An obituary of a poor man's car named Nano
The Nano as we know it is finished. Figures in June were dismal marking a cul-de-sac for this cute little bumble bee: only one unit manufactured, three units sold in the domestic market and zero exports. While Tata Motors hasn’t officially announced its obituary, they’ve admitted that the Nano cannot continue in its present form.
As someone who comes from a two-yellow-Nano family, the family mourned the news by taking her out for a long drive and showering her with kisses. I sent another kiss flying heavenwards to my great grandfather who drove a Model-T Ford (a people’s car precursor of the Nano in automobile history) in Lahore in the 1920s.
The way Ratan Tata envisaged the Nano it was to be a car for the people. It was meant to provide the little Indian with a safer mode of transporting the family than the two-wheeler.
I grew up in Allahabad on the front of my father’s Bajaj Chetak. When I was too tall to stand in front, I moved to the middle of the scooter, sandwiched between my parents. It reached a stage when I just wouldn’t fit on the scooter; we switched to taking two cycle rickshaws to Civil Lines. The Nano was meant to change all this. It did for us, but not for the rest.
When the Nano was launched, it was greeted with scepticism and paranoia. Commentators presumed that millions of two-wheeler riding Indians would switch to the car, thus clogging the roads with even more traffic and adding to the pollution. This was an elitist criticism: only the well-off have the right to own cars. When the masses can afford it, it’s a crisis.
As it happened, the people the Nano was meant for rejected it. Later on, Ratan Tata accepted that it might have been a mistake to market it as ‘the cheapest car.’ Which brings us to the question: Who killed the Nano: the Tatas or the people for whom it was made?
The people. Ratan Tata had vision. Except that he — and nobody else — could have anticipated the peculiar psychology of the Indian car buyer. For the target consumer, the Nano was an emblem of her poverty. There was somehow more pride in riding a Bajaj Pulsar or the Honda Activa — two extremely popular small-town options, than in driving the Nano.
The Indian said: I will travel three to a scooter in pouring rain and baking sun, but I will not travel in a car. This no one could have foreseen. In the end the Nano was defeated by a mindset of cystic poverty: I’d rather wear tattered clothes rather than accept hand-me-downs.
There’s nothing wrong with the Nano. More Samsung mobiles caught fire than the hapless car. My friends from New York, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris and Toronto, sat in it, drove it, loved it. It was spacious, fun to drive with a single hand and had the best in-class AC. In small towns with narrow lanes and chowks, it was simple to manoeuvre and park.
Besides, it had character. It was the Pride of India, just like Old Monk rum. If the car we drive says something about us, the Nano said: To hell with status and the rat race. It was the poor man’s Mini Cooper. It was the ultimate anti-car.
The safety myth was illogical. A Nano was always going to be safer than two wheels. But Indians preferred skidding bikes and scooters on potholed roads than the stability of four wheels. At some point Tata ramped up the model; it tried to shed the “cheapest” tag. The ploy didn’t work.
It fell between stools: the lower middle class rejected it, so did the upper middle class, which could have chosen it as the second city car. At least everyone’s precarious aspirational pride is intact in a desperately poor country.
On Indian roads, the Nano has other incidental uses too. The humble nature of the vehicle deflates road rage. The transgressions of Nano drivers are forgiven with a smile. One doesn’t pose a threat. A poor society might reject the car out of its own poverty but the same poverty makes it respect the humble nature of the Nano owner.
Pedestrians don’t take you seriously, taking liberties while crossing the road. At times, I’ve run them over, which is fine, because the Nano is so light that people pop up from the tarmac after being run over and start walking again, like in old Hannah-Barbara cartoons.
Finally, reports say that Ratan Tata wanted to keep a limited production line alive for "emotional reasons". The sacked Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry termed the Nano a “legacy hotspot”, a monkey on the back. It should have been kept alive as a triumph of frugal Indian engineering.
In the final run, the crux of the problem that Ratan ran into lies in the old horse and water proverb. You can take an Indian to a Nano, you can even take the Nano to an Indian, but you can’t make him drive it. For the moment, it’s tata Nano, hello scooter, kind of back to square one after a decade.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)
Also read: How Tata Nano took middle class India for a ride