Very small car!

A 624cc engine, producing 34bhp to power a four-door vehicle at a top speed of 105 kmph, at a fuel efficiency of 20 kpl (which converts to a whopping 40 mpg!)....this is the very small Tata Nano. The much talked about small car at Detroit this year where the theme was small and green.

How the Tata-Nano was born

Chairman Ratan N. Tata had told a Financial Times correspondent on the sidelines of the Geneva Auto Show that he was thinking of making a car that would cost about € 2,000. Adjusted against the then exchange rate of the rupee, that translated to Rs 1 lakh.

Jai Bolar, senior manager for development at Tata Motors’ ERC, recalls that the team entered the conference room armed with just a 60-slide presentation on all the low-cost modes of personal transport. The vehicles included motorbikes, autorickshaws, scooters and the company’s own Indica. “We had no clue as to what we were supposed to do,’’ says Bolar. “So finally, we asked him whether he could tell us what he had in mind.”

The next few minutes will, forever, be imprinted on the team’s mind. Tata, or RNT as he is affectionately called, held forth, exhorting the team to dream of building a low-cost car that would cost only marginally more than a two-wheeler and revolutionise personal transport in India. Show the world what Indian engineering is truly capable of, RNT told the engineers. “Make me also part of the team. Only in a country like India or Pakistan can a low-cost car be made,’’ he insisted.

The motivational talk worked. “We came back from the meeting all charged up,’’ says Nagabhushan R. Gubbi, head of engineering for passenger cars. Gubbi did not know, nor did the others, that they had just been impelled by arguably India’s most visionary businessman to create history.

Spluttering Start

The team made little progress over the next year and a half. It tried to source parts from around the world, even toyed with the idea of an open car with plastic or canvas sheets for protection. The problem was it was still thinking of making the motorcyclist safer. Two-wheelers continued to overtake the image of a car in their minds. “The biggest challenge when the project started was there was no brief, no benchmarks, and it had never been done before,’’ says Bolar. Even RNT had only the disturbing image of a family of four riding a scooter on wet roads and an unclear dream to help such families as benchmarks.

At Tata Motors, Jain is regarded as a pioneer. Jain redesigned the engine and increased its capacity to 586 cc. That appeared to be peppy enough and satisfy all parameters. While Tata engineers worked on the engineering of the car, Italian design house I.D.E.A., which also designed the Indica, was chartered with styling.

Beat But Not Beaten

Bolar says that since there was no precedent to the project, everybody had a number of concepts. “The management remained open, but the most challenging task was to define the specs,” he says. The Maruti 800 was the only benchmark to go by. And it cost more than Rs 2 lakh on the road.

Finally, in October 2006, Jain hit upon an optimal engine design. His creation had a capacity of 624 cc and squeezed out 34 bhp of power. “It was the first time that a high-pressure die-cast engine was made in India,’’ says Jain. In comparison, the first Maruti 800, which was powered by a 796-cc engine, delivered only 37 bhp.

Jain’s computer prototype was cast into a real engine in January 2007, when it was first fired. With a multi-point fuel injection system developed by Bosch calibrating the gasoline flow, the heart of the car was ready. Jain filed 10 patents for the engine. By the time the car was finished, the company had filed 34 patents in all; and some more are in the pipeline.

Since the project was inspired by two-wheelers, people who had worked in the two-wheeler industry were roped in, especially in sourcing. Rakesh Mital, who came from Yamaha, came up with the idea of using instrument panels similar to those in motorcycles. The panel in Nano’s dashboard was inspired by the minimalism of the clusters on the heads of motorcycles. Ideas for suspension, cables and lamps were inspired by scooters and motorcycles. The tall-design car has McPherson struts stabilising the front and uses a suspension similar to that of motorcycles at the back to balance for a higher centre of gravity and a rear-mounted engine.

An Idea Is An Idea

Often ideas came from unexpected sources. The team was struggling to reduce the cost of seats while complying with safety norms when RNT, a passionate pilot, who often shuttles between Mumbai and Pune by a chopper, had a brainwave. He thought the reclining and sliding mechanism of helicopter seats could hold a solution for the Nano. The engineers at Tata Johnson studied the mechanism and designed one for the car. The window winding mechanism of the car was also inspired by helicopter windows and done by IFB and Shivani.

The manufacturing team also introduced pokayoke, a Japanese term for mistake-proofing. Mirasdar, who made the prototypes, almost always had a suggestion that would end up reducing costs and simplifying processes.

If the Nano was one of the most anticipated events in automotive history, its launch has set the industry aflutter. “It’s a problem for Detroit,’’ wrote The Washington Post, “which is racing to enter India’s booming small-car market but will now have to completely revolutionise its production and distribution to compete.’’

Perhaps the most important comment came from Ford’s Executive Vice-President John Parker. “It is a groundbreaking product,’’ he said. “The Nano will cause people to think differently about the car. I have a lot of respect for Tata.’’ It seemed like poetic justice that the praise came from the company that had revolutionised personal transportation with the launch of the original ‘people’s car’, the Model ‘T’, exactly a hundred years ago. Curiously, every ‘people’s car’ has been launched in the eighth year of the decade!

However, Tata Motors still needs to align the commercial imperatives behind the car, analysts say. The company has invested Rs 1,700 crore in creating the Nano, which will yield wafer-thin margins. Analysts are concerned the company will have a hard time achieving the volumes before the Nano returns a profit. In fact, Tata Motors’
stock has been downgraded by rating agencies on this count as well as concerns over RNT’s bid to acquire the Jaguar and Land Rover for $2 billion. Analysts also seem unsure if a company can straddle a spectrum of products that ranges from a $1-lakh car to a Rs 1-lakh car. “That car doesn’t have airconditioning, power steering, air bags and other features. Do you dare to buy that kind of car?’’ Wang Chuanfu, chairman of Chinese carmaker BYD, was quoted as saying at the Detroit Auto Show.

In fact, the publicity the Nano has garnered globally would be worth more than Rs 500 crore.

The Last Mile

The launch was perfect, but the Nano has to go some more distance before it reaches the customers. The last stage of cost reduction is expected to happen in distribution. Tata Motors is developing an assembly kit for distributors who would stock completely knocked-down kits of the car at warehouses and assemble them on site. Carting CKDs to different parts of the country is expected to bring down costs as more parts can be transported in the same space that a fully built car can be moved.

To enable cheaper assembly at the distributor’s end, some parts of the car would be glued together instead of welded. “Usually those who make a small number of cars do such distributed manufacturing,” says Wagh. “Sometimes others do it to test the market. For the first time, it would be tried on a large scale.’’ Also, the car is still at the beta stage. Wagh says there would be more tweaking done by the time the first car rolls out of Singur later this year.

Already newly converted cynics are describing the car as revolutionary. The only person not fully satisfied is RNT himself. “It is not as revolutionary as I wanted,'' he said. “I wanted the car to be made from new materials, use new techniques, in a sense completely re-envisage the way cars are made. In that sense I am still not satisfied,'' he told BW.

For the moment, however, the cute-as-a-bug Nano is the cynosure of all eyes. And Ratan Tata has undoubtedly entered the hall of fame of automobile manufacturing.