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NaNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Posted by Uncle Mark | March 19, 2009 | In contributing editors green humor

Recently, I was taken for a spin in the new Jaguar XF 2.7TD and boy was I impressed. The car was so good that it made me proud to be British. There was the drama of the starter button that glows red, pulsing like a heartbeat and, and when you start the engine, the gear lever rising from the centre console while the air vent swivels open, making you feel like a jet fighter pilot!

And don’t get me started on the oodles of wood and the leather, sumptuous to touch, and the beautiful plump carpets, coupled with stylish aluminium, bathed in a cool blue light. If this car were a woman, I would drag it off to bed tonight and would marry it tomorrow….which makes it understandable why the billionaire Indian mogul Ratan Tata bought the company last year. The man has taste, or at least I thought so until I read the deluge of press about his latest exploit: the infamous ‘Nano’ car.

Dubbed the worlds cheapest car, because it will retail for the US dollar equivalent of around 2,500 bucks in India, China and the rest of the developing world, it should be called the worlds crappest car. Here are four reasons why I’d like to put the ‘No’ in Nano.

(1) It looks crap

Number one, just look at it: it’s bloody hideous. It looks like a crappy, lead paint-covered, poorly manufactured Chinese children’s toy. No matter what color you choose (apart from invisible), it’s going to look crap. And those tiny wheels (taken straight from a wheel barrow) look like a joke. Even people of little means deserve to drive in something that doesn’t make them look complete pillock. NaNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

(2) It is crap

Number two, it will be a piece of crap! No, I haven’t driven one yet (***shudder***), but there is no way on God’s earth that this isn’t going to a steaming pile of doggy doo doo. Tata have had to cut costs to the bone and come up with some novel engineering solutions, but then they have cut the bone to the bone, and that’s bad.

The Nano ‘boasts’ a 0.6-liter engine that has only 33 horsepower, its front and rear bumpers are made of plastic, not steel (I don’t think we have to guess what its crash rating will be – can you get under zero in the NACAP ratings?), and many parts are glued (yes, glued) together rather than welded. There’s only a single outside mirror, on the driver’s side, and a single, center-mounted windshield wiper….and that’s just on the outside!

The ‘spartan’ (and that’s being unfair to spartan) interior ‘features’ hand-cranked windows and manual steering and transmission. There are no three-point seat belts in the back seat, no air bags anywhere, no anti lock brakes, and radios and air conditioning cost extra. It sounds like a prison on wheels, a veritable automotive Guantanamo.
But here’s my real beef: the continuously variable transmission, while being lighter, is going to give it a terrible ride and will be tougher to service. The wheel bearings are strong enough to drive at 45 mph but are going to wear out quickly at the higher speeds that drivers are going to undoubtedly try to wring out of them. It’s just gonna fall apart quickly.

And worst still, because it is cheap and has no amenities at all, people will ‘pimp their Nanos worse than a rapper who’s just signed a multi album deal. NaNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

(3) It’s a death trap

Thirdly…it’s going to be a killer.
I’m not an elitist. The Nano certainly offers a safer ride than the motor scooters that now function as the family vehicle for millions of rural Indians. Every day in India, road accidents kill nearly 300 people, which is the highest traffic-fatality rate in the world.
However, at the same time, the Nano promises to add as many as 2 million inexperienced new drivers a year to India’s already crowded roads. That translates to more accidents, injuries, and deaths.
NaNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

(4) It’s a planet killer

Finally, I can’t believe that I am defending the tree huggers (I don’t hate them, but I could never eat a whole one), and with car sales catering around the world, the international automobile industry sees the Nano and similar cars as one of the few areas of growth on an otherwise bleak horizon, but environmentally, the Nano is scary.

Of course, I want everyone in the whole world to have a car (with decent roads and parking to go with them) or have access to adequate public transport, and don’t believe that just because I live in the West, I have some God-given right to automotive transportation while others do not. Howver, if India, China and other Asian nations put hundreds of millions of additional cars on the road, it will have dire dire dire implications for the environment. Indian vehicles already spew 219 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming and, according to the Asian Development Bank, by 2035, India’s CO2 emissions could soar to 1.5 billion tons, thanks largely to the Nano and its ilk. Emissions on that scale would negate any projected emissions cuts in the developed world, virtually guaranteeing that efforts to halt climate change would fail.

Now, I’m not a scientist, but I’m sort of guessing that’s a bad thing, despite it being so bloody cold at the moment. Our mate Ratan says that it’s not the company’s problem:

“We never promised to make the world’s most eco-friendly car. We only set out to make the most economical car in the world” he said.

Besides, he notes, the Nano is much cleaner than the aging scooters and three-wheeled motorized rickshaws they’re likely to replace. Tata claims the car will get about 50 miles to the gallon and conform to Europe’s emissions standards, which are stricter than India’s. Its catalytic converter will scrub away about 80 percent of exhaust-pipe pollutants - though not carbon dioxide, which converters don’t capture.

But the man is a moron, I’m afraid. He’s assuming that the catalytic converter will work as promised. Car maintenance is a foreign concept to many Indians, and the country’s pitted roads are rough on even the sturdiest components. If the Nano’s converter gives out, its emissions could increase five-fold.

I know that Uncle Mark is a genius, but right now even I don’t have an answer to these problems. What I do know is that I for one do not want to sit through more films starring Al Gore, and I’m guessing that you don’t want to either.
So, in conclusion, be like me and just say say “NaNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” to the Nano!

I guess we’ll have to see what happens. My only hope is that the heavily-indebted Tata goes bust as it struggles to repay the $3bn in debt incurred during its acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover last year, but then, alas, my beloved XF will be a victim too. Damn you Nano!

NO Love,

Uncle Mark

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