When Tata Motors unveiled its tiny Nano at the Delhi auto show in January, the car made global headlines. The Nano, with a 623CC engine that gets 50 miles per gallon, was to be sold for a mere 100,000 rupees, or about $2,500. It instantly won praise as a showcase of frugal Indian engineering and set competitors scrambling to reassess how cheaply they could make vehicles. "I hope [the Nano] will be the car that changes the manner in which people in...India travel," Tata boss Ratan Tata said at the time. Even better, he said, the company could do it at a profit.rnThat last promise may be the hardest to fulfill. To keep the price down, Tata has done away with most higher -margin gizmos found in modern cars. So commodities such as steel and rubber, which have soared in price recently, account for a bigger percentage of the Nano's cost than they do in other models. "There are some questions about [the Nano's] economic viability in this new, harder environment," says Tim Armstrong, emerging markets director at consulting group Global Insight.
展开▼
