Click to play videoNew Delhi: World's most affordable car, Tata Nano, was commercially launched on Monday and with it the car's rough journey to reach its market finally came to an end.
Nano is more popularly known as Rs 1-lakh car but it was not planned to be so.
Tata Motors chairman Ratan Tata had just guessed a price to his planned low-cost car way in 2003 at the Geneva Motor Show but a newspaper headline made him firm up that figure as the price target.
On January 10, 2008, the world saw the Nano for the first time as Ratan Tata announced his plans. Tata didn't losing the opportunity to take a dig at Suzuki, who had doubted the viability of the project.
"A promise is a promise," Tata simply said while revealing that his company is launching Nano.
The Nano has a strong potential and Tata Motors say the car can sell over a million units annually, which was the size of the entire Indian car market a couple of years ago.
Every car that Tata sells currently is built in Pune. The plant is now getting more active because part of every Nano is being made at the plant because of the trouble it faced in the first location, Singur, which was chosen to build the Nano.
Tata chose Singur in West Bengal for the car plant. No other carmaker except the oldest Indian car company Hindustan Motors has West Bengal as its home.
But before Nano's home could be built, the Rs 1,700 crore project started facing tough opposition. That was the beginning of the delay of over six months for the car's launch.
Finally, Tata Motors had to pull out of Singur and started its search for a new manufacturing location. Vendors and Tata Motors suffered huge losses as 80 per cent of the plant construction was complete.
The real challenge will now be to scale up its production capacity at Pantnagar and Pune before Sanand comes online.
So the wait for the launch is over but the road ahead promises to be just as challenging as the journey so far.
(With inputs from Sumantra Barooah and Swati Khandelwal)
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