Tata Nano: boon or curse?
With so much media coverage, from Indian newspapers to international magazines such as BusinessWeek, it was hard to miss the eagerly awaited the launch of Tata Nano – the one lakh Indian rupees (roughly US$2,500) car. Coverage has varied from one end where this is being hailed as a watershed event for global auto industry to being assailed as a curse that will clog the already crowded roads and contaminate the already polluted air further. Comments posted by readers to many of these articles made interesting reading. Many readers congratulated Tata Motors on its innovation and bringing the dream of car ownership a lot closer to a great number of people in India. A lot of readers from India were gung-ho about this event and one could imagine their chests swelling with nationalistic pride. In fact, a reader of one of these articles accused fellow readers of being nonobjective and jingoistic.
Media predictions are just that – predictions. A few years from now there will be hard data that will prove or disprove these predictions. One must credit Tata Motors for a tremendous amount of out-of-the-box thinking. For one, they had to control the costs and deliver the product at the promised price – the number, one lakh, was a single point USP and had to be met (pardon the pun) at all costs. That meant innovative use of parts, materials etc. and economies of scale. Also, the concept of knocked down kits and having local shops assembling cars before delivery instead of being assembled in a factory is a dramatic, disruptive concept. Facilities available in these local shops will be nowhere close to the advanced machinery available in auto factories. So the car would have to be designed for reasonably quick and efficient assembly with not so sophisticated technology. Management guru C.K. Prahalad has predicted that many new innovations will come from developing countries at the so called bottom of the economic pyramid. Perhaps, this is one of those instances. Or is it? Only time will tell.
Tags: automobiles, innovation
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