Tata's U$2500 car

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Ciro Pabón
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Joined: 11 May 2005, 00:31

Tata's U$2500 car

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One windshield wiper, 35 hp, 600 cc Bosch engine, wheel bearings rated for 70 kph, top speed of 75 mph, trunk space for a suitcase (barely), belt driven CVT, no radio, no power steering, no electric windows, speedometer, odometer and fuel gauge only. This guy is a genius.

“In the next five to 10 years, the whole auto industry is going to be flipped upside down.” I bet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/busin ... iacar.html
Ciro

modbaraban
modbaraban
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007, 17:44
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Couldn't they just made it $30 more expensive to throw in a cheap stereo? :roll:

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Rob W
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Joined: 18 Aug 2006, 03:28

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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I agree Ciro... but cannot believe that some nay-sayers, no doubt given encouragement by larger auto companies, are saying that the car will cause environmental problems because so many will be sold. It puts the power to buy a car into the hands of people who previously couldn't afford one.

I say, for every one of these cars bought, it'll take a 2-stroke motorbike/tuk-tuk off the street somewhere which has to be an improvement.

Also, they might not pass emission standards in most western countries but the next version easily could. A lighter, lower HP car makes sense in so many ways (less tire wear, less brake wear, less emissions, etc) and once they add in ABS, crash tested design changes etc they'll be able to be exported into lots of places which could really use them.

R

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Ciro Pabón
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Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Well, modbaraban, in my (third) world, the first thing people does when buying a car is buying a stereo with mp3 and CD. If you install a U$30 radio, these are U$30 that are going to be thrown away.

Tata has been thinking a lot on the path of "do we really need that thing"? Look at the "bearings example": they save money using cheaper ones, they are easy to change by the people themselves, using better ones if they wish, and they are not a safety hazard when they fail.

I think that the idea is to change bikes for cars for a lot of (poor) people: they don't have stereos or luggage space today. Actually they don't even have a roof. You should see the figures: in Colombia, at least, the invasion of cheap chinese motorcycles have DOUBLED the number of bikes IN TWO YEARS. The market is saying something (at least to me).

I don't know how things are getting along in Kiev in that respect, given the wonderful weather bikers must enjoy there... but here we have 3.000 mm of rain a year and people don't give a rat buttock about it: it's always better to ride a chinese bike than to ride a crowded bus, specially if you've never owned a car. ;)

The only thing I would not compromise is safety: these cars are the ones that are going to be used by the masses of the world, masses that are "illiterate" when you talk about good driving. I'm talking here about people that does not live in Europe (well, not in what Europe used to be) or in America. I believe as I've said (too) many times that Europeans and Americans will use that kind of cars once oil reaches U$200 a barrel, but that's another story.

I wonder, as I've done (too) many times, if these people (we, the people) deserves a similar design for a kart and if road designers can make tracks out of current roads. By we I mean "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; ... the homeless tempest-tossed ... I lift my lamp beside the golden door". Of course, I can easily guess that when Mrs. Emma Lazarus wrote that she meant "racing line" instead of "golden door" but that's just poetic license. :)

By the way, the lamps of Tata's car do not level when the car has greater load... but they seem golden to many. ;)

This way, by provinding racing for the people when young, the massacre by accidents that we will see once these cars bump into a SUV monster would be less.
Ciro

Carlos
Carlos
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Joined: 02 Sep 2006, 19:43
Location: Canada

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Sounds good to me ... maybe needs higher spec wheel bearings, reminds me of the first car we took apart, put together and drove... a little Isetta with a BMW twin... remember those 360cc Japanese cars? You never had to lift off for a corner ... ever. How many cars gain that compliment?
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modbaraban
modbaraban
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007, 17:44
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Ciro, first of all let me deflate the myth about a piece of Siberia located right at the geographical centre of Europe (which is about where Ukraine is). There’s no snow lying on the streets for the whole year. The temperatures can go below 0 Centigrade only in winter. And when they do it’s not far below (except for 1 or 2 weeks-s-s-s l-l-l-l-l-l-lik-k-ke n-n-n-n-now 8-[ ). During the other 9 months the weather is quite okay for bikers, unless u wanna wear leather clothing when it gets tropically hot in the summer.
The reason for comparatively low popularity of 2-wheeled transport is the…. traffic... and it’s behaviour... you don’t wanna be on those streets driving anything smaller than a middle-size sedan or hatch. While SUVs are exceedingly popular, I wonder what would happen if tanks became road-legal.
And yes, you are completely right about the cheap stereo. For some reason I though if there’s no stock stereo, so there’s no slot to install it. My bad.

