Excerpts from a Rata Tata's Interveiw on Nano to TOI

Q: What sparked off the idea?

A: In this particular case, you could not help but notice there were three-four family members on a scooter with a kid standing in the front, the guy driving and his wife sitting side saddle holding a little kid. When you are driving a car, you say to yourself to be careful, you know they may slip and fall. Add to that slippery roads and night time riding and you have a reasonably dangerous form of transport. That does not mean scooters should not exist—it's an evolution of bicycles and it's the path to prosperity. But, scooters as family transport seemed dangerous. I asked myself if we could put two wheels at the back to give the scooter greater stability. Would it make it safe for the occupants if you put a bar over the top? Last year, I was at Bertoni and to my surprise I found that BMW had produced a scooter with the same safety bars that I had thought about with rubber bumpers on the side and a seat which had a seat belt. Apparently it was not successful and BMW withdrew it.

I set about thinking if we could make a four wheel vehicle from scooter parts. At an ACMA (Automotive Component Manufacturers Association) meeting I even suggested an Asian people's car—a really low-cost car that Malaysia, Indonesia and India could produce jointly. I got no response. The only person who showed encouragement was [Hero group's] Brij Mohan Munjal, but we never really took it further. We found later that using scooter parts is a real limitation.

So we changed tack. We decided to look at everything from scratch. I thought that we could have a car made from engineering plastics that would not be welded but use adhesives. But some of these concepts did not lend themselves to costs or volume manufacturing. So we moved on to a more conventional kind of car.

That led us to configure a small car which would be a full-fledged car. We started again in an evolutionary way. It started with a concept of being a four-wheeled rural car. Do we have roll up plastic curtains instead of windows? Do we have openings like autorickshaws have instead of doors, but have a safety bar? We had many such early concepts and we finally decided that the market did not want a half car. If we wanted to build a people's car it should be a car and not something that people would say, 'That is a scooter with four wheels or an autorickshaw on four wheels'. And so we decided to do a car and really pare the cost.