The Hindu Business Line : People’s car

New Delhi, Jan. 10 Nearly 70 years separate the original people’s car, the predecessor to the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Tata one-lakh car or people’s car as the company is calling it for now.

Volkswagen means people’s car in German and the original version of the Beetle was conceived to be an affordable car for the masses. Inspired by it, similar people’s cars were launched by other manufacturers in Post-war Europe such as the Citroen 2CV (two horses in French) and the Fiat 500 (Cinquecento in Italian).

All these people’s cars were conceived and produced to make personal mobility affordable to Europeans. In fact, when the VW Beetle’s original model was developed as the car for everybody, the German company’s aim was to price the car very close to that of a motorcycle, similar to Tata Motor’s target.

Volkswagen’s famous tagline for the Beetle in 1938 read “Five Marks a week you must put aside – If in your own car you want to ride”.

Similarly, the Citroen 2CV was conceived to make cars affordable to the rural people of France, who needed space for transporting farm produce and poultry to the market and whose performance expectations from a car they would own centred around fuel efficiency.

It is also an interesting fact that all these people’s cars, like Tata Motors’ one lakh car, also featured small sized, rear mounted engines. But, unlike the kind of cost cutting measures that the original versions of these cheap people’s cars had to adopt, the Tata car is still a modern day automobile, though the rumour mills had us thinking otherwise about what kinds of compromises would be made in the one lakh car.

For example, the original models of the Citroen 2CV and the Fiat 500 had fabric roofs that could be fully rolled back. In the 2CV, the windows were flap-up type, since roll up windows were considered expensive and the doors and bonnet were detachable for easy repairs.

And the suspension set up of the 2CV was kept so soft that a normal person could rock the car from side to side just by pushing with one hand. But, the idea behind the soft suspension was to enable farmers driving the 2CV down bad rural roads to reach the market while still keeping their eggs intact.

There are loads of such fruits of lateral thinking in the new Tata economy car.

All the people’s cars were iconic symbols of their times. They were cars that left an indelible impression in the minds of ordinary citizens, car freaks, designers and historians alike.

The Tata one lakh car will now takeover and start writing its own story for posterity.