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The $2,200 car was built for frugality but it's no cheap drive. Engineers stripped away everything they could. What's left is a nice little car, surprisingly roomy inside and fun to shift, if a bit slow on the uptake.
The starting design point for the car was price. Ratan Tata, chairman of the sprawling Tata group of companies, has said the price actually came from a journalist, who asked him at a 2003 auto show to put a price tag on the ultracheap car he hoped to build for millions of Indian families who curl themselves four at a time on motorbikes and zoom precariously around the nation's expanding network of roads.
The answer -- 100,000 rupees, or about $2,000 at today's exchange rates -- was the starting point for the Nano's engineers.
Thus was born a philosophical experiment, six years and 20 billion rupees ($396 million) in the making: How much can you take away and still have a car?
"The real secret to the car is weight," said David Hudson, a British engineer at Tata Motors. "Because if you control weight everything else follows. Light weight cars need light weight brakes and light weight engines."
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