Can India afford Tata’s 1 Lakh car?

By Aditya Mhatre at 4 October, 2007, 1:03 am

About 2 years back, Mr Ratan Tata announced the ambitious dream of a Rs 1 Lakh car. He termed it as a compact people’s car which will revolutionize the car industry in India. The car is also said to be a rear-powered ( just like an auto rickshaw) and gear less. The car is in its prototypes phase is set to come out in 2008. The Maruti Udyog management thinks that rolling out a car at the 1 lakh price point is not feasible but lets not dwell too much on the cost because my concerns are towards the pollutions and the traffic congestion problem.

I am sure that Tata will sell a lot of these cars because people with families who owned a motor cycle might go in for the 1 lakh car which bothers me a bit because of the pollution that all these small cars might potentially create. Tata has also confirmed that it is going to be a fuel-based car and not a CNG/LPG powered car. Tata has also made it pretty clear that it wont be a high-powered car which means it would be city car. So then why couldn’t Tata create a green car ? They would have earned so many brownie points by going green. One of the reasons for not taking that route could be that the gas system is more expensive than a fuel based system but then the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) would have been lower which could have been used to market the car.

Another thing that bothers me is the traffic congestion that this car might cause. As mentiooned earlier, a lot of people would satisify their dream of owning a car by purchasing the 1 lakh car. Infact I see a lot of college going students using this car in the city as well. The roads of all major cities in India are already going though the traffic congestion problem so now imagine the problems that this car would bring to the cities. We simply don’t have the infrastructure to support the existing cars so adding a low-cost revolutionary car to our city streets would create havoc on Mumbai streets. An average car cost about Rs 3.5 lakh which is the cost of 3 low cost cars. Where is the parking space for all these additional cars. The city planners or the RTO should be able to foresee such problems right now. Will the city planners be able to create restrictive rules like they have done for auto-rickshaw?

All we can do for now is ask these questions and hope for the best.

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