March 23, 2009, 9:30 am
World’s Cheapest Car: Boon or Bane?
By James Kanter
Bloomberg News Ratan Tata, the chairman of India’s Tata Group, which is poised to market the wold’s cheapest car: the Nano. Not everyone is thrilled.

For huge numbers of people in India the imminent introduction of the world’s cheapest car – the Nano – is a boon to families all over the developing world that currently speed around town on overloaded two-wheelers, often with an infant perched precariously on someone’s lap.

People across India have been saving money for months with the goal of purchasing the car, made by Tata Motors, a branch of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, and which will be priced at about $2,000. For many, it represents a leap, overnight, from the indignity of two-wheeled motor scooters to the relative luxury of four wheels and a roof.

For millions the car has become emblematic of their aspirations, as Vishal Bhatia, a Green Inc. reader in Mumbai, suggested in his comment the last time I posted about the Nano:

“I’m buying it because it gives a sense of freedom,” Mr. Bhatia wrote, “freedom to go to someplace in uncrumpled clothes, with my deodorant still being able to mask my body odor. But above all to see the look in my family’s eyes when they see it in person.”

Environmentalists, however, have decried the Nano and its low-cost imitators as an impending disaster. Certainly, the seemingly guaranteed success of the Nano may create more traffic and strain on India’s already rickety urban infrastructure.

And although the car may emit less greenhouse gas than some two-wheelers, it still has troubled officials leading efforts on global climate protection. Last year, the Nobel Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri, who is head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was quoted as saying he was “having nightmares” about the car.

Some commentators say that the achievement of introducing the Nano would be that much greater if only they were powered by something else than fossil fuels. They see the Nano as a missed opportunity to leapfrog the internal combustion engine.

From Elena Tudor, a Green Inc. reader in Romania:

[E]ven for those of us who recognize the dangers of continued reliance on car-based demographics, living patterns, etc., it is probably more difficult to dismantle our physical-economic infrastructure than it is for developing nations to build sensible transport systems which not only avoid adding to global CO2 emissions, but in the long run ought to provide a better living and working environment for those who can persuade their political leaders that this is the wiser course.”

Indeed, debate over the Nano points up an achingly similar question that has long plagued richer, car-centric countries in the West: How soon until governments develop truly effective multimodal urban public transportation systems?

Another Green Inc. commenter, Abhishek, in Delhi, wondered if Ratan Tata, the current head of Tata Group, might take up the mission: “Maybe that’s the next thing Ratan Tata can turn his mind to,” Abhishek said.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/worlds-cheapest-car-boon-or...