Carlos, I don’t think it’s the case, and I can’t agree with your comparison with old small cars. Times had changed. Cheap cars were repairable back then, now they tend to be recyclable and just that.

Finally, one of the Top Gear’s best, imho. Guess what? It's about small cars :shock:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=patvUFyIa1I
Last edited by modbaraban on 09 Jan 2008, 03:06, edited 1 time in total.

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Ciro Pabón
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Joined: 11 May 2005, 00:31

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Well, that's an excellent point. I wonder if Tata will think about it: to "install" the radio slot and perhaps parts or most of the wiring needed.

About the weather in Kiev, my mistake. We have the same weather in Bogotá. We call it "middle weather": half of the time you're freezing and half of the time you're sweating.

On the other hand, googling around, I might have been thinking about Sumy, Ukraine, where I hear they had minus 31 celsius during last winter, an incomprehensible temperature for me. Actually, I'm sure there is ALSO no need for energy-recovery systems in Sumy's winters: you want 60% (or more!) of the output of Tata's 600 cc engine to be converted into heat and directed into the cabin. :)
Ciro

MrT
MrT
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Joined: 17 Jan 2006, 11:32

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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I'm much more excited by Gordon Murray's T25 project.... But this looks like a similar, good idea also.

http://www.gordonmurraydesign.com/LN_T25.html

modbaraban
modbaraban
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007, 17:44
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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MrT wrote:I'm much more excited by Gordon Murray's T25 project.... But this looks like a similar, good idea also.

http://www.gordonmurraydesign.com/LN_T25.html
gordonmurraydesign wrote:It must be "cool", something to be seen in such as the original Mini, the Fiat Cinquecento and the Smart
An affordable yet cool car is definitely something to be seen these days. The last one was the original Mini or VW Kaffer?
I'd definitely be the one to buy the 'Mini of 21st century' described there.

@ Ciro
- 31C happens rarely here and there. When it does it's not for long. The thermometer showed -6C today.
Ciro Pabón wrote:We have the same weather in Bogotá. We call it "middle weather": half of the time you're freezing and half of the time you're sweating.
That's a revelation to me. Can't imagine freezing colds in Colombia.

leomax
leomax
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Joined: 27 May 2006, 05:57

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Its launched,Nano is the name given to it.Euro4,its said to pass crash tests.
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/tata-unveil ... 046-7.html
http://www.ibnlive.com/photogallery/627.html

manchild
manchild
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Joined: 03 Jun 2005, 10:54

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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That's the way to go. Modern auto industry sells you more furniture and electronic gadgets in a car than what's the value of car itself! Car is for transportation, not for warming your butt and having back massaged while browsing the web, playing computer games or watching DVD!

Ford T, VW Beatle, 2CV, FIAT Topolino/500/600, Renault 4CV, Dauphine, 4... those were real means of transportation. Tata Nano is continuing where they've stopped.

Bravo TATA!

Tp
Tp
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Joined: 02 Mar 2006, 15:52
Location: UK

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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I'm not so sure...

If you (like many Indians) don't buy it, it just means instead of being hit by a bike, you're gonna be hit by a car......And you will be hit, as the driving tests in India are completely inadequate.

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Ciro Pabón
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Joined: 11 May 2005, 00:31

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Thanks, tp. I've said a couple of times how worrying is for me the number of people dead by driving, explaining that the reason that brings me to this forum is to learn from the racing world how to make better drivers AND better roads, in hopes that, some day, racing will be a school mandatory subject and civil engineers will have at the tips of their hands the same tools racing teams use today for simulation of car behaviour.

