The World's Cheapest Car: Tata Nano

Some things are more important than politics, as we all know.  The children, for example.

Also personal transportation.  And today there was a milestone in personal transportation. 

You can get a measure of the excitement from Richard S. Chang of the New York Times reporting from India. 

Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

And now it is here, the 4-passenger Tata Nano, available for a price of 1 lakh rupees later this year.

The Indian media is naturally very proud.  The Hindustan Times reports:

Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs 1,00,000 "people’s car" unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi on Thursday will help the common man shift from two-wheelers to four-wheelers, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.

“This is a proud moment for India,” he said.

Unfamiliar with rupees and lakhs?  Oh, fie, what kind of a multiculturalist are you?

A “lakh” is 100,000.  The Indians also have another important number, the “crore.”  The crore is 100 lakh, or 10 million.  You can check out the Indian number system here.  One interesting aspect of this is that a crore is written as 1,00,00,000.  What do you think of that?

The confusion is that we have a mixture of Greek in “nano” and Indian in “lakh.”  Are you still with me?

OK, I’ll stop with the multi-culti stuff.  The Tata Nano comes in at $2,500.  Which is some kind of a price.

Some people are upset about this.  They are worried about saving the planet.  Imagine tens of crores of Indians driving around in these little Nanos!  It will kill the planet and cause glaciers in Greenland to melt.

But I am thinking of something more prosaic.  Right now, people of modest income in the developing world tend to ride around on 125ml Honda motorcycles.  Sometimes the whole family is draped across the bike.  This is not safe.  Now families can ride in their four-wheeled Tata Nano with its 2-cylinder 33 hp 660ml engine.  It will be much safer.

Other people are worried about “chaos” on the pot-holed rural roads of India.

There’s solution to that, of course.  Build more roads!  Most of the populated areas of India are dead flat, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.