I read something about this a couple months ago during an extremely boring flight, and I guess its time has come. Gizmodo announces (and there’s an official press release, too) the new super-cheap car from Tata Motors. Rolling off the line for only $2,400, they promise to increase India’s per capita car owners.
What I wonder is how this will affect fuel prices around the world… negatively, I suspect.
From Gizmodo:
The four-door car, which will be about as big as a VW Rabbit, will come with a less-than-impressive 30-horsepower engine. But hey, for that price, what do you expect? The car, which has yet to be named, is expected to drastically increase the rates of car ownership in India, which currently stand at about 8 people per 1,000. It’s great for the mobility of the Indian people, but something tells me that a car that cheap doesn’t have the most efficient or well-designed engine in the world. Here’s hoping this doesn’t result in a drastic uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.
[via Gizmodo]
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Stumble it!
on December 21st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
whats the gas milage?
on February 26th, 2009 at 5:23 am
The magic number here is the population of India! This little car will mean the end to gasoline, V-8 engines for the U.S. car buyer. In a very short time, millions of these vehicles will be put into service and suck up in small, solid, affordable, quantities , the world’s supply of cheap oil. We are at a time when the largest oilfields feeding America cheap oil are in decline, and no new large fields have been discovered. Oil, in the very near future will soar in price beyond the earning power of the average American and the value of what he produces daily. We will be relegated to high speed intercity rail, powered by electricity from nuclear reactors, trains, electrically driven also, and little carbon fiber tandem commuter cars, battery and bio-diesel assisted. Our Aircraft industry will fail miserably and our oil will be reserved for military defense purposes. We will reach a tipping point where we can no longer fine fuel for nuclear power, or a place to safely dispose of nuclear waste. We will finally turn to Solar, Wind, Wave, Tidal and Geothermal power and population limitations as severe as those China already responsibly accepts. The American Dream as we know it dies with the dwindling cheap oil in Saudi Arabia,where it was born, and mind bending sociological paradigm shifts creep over America and warp it into the twenty-first century, like an unwilling child, forced to finally grow up! The environmental issues we will face, when trying to survive without cheap oil will make us weep for our present foolishness, as we will be forced to eat tainted food, drink poisoned water, till salted fields, and shit in bags to get enough topsoil from humanure to plant a veggie garden beside our shanties as we watch our pavement paradise erode away. The (GRD) great republican depression is the harbinger of this bad news and the depression will not end until we change our way of life and reduce our frivolous population. Asians, for the greater part vegetarians produce for example in China more 130+IQ post graduate students than America has high school students - Fear This! These are small bodied, intelligent veggie and pork and fish fed, an economical and environmental super bonus when you consider how many acres of farmland is needed to feed one American student beef lose or not! never mind his girlfriend’s fat ass, his car in the college parking lot, his premium clothing, and his privileged and very expensive position in society while in school! Asia does not operate the same way, they have a larger pool to select from, and they can easily afford the extra years of study it takes to make a difference in the world, and they feed clothe, house and teach students for much less per capita! America, prepare for a sub-third world life, because that is exactly what is going to hit you in the next decade as Asians power ahead of you and leave you behind in your dope ridden, drunken game playing sexually corrupt morally imbalanced stupor!