I had another opening planned - actually, a suggested marketing slogan for the Indian car maker - but I am not sure I could get away with it in a family newspaper blog...
In any case, it has been an eventful couple of weeks for Tata.
First, their Jaguar brand, purchased from Ford last year, was ranked tied for first in initial quality over the past three years by the J. D. Power organization.
Tata can't take much credit for this because the cars were mainly built under Ford's stewardship. And make no mistake; Jaguar would not have survived, let alone done so well, if Ford hadn't bought the company and nurtured it.
Tata's other Ford purchase, Land Rover, unfortunately sits very near the bottom of that survey. Land Rover has known for years it has had issues; many of the same people who have dragged Jaguar up by the bootstraps have been in similar positions with Land Rover, but without the same impact as yet.
But Ratan Tata, head of the eponymous industrial conglomerate, said in a recent television interview that in order for Jaguar Land Rover to continue to be a viable business, it will need access to capital to invest in future product development. In the current credit crunch, few private sources are leaping to offer loans to car makers.
Tata has asked the British government not for a grant or bail-out, but for a loan guarantee for up to 500 million British pounds - nearly a billion dollars Canadian.
The request is connected to the fact that Tata bought the two British icons for nearly three billion dollars, using a bridge loan of even more than that. This saddled the company with huge debt just minutes before the bottom fell out of the car market.
In business, as in comedy, timing is everything.
At the other end of Tata's product line, the company launched the Nano earlier this week. The tiny four-seat two-cylinder car will sell for the equivalent of $2,500, and is projected to be to India and East Asia what the Model T Ford and VW Beetle were to their respective homelands - the vehicle that puts the country on wheels.
Mr. Tata said it was the culmination of a six-year dream, to come up with a product that would allow low-income Indian families to travel more safely than they typically do now - on their motor scooters.
It was generally assumed that the Nano would have the structural integrity of a wet Kleenex box, hence could never be sold in first-world countries. But the company says European sales are expected to begin in 2011, and plan to develop a variant for the US (and, presumably, Canada) for a year or two later.
Wonder if they'll throw in a free iPod Nano.
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