Don’t get mislead by the title! It is not about minute thoughts, but it is about Nano the car. I was reading about October car sales in team-bhp and was surprised to note that Nano sold only about 3000 odd cars. The highest selling car was Maruti Alto and that was more than 30000 that is 10 times more. This was unexpected I would say. Nano was definitely expected to sell more. In its defense it was said that suppliers are moving to the new plant and so Tata didn’t make enough Nano’s to sell, but it still doesn’t explain as even before this month Alto was outselling Nano by a factor or 4 or 5. So here is my wild hypothesis on why Nano sales is not taking off as expected. I think positioning it as 1 lakh rupee car has hurt it in a couple of ways. One is many people didn’t expect a 1 lakh rupee car to be a complete car. They expected it to be more like a 4 wheel auto rickshaw. Secondly, in reality people are paying close to 2 lakh or more for buying Nano which was marketed as a 1 lakh rupee car and this made it look expensive in the eyes of the people. This along with the first factor makes people think that for another 40K or so, they can buy a M800 or a decent used car (meaning real car). I am not against Nano. I felt happy and proud when Nano was launched, felt bad when people trashed it for fire accidents and now feel sorry that it is not selling well. This car really put the (low cost) engineering capabilities of the Indian Automobile Industry in the world map and deserves to Succeed.
