Here’s another interesting piece of news that parallels yesterday’s story on Indian car transport; the Indian government has broken ground on a warehousing auto hub in the Calcutta suburb of Howrah, which is designed to allow Indian car companies to store cars at the key Shalimar rail hub in Howrah and then be able to move the cars around eastern India.
Quite a few of those cars being stashed there will be the Tata Nano; no, it only sounds like something out of Mork and Mindy. The Nano is a very affordable (about $2200 per Wikipedia) compact that is currently the world’s cheapest car; interestingly, “nano” means small in Gujarati,, the western Indian language from where Tata got started, as well as prefix for one-billionth or tiny in English. Tata is a large enough player in the world car market to have bought Jaguar and Land Rover off of Ford in 2008.
However, the India car makers seem to have an uphill struggle getting the infrastructure going to get the Nano and other new products to an international and national market. If they can deliver sufficient quality to meet American safety and emissions standards, they could become a major player in the US market.
As I mentioned earlier about Telsa’s pending IPO, more car companies means a more diverse clientele for car shippers. Also, the Nano and cars like it might mean more cars being sold, as a new $2000 car might be in the budget as a second or third car in better-off families or as a first car for struggling families.
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