The Hindu Business Line : Nano: Booking begins today

The big day has finally arrived. Bookings for the Tata Nano kick off on Thursday and will go on till April 24. Indications are that there could be over four lakh bookings across the country.

“Everyone is talking about the people’s car and it is definitely going to be a rage on the lines of the Maruti 800 in the 1980s,” industry sources said.

Booking venues

Sales of the booking forms, which began on April 1, extended to 30,000 locations across the country.

These included Tata Motors dealerships, branches of SBI (State Bank of India) and 15 other banks which are the preferred financiers as well as various Tata Group outlets such as Croma, Westside, World of Titan and Tata Indicom.

In addition, there were special incentives for Tata Sky subscribers keen on buying a Nano.

Although the exact number of booking forms sold is still not clear, there are no two ways about the fact that demand for them has been strong.

Payment

“At least 90 per cent of people who bought the Rs 300 forms are expected to submit them from Thursday,” sources said. SBI will be the nodal agency for collecting the bookings.

The booking amount for the base version, costing Rs 1.34 lakh (on road, Mumbai) is Rs 2,999 going up to Rs 3,499 and Rs 3,999 for the mid and top-end options with price tags of Rs 1.6 lakh and Rs 1.85 lakh.

The down-payment for the three versions is Rs 95,000, Rs 1.2 lakh and Rs 1.4 lakh respectively. The equated monthly instalments range from Rs 1,799 to Rs 2,975.

Possibly, one of the most attractive features of the Nano is that employees with an annual salary of Rs 75,000 are eligible for the booking process while this is Rs 1-lakh in the case of entrepreneurs.

The customer profile for the car is, therefore, expected to be quite diverse. Experts say that there will be a fair share of women who will be keen on graduating from gearless scooters to the safer confines of a car.

Allotment

Tata Motors will process and announce the allotments of 1,00,000 cars in the first phase of deliveries through a computerised random selection procedure.

If booking goes up on the expected lines the selection process may take a few weeks to complete. As the delivery of the Nano begins in July, two in every three applicants will perhaps have to wait longer.

It now remains to be seen how long this wait will be because the company plans to manufacture only 50,000 Nanos in this fiscal.

If bookings end up being ten times as much, then interested buyers may have to wait for even a year. The big numbers will come in after the Sanand plant in Gujarat is commissioned.