For decades, Detroit has been the center of the automobile world and home to the Big Three auto giants.The $ 2500 price tag astonished a country where the cheapest listed car is the Chevy Aveo, which costs about $10,300 in a stripped-down Value version. "You can now buy a pair of Tata Nanos for about the cost of breast enlargement surgery," chortled one blogger, in a society that appears to be as obsessed with the human anatomy as it is with an automobile chassis. "If all the gas-guzzling SUVs on US roads were replaced by Tata Nanos getting 50 mph, would the US meet its obligations under the Kyota Accords?" .Tata mantra is important, for India just as much as the UK. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's Britain gave Nissan permission to become the first Japanese carmaker to set up a production facility in Europe. Nissan's spit-and-polish plant in Sunderland breathed new life into one of England's most depressed areasit and as Jones points out "within four years, the top 10 auto component manufacturers in the world were there". The Indians, he says, can repeat that, to considerable profit for themselves.
The Nano has a monovolume style but with clever thought to enhance useable occupant space while reducing the overall length to occupy even lesser space on the road. At just a shade over 3.0 metres in length and 1.5 metres wide, it has a twin-cylinder engine that's placed horizontally at the rear and drives the rear wheels via a four-speed transaxle. The placement of the engine has helped give a low flat floor and good cabin space. An upright seating stance helps the four occupants survive the cut and thrust of the city commute with reasonable comfort. Given its proportions, the car should be easy to manoeuvre.
The engine is a 623cc twin-cylinder SOHC unit featuring multi-point fuel injection with about 34 bhp on tap. A great deal of innovation has gone into the drivetrain and its placement and the company seems to have truly pushed the limits on the engineering front with over half the 34 patents its team has filed pertaining to the drive train itself. One of the key patents is the introduction of a balancer shaft to iron out the typical primary bad vibes from a twin-cylinder engine.
Balancer shafts are used in both high performance motorcycle engines and for high performance motors in rally cars. The incorporation of such a detail displays the logic applied. Thinking differently yet logically has made the Tata boffins attain their minimum performance goals. But more is likely to come from this engine.
The zeal to reduce weight, so as to garner the best on-road fuel efficiency has seen Tata come up with tubeless tyres on the Nano. Similarly, innovative bonding technology of glass to the metal – employed on the tailgate – the ribbed roof to build in more strength and rigidity without adding more material have all played small but critical roles in slashing materials costs and weight resulting in the car's fuel efficiency
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