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Tata People?s Car to d?but

  • The Mercury
image The $2,900 People's Car will be unveiled in India.

Will Tata be a hit sale or will the environmentalists ruin its chances?

India's “People's Car” has yet to be unveiled but some Indians are already raving about Tata Motors' new $2900 vehicle — despite environmentalists' fears.

Environmentalists predict a plague of ever-cheaper cars and ever-swelling clouds of climate-changing fumes.

Tata will unveil its 100,000-rupee car tomorrow.

Selling for less than half the price of the current cheapest car in the market, it hopes it will tap into the growing ranks of India's middle class — rather like the Volkswagen Beetle did in Germany or the Mini in Britain.

Several more-established middle- class consumers said it would make for an affordable second car.

Tata Motors says a lot of the fears are unfounded. It says the car will meet emission standards and car sales are already growing fast without the help of the People's Car.

 


Considering the cheapness of Tata cars do you think it would have a promising future in Australia?


 

Comments on this story

Displaying 2 of 2 comments

  • "Environmentalists"?? The article says this like it's a bad thing... I'm an environmentalist, I like living in a climate that can supply me with enough food to eat and export and that doesn't assault us with devastating storms too often. Call me crazy if you will. I do however also like driving and I can't wait until there is a viable alternative to burning hydrocarbons to get us around. Because really, this is a technological issue, one that was largely caused by badly designed technology and can be fixed with well designed technology. Anyway, CO2 emissions from cars are not even slightly the biggest problem, burning coal is far worse in terms of it's contribution to climate change. A bigger problem of having more cars on the road is that they simply take up more space than motorcycles (of which there are many in India). Since the dimensions for the People's Car haven't been released yet, let's use the Punto for the sake of comparison, it is 1.7m wide and 3.8m long. The Honda @125 06 scooter for the sake of comparison is 1.9m long and 0.7m wide. You could fit almost 5 (4.857 actually) scooters in the same amount of road space as you could fit one Punto.

    A. Wilson Posted on 10 January 2008 1:14am
  • It would have little chance of meeting ADR's, and the cost of achieving this would at least double the price, along with our huge taxes it would be closer to $10,000, still cheap compared to anything on our market.

    Adam McInerney of South Yarra Posted on 09 January 2008 3:24pm

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