The Tata Nano has been Mr. Ratan Tata’s dream project. But Tata Motors has been given time till 2017 to make the Nano a sales success or else it will be axed.
The Tata Nano was the brainchild of Mr. Ratan Tata whose vision was to see a car outside every household in the country. But the project always faced issues and could never be as popular as initially predicted. The buzz fizzled out after the Singur fiasco and Tata Motors just couldn’t generate enough interest for the car after that. The car finally got launched in the year 2009 at the promised price of Rs. 1 lakh (ex-factory). But the sales weren’t even close to predictions.
Tata Motors could manage average sales of around 2000 units every month which is just about 10% of the Sanand plant’s capacity of 2.5 lakh units per year. The factory was specifically built for the Tata Nano by investing Rs. 4000 crores. The company has done various experiments to increase the sales of the Nano but most of them have failed to grab attention. They have launched new variants of the car along with changes to the exteriors as well as the interiors. They introduced new colour schemes in order to make it look more youthful. These changes resulted in a negligible impact on the sales figures.
The Indica maker has plans to launch an AMT (automated manual transmission) equipped Tata Nano in the near future to target the car at young urban households who are looking for a small car to zip around town. Tata Motors can fiddle around with the car till 2017. The ultimatum has been given by the Chairman of Tata Sons, Mr. Cyrus Mistry. He has mentioned that he may be forced to shut down the project if sales figures do not reach a certain level.
The company is sitting with an inventory of almost 8000-10,000 Nanos, some of which are from the year 2013! Clearly, they haven’t managed to plan the inventory and production schedule well. Otherwise there is no way that a 2013 car would be sitting in the stockyards till the beginning of the year 2015. We believe that the Nano still has the potential to succeed in the country if the new variants are bought in time and marketed aggressively.
Source – Zee News