This story is from August 21, 2014

Cheapest car tag hit Tata Nano: Creator

Girish Wagh, the man behind Tata Motors’ much-touted budget car Nano, has blamed “external factors” for the poor run of the vehicle, while also linking the failure to the last-minute withdrawal of the factory from Singur in West Bengal that led to delays in deliveries.
Cheapest car tag hit Tata Nano: Creator
NEW DELHI: Girish Wagh, the man behind Tata Motors’ much-touted budget car Nano, has blamed “external factors” for the poor run of the vehicle, while also linking the failure to the last-minute withdrawal of the factory from Singur in West Bengal that led to delays in deliveries.
Wagh, the main architect of Nano, also feels that the tag of “cheapest car in the world” badly hit the chances of the model, which actually was meant to be a low-cost innovation.
“People started looking at Nano not as a low-cost innovation, but as a cheap car. This, among other factors, also hurt the chances.”
Elaborating on what he called the “external factors” that led to the initial hiccups with the Nano, including thermal or fire incidents, Wagh told TOI that the company had found “foreign objects in the exhaust system of the car”. Also, he said that connections taken from the electrical system of the car were not made in the best possible manner.
He, however, refused to answer when asked whether he believed that there had been a conspiracy to undermine the car’s run in the market.
Wagh, the man also behind Tata Motors’ highly-successful mini truck ‘Ace’, said Nano’s run was disturbed after the company had to move out of Singur factory, following widespread protests over land acquisition that were spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress. “We were prevented in meeting the demand and it pained a lot... As many as 3 lakh customers had to wait despite having fully-paid bookings.”
Against the initial expectations of annual sales of at least 2.5 lakh units, demand for Nano never really picked up. The company managed to sell only 21,219 units in 2013-14 against 53,848 units in the previous fiscal.

Wagh, however, said Tata Motors is working on a new plan to revive the demand for Nano. “We have re-calibrated the targets and are quite confident of meeting them,” he said, though refusing to share the new projections.
Wagh said Tata Motors has been quick to make changes whenever a need was felt to do so. “When we had noticed some problems with the car initially, we did upgrade the vehicle. There was transparency in the entire process.”
He said the Nano experience had been a useful learning exercise for Tata Motors and its R&D team. “Ups and downs will always be there... but this industry is such that you cannot dwell on the past for long.”
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