Tata buys British brands

Jaguar and Land Rover, British motorings two best brands, sold first to the American company Ford Motors have once again changed hands. Tata Motors, who made the very small car Nano for their home country of India, have bought these British brands for £1 billion.

beautiful models say goodbye to the Jaguar XF

Interestingly Tata Motors is a group company of the parent Tata Sons, which has been doing business in India for more than a century! And in the last few years this group has started to expand globally——Tata Tea bought another British brand Tetley in the year 2000, another group company Indian Hotels is trying to acquire the American hotel chain Orient Express, while last year Tata Steel paid $13 billion for the Anglo-Dutch Corus Group.

In fact over the last eight years the Tata Sons group companies have made 35 overseas acquisitions, including coal and iron ore mines, totalling $17.79 billion. Tata Motors got the British brands, Jaguar and Land Rover, fairly cheap at the price of $2.3 billion. Because Ford itself had paid $2.5bn to acquire Jaguar in 1989 and $2.7 billion for Land Rover in 2000!

Moreover both brands have come out with exciting new cars, the Jaguar XF (pictured above) and the Land Rover's LRX Concept.


So why is Ford selling?

It is short of cash, having suffered global losses to the tune of $2.7 billion in 2007 and a whopping $12.6 billion in 2006! Ford had already sold another British band, Aston Martin last year as it tried to cover those losses....it now retains only the Volvo brand.

But Tata Motors itself is not in such rosy shape after buying the two British brands. When the deal was first announced a month or two ago, Tata Motors shares had a market worth of $5.9 billion, having fallen 20%. Tata Motors also needs capital to help pay for the manufacture of its Nano, the world's cheapest car, due for launch in the second half of this year.

So the company mandated the State Bank of India to raise $3 billion in overseas debt, to be pooled by Citibank, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, JP Morgan, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho Financial Group.

What does Tata hope to get from spending cash on these British brands? The big fear among common Britons that jobs would be lost or that the plants would be shifted overseas have been put to rest. Tata Motors has decided to retain manufacturing in Britain, has an agreement with Ford over job and pension guarantees for British workers.



The Chairman of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata, seen here with his baby the Nano said, "We are very pleased at the prospect of Jaguar and Land Rover being a significant part of our automotive business. We will endeavour to preserve and build on their heritage and competitiveness, keeping their identities intact."

So what do Tata get out of this deal? If the cars will be manufactured in Britian how will they sell in India? Or is Tata in it for all technology and development that has gone into these two British brands?

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Lexus hybrid

Another gorgeous hybrid from Lexus. The 2008 Lexus RX 400H...

The Lexus RX 400h hybrid has a 3.3-liter V6 gasoline engine and two electric drive motors (for the front and rear wheels) to deliver performance on par with some V8-powered luxury SUVs -- but with better fuel efficiency. The RX 400h has an EPA-estimated fuel-economy rating of 27 mpg in the city and 24 mpg on the highway. This is because the electric motors kick in while the car is coasting along at slow speeds in city traffic.

The RX 400h is certified as a Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle (SULEV) in California, producing nearly 70 percent fewer smog-forming emissions than the average new car. The RX 400h is also certified as a zero-evaporative emissions vehicle in California and those states adopting California standards.


The Lexus RX 400H interior features voice-activated navigation, satellite radio, a charging point for your mobile phone, backup camera to aid in reversing, split-rear seats to accomodate luggage, and a rear-seat entertainment system with wireless headphones and a LCD screen.

With a base price of $42,580 the RX 400h is a "full hybrid," which means it can operate in electric-only or gas-engine-only modes as well as a mode that combines the power of the gas engine and electric motor. When the RX 400h is coasting or its brakes are applied, the electric motors function as generators, capturing kinetic energy that would normally be lost as heat through the brakes and transforming it into useable electricity to recharge the batteries. This function is also available in the electric G-Wiz.

One famous owner of the Lexus RX 400H is the beautiful Jessica Marie Alba. Jessica is a very green-conscious celebrity who says, "I'm trying to do as many eco-friendly and green renovations as possible, from the furniture we're buying and the refurbishments we're doing to getting systems that conserve water. I've been investigating solar panels and things like that and I drive a hybrid, so I'm doing the best I can."

Other celebrity owners of the Lexus RX400h are Jessica Biel, nature lover Vanessa Hudgens, and Eva Mendes.

