Does Electric Car have Future in India?

Indians are well aware of their traffic issues. In excruciating detail, in fact. The conceptually improbable assortment of vehicles which infests India’s roads is enough to produce a national wince while even considering it. The distinction between car insurance and life insurance sometimes needs to be checked. The good news (for once) for India’s eyesore-averse public is that electric cars, and an all-Indian car concept, are a perfect match.  Those who’ve been following the career of the Tata Nano, which in 2008 received international attention as the world’s cheapest new car, will know the business angles. The Tata Nano and related designs could also be India’s ticket to both a national problem solver and a pricelessly valuable export as electric cars. The Tata Nano class of car has one huge advantage as a potential electric car: its frame. It’s a lightweight design. Electric cars perform much better without having to lug around massive frames. For manufacturers, the Tata also has another big advantage as an electric car - much cheaper production costs. If a diesel powered Tata Nano cost $2500 to buy in 2008, an electric version would come in well under that figure to produce.   India’s ability to produce cheap, efficient space missions is well-known. This is the automotive version of that scenario. A quick glance at the costing of foreign electric cars is a rather graphic reminder that India does do some things far more cost effectively than other countries, and the Tata was already a glaring example of far better cost efficiency to start with. It would take one of India’s several million qualified CAD designers about half an hour to produce the specifications for a category-killing export car. The employment a product like this and its related assemblies could produce for the domestic market alone would be valuable to India’s economy. The exports would be worth billions. The Tata Nano class doesn’t even really require retooling to become an electric car, just a slightly different assembly process. If one also considers the possibilities of adding Indian- made extras like local GPS, electronics, etc, the car becomes a sort of Indian Expo of potential products. The Japanese car industry was the forerunner of the Japanese economic boom. With Japan’s cars came Japanese technology. Chinese outsourcing introduced Chinese technology around the world. America itself developed based on the marketing of its lifestyle and related technology around the world. There’s no reason why India, with an already existing production capability and reliable design concept, couldn’t do exactly the same thing, and on a huge scale. The skills and production capacity are ready to go and can easily be expanded to meet demand. The products can even be promoted globally in the world’s biggest movie market, Mumbai. A Bollywood star in an Indian car could be as big as Audrey Hepburn promoting scooters, (which didn’t even really exist as commercial products until that 1950s promotion) and with a global reach starting with a billion or so people, could make quite an impact. Perhaps most importantly, Indians will be able to buy their own cars and get their car insurance quotes and drive on their own roads without wincing.