More than 203,000 people made down payments on the new Tata Nano car in the two weeks following its launch on 9th April 2009.
Only about one in five of the sales were for the £1,300 base model, widely touted as the world’s cheapest car when it was first unveiled. Half the orders were for the top-of-the-range Nano LX.
Nano car sells big
The orders for the modestly-priced motorised, which is pitched at the millions of people in India who currently travel by bicycle and scooter, are worth over $500 million.
The first vehicles are expected to be delivered in July, but some customers will have to wait a little longer; the number of bookings is more than double what Tata is capable of building in the car’s initial production run.
It was always going to be popular, but demand for the world’s cheapest production car was such that those wanting to be the first to get their Tata Nano are having to enter a lottery.
What is the Tata Nano?
The TaTa Nano is a small-engined and extremely lightweight four-seater car which returns an average 50 miles per gallon; the car is India’s equivalent of the Model T Ford – a mass-produced, lightweight and affordable car intended to make motoring accessible to as many as possible.
The car has critics who fear the environmental impact if it eventually sells a million units a year in the sub-continent as predicted.
Andrew Davis, director at the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), believes that a lightweight car such as the Nano could provide a template for cars in the West: “We struggle to reduce our emissions of CO2 at the same time as even the smallest model of car is weighed down with features such as air conditioning, electric windows and ABS brakes.”. The Tata Nano in its most basic form costs £1300.
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