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Best of Geneva

The stylish Mégane Coupé Concept from Renault was one of the best cars at the 2008 Geneva Auto Show. Powered by a 200hp (147kW) 2.0 Turbo petrol engine, and a manual six-speed gearbox, which drives the Mégane Coupé Concept from 0 to 100kph in just 7.2 seconds. Despite this the new car promises an economical fuel consumption of just 6.5 litres/100km (emission on 154g of CO2/km).

The two-part doors deploy gracefully and elegantly in an independent movement like dragonfly wings. The independent, asymmetric front seats, which rise up from the sills, seem to float in midair. Some other cars noticed at the show:

Freep
BY MARK PHELAN

Tata Motors

Indian automaker Tata basked in unaccustomed attention. Tata has been a regular at the Geneva auto show since it introduced its first car, the Indica, in a lightly attended news conference in 1998. It moved to center stage in 2008, setting tongues wagging with its $2,500 Nano minicar and spurring speculation about its imminent acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford.

The Nano is a sensation, drawing curious visits from the leaders of General Motors, Nissan-Renault, BMW and Fiat.

GM Chairman Rick Wagoner, a 6-foot-4 former basketball player, towered over the 5-foot-3-inch Nano as he and Ravi Kant, managing director, spoke.

Renault Mégane coupe concept
Low and sleek, the concept looks a lot like the production model Renault plans to introduce at the Paris auto show in October. The concept drew admiring attention from other automakers' designers. The production model will lose the concept's elaborate two-piece gull-wing (more like dragonfly-wing, really) doors, but the clean and attractive body and haute-moderne interior are a welcome return to form by Renault's stylists.

Hyundai i-Mode concept

Hyundai's nifty i-Mode concept is a six-seat "monocab" or "one-box," the descriptive term Europeans use for vehicles that don't have an obvious hood or trunk. It's also the Korean automaker's most appealing concept vehicle in some time, sort of a good-looking take on the same idea as the Pontiac Aztek. Power comes from a new 2.2-liter turbodiesel that produces a serious 340 pound-feet of torque -- 20 more than the 4.6-liter V8 in a Mustang GT.

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Era of small urban cars?

The Toyota IQ concept, unveiled in the Frankfurt Auto Show last year, was shown in a production version this month at the 2008 Geneva Auto Show.

Is this our future? Small cars that we drive only in the city, that cost less, pollute less, drive slow and have fewer accidents?

The production model of the Toyota IQ, according to Toyota Motor Europe senior vice-president Andrea Formica, "the world's smallest four-seater passenger car. Its clever seating configuration takes three adults plus a child, in less than 3 metres."

The Toyota IQ is a two-door four-seater, but less than three meters long. It makes up this compact length by placing the fuel tank beneath the floor, a newly-developed differential, and a smaller air-conditioning unit, which give more interior spacing. The front passenger seat can be pushed forward to create more legroom for the rear seat. So how small is this smallest four-seater passenger car? How does it compare to the other Japanese girls car (Nissan Pino)?


See how it sizes up next to this pretty girl? If you're the customer taking the Toyota IQ out for a spin, you can ask the brunette to sit next to you in the passenger seat. Naturally you won't be so rude as to leave her blond friend behind, will you? So push the brunette's seat a little forward and you can have the blond sitting behind her....at this point if a third girl wants to join you all for the drive, the only way she can fit in behind the driver's seat is if she's really small and tiny. Like a child.

For this reason Toyota label the IQ as having a 3+1 seating capacity; namely 3 adults and 1 child.

Toyota will build the iQ in Japan, and expects to make 100,000 cars in 2009, its first full year of production. Toyota hopes its small size will make it attractive to urban drivers. Unlike the other small car, the Tata Nano, which is all gasoline, the IQ has a gas-electric 500cc plug-in hybrid engine. It gives the IQ a fuel economy meeting the 5-star rating in Europe and CO2 emissions of 99g per km. These emission standards are far better than Toyota's earlier hybrid, the Prius, which emits 104g per km.

The Toyota IQ is targetted at Europe initially, since this is the market where the Toyota Prius has had a good run so far, selling 32,000 cars in 2007 to environmentally-aware urban customers.

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2008 Geneva Auto Show

More photos at Jalopnik

In 2008, carmakers talk about "biopower" more than horsepower, and green is easily the automakers' favorite color at the International Auto Salon in Geneva, which officially opened March 4. Demand for the smallest cars accounts for 36.5 percent of the West European market, according to J.D. Power Automotive Forecasting, and it is rising as carmakers aim to reduce carbon emissions and avoid European Union penalties by selling smaller models.

