automotive anything that sells for $2,500 is quite a feat indeed – but what seems to have happened is that Tata’s engineers, in a land without fairways and retirement communities, have independently discovered the golf cart.