Today we learn a lot of things at school, from the binomial theorem to the bones of the body, but maybe few are so practical and related to life itself as the subject of learning to drive: not by a mere 30 hours (or something like that) of practice, when you're already 18, but through several years of education at school. The situation of drivers in the third world is abysmal. I quote:
"NEW DELHI — A few weeks ago, the traditional Indian joint family household of Vineet Sharma, a fertilizer industry consultant, achieved a long deferred dream. Having ferried themselves on scooters all these years, the Sharmas bought a brand-new, silver-gray hatchback known as the Tata Indica.

Never mind that none of the six adult members of the household knew how to drive. No sooner had the car arrived than Mr. Sharma, 34, took it for a spin and knocked over a friend. His brother slammed into a motorcyclist, injuring no one but damaging the bumper. The brother was so scared that he no longer gets behind the wheel, except on Sundays (NOTE: !), when the roads are empty.

“We bought it first, and then we thought about driving,” Mr. Sharma confessed.

This week, as Tata Motors unveiled the world’s cheapest car, the $2,500 Nano, and automakers from across the world came to New Delhi to peddle their wares to a bubbling Indian car market, Mr. Sharma began to think about his driving.

He enrolled in a weeklong driving course and dived headlong into the madness of the morning commute in a beat-up Maruti 800. Its odometer had long ago stopped working, and it carried on its roof a sign for the driving school, accompanied, improbably, by the smiling face of the animated movie character Shrek. He wasn’t going very fast and said he was very nervous.

He had good reason, for his first real foray on four wheels revealed how many hurdles still hinder the new Indian romance with the road. Amid a cacophony of horns, a blood-red sport utility vehicle weaved between cars, passing Mr. Sharma within a razor’s edge on the right. A school bus snuggled close up on his left. No one seemed to care about traffic lanes. Cars bounced in and out of crater-size potholes."
I know too well this situation: I've mentioned how I've picked up broken bodies from car wreckages in my country, and, believe me, it's not something you forget easily.

I would also like to mention the fact that some people is worried by the fact that these millions of new cars have to be made in a better way. I've always thought that the third world, that is, the majority of humanity, has to find its own new, innovative way: we cannot copy the american or european way, they've not done it well, sorry for saying it this way, pals! :)

This is the people that needs this kind of car, but I propose to deliver a better one
Image

If we extrapolate the problems that a mere 600 million people have caused until now, and multiply them by 10, this world is going to be a true sh..t. That's the base scenario: we get a car like the ones in the movies, but for everybody... That might be the dream of some, but it's not good enough for me. ;)

We can learn from "them", but "they" are not going to come "here" to solve our problems, we have to develop our own solutions. We have to think in a new, more ambitious, more exigent way. We cannot be happy by "being like them", we have to show "them" how to make things correctly. I quote again, an inspiring quote (at least for me):
"We envision a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people on average range hundreds of kilometers daily. We believe this prospect of ‘green mobility’ is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behavior over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation."
Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport
Ciro

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HKS
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Joined: 05 Mar 2007, 06:37

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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Its time for India to show the world, what it is made up of.

Tata Steel, Mittal industries, Tata Group of Hotels (Indian hotels), Tata Motors,Reliance, Wipro , Infosys and many more are undergoing globalization very rapidly.China,India is all ready to outperform you.
Racing cars are neither beautiful nor ugly, they are beautiful only when you win races.

manchild
manchild
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Joined: 03 Jun 2005, 10:54

Re: Tata's U$2500 car

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I wasn't praising this only India-wise. Driving in India is what it is. I guess that 8 people in 2 Nanos that crash will still be safer than 8 people in 2 moto-rickshaws that crash.

It is a global achievement. This car will overflow the streets worldwide. Why pay 5000 euros for one Logan if you can get 3 Nanos for the same price? That's the bottom line. Logan covered certain part of the market but it is still too expensive for millions who dream about owning a car. Just wait till they make pickups out of Nano. It will boost the economy in poor countries.

How great it would it be if Guy Negre's MDI could be made cheap and implemented in Nano!

BTW, what does this mean (found it on official site):
This is the first time that a two-cylinder gasoline engine is being used in a car with single balancer shaft.
What balancer shaft? I don't think there were any balancer shafts used in 2CV or in FIAT 500/126 engines.