Businessweek
by Jack Ewing
The Saab presentation at a lakeside Geneva hotel on the evening of Mar. 3 was just one example of how, with oil prices at record highs and regulators demanding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, the auto industry is at pains to show it's serious about finding alternatives to petroleum.

Certainly there's a heavy dose of PR in the green claims of carmakers. But there also seems to be a consensus that the end of the gasoline age is within view, and that the auto industry needs to respond more quickly. "We're just at the beginning of this changeover," GM Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner told reporters. "I think it's going to be big and it could happen faster than we think." Wagoner even raised the possibility that U.S. consumers will be willing to pay premium prices for feature-packed small cars, as Europeans already do.

There is still no industry consensus, though, on what kind of technology will replace gasoline. GM's Lutz is an advocate of ethanol. "No other technology will reduce CO2 and dependence on imported fuel as much as ethanol," he said.

Other automakers are jumping on the hybrid bandwagon. German automaker Daimler (DAI) displayed a prototype Mercedes SUV it calls BlueTEC Hybrid, and also boasted that it has made a technological breakthrough in adapting lithium-ion batteries—commonly used in mobile phones—for automobile use. The technology will appear in the S400 hybrid planned for launch in the coming year, Mercedes said.

Hydrogen hasn't been forgotten either. Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche says he has already test-driven prototype Mercedes cars powered by fuel cells. "They are ready for the market," he told reporters. The problem is that Mercedes needs to mass-produce the cars for them to be affordable, yet there is unlikely to be a large market until drivers have a place they can tank up with hydrogen.

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The Reva story

In the early 1990s, with a barrel of oil selling at $10, there weren’t too many investors in Electric Vehicle (EV) technology. Moreover, development of new EVs meant overhauling internal combustion engine technology that had been developed and refined over decades. Chetan Kumaar Maini, the founder of the REVA Electric Car Company Private Ltd., recalls the sneers with which conventional auto players met his desire to manufacture cars that ran on electricity. After a five-year stint in the US working with GM and Amerigon, Maini returned to India in 1999. Thankfully, the Maini Group was doing well, and he could afford to pursue his dream of mass-produced EVs.

Livemint
Venkatesh Babu

We are sitting in the clubhouse of the Karnataka Golf Association, which overlooks a spread of manicured green. An evening breeze blows across the fairways as we sip hot cups of tea. The noise, dust and grime of Bangalore roads are mercifully out of seeing and hearing range.

Maini, 6ft, is nattily dressed in a colourful striped shirt and sports a neatly trimmed French beard. He leans back languidly and starts talking about his lifelong fascination with automobiles. "Like most kids, I loved cars and started tinkering with models when I was very young. I have been told that one of the first things I identified as a child was my father’s Ford Taunus 1966 model."

This fascination with cars led him to pursue a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Michigan. There, he headed a team which built a solar car that won the top prize in a 2,500km race sponsored by GM. Thereafter, vacations meant working at GM plants, trying to understand how the auto industry works.

It was as a postgraduate student in mechanical engineering at Stanford that Maini’s fascination for hybrid vehicles took a more practical turn. "I decided that I would work in this space," says Maini. After some research, he discovered that Amerigon Inc. was doing good work in the area of electric vehicles (EVs). He was hooked, and began working with Amerigon, which today is a partner of his Reva Electric Car Co. Ltd (RECC).

After two more years of research, the Reva EV was unveiled in June 2001. Named after his mother, it got mostly positive press. But the cars didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. Till date, RECC has sold around 1,800 cars, half of them in the international market.

Later this year, the company plans to introduce a dramatically revamped Reva, which will run for at least 150-200km before it requires recharging. The secret could be in new lithium-ion batteries that will offer better performance than the existing lead-acid ones.

When asked about the Tata Nano, Maini reacts cautiously. “It is a significant achievement for the Indian automotive industry, but it still burns conventional fuel.”

After a motor show in London two years ago, a member of the press called the G-Wiz the "ugliest car at the show." Maini grins when I remind him. "It is a subjective opinion. That is the least of our challenges. We have been taking feedback from current and prospective customers. Newer models might incorporate some of the suggestions."

A couple of automotive companies have been sniffing around Reva. And with good reason. RECC has more than 20 patents in electrical and battery related technology. Maini himself has a patent in energy management system for electric vehicles.

When I ask him if Reva is a potential acquisition target for big foreign auto companies, Maini plays it cool. "Yes, we are talking to several players for all kinds of relationships. We have had a learning curve. We have an IP portfolio. For the moment, though, we continue to focus on upping our capacity from 6,000 to 30,000 vehicles a year."

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