The Mecca for the Indian petrol head is across the street

Have you all planned your Auto Expo visit, and marked the stalls you don’t want to miss. Plenty of exciting displays mean money you spend buying passes is irrelevant to the entertainment in store. Unlike many of you, what I’d like to see though is not just flashy new cars and attractive women, but vehicles that are applicable to the Indian automobile market – vehicles that project an image of what we’re likely to see on roads in front of our homes. This regrettably isn’t the case with some auto makers in previous editions. They bring containers of cars and put them on display for no apparent reason. If they think this builds brands, they need to think again. If you aren’t going to sell what you show, won’t it result in frustration and anger amongst buyers who aspire for these products?

The CV industry can also do a Bollywood bomb

Call me lucky, but in the recent past I’ve witnessed everything from puny scooters to luxury sedans going live. The Mahindra Gio was one of the strangest launches I’ve been to (looks have no connection to my claim). It was possibly the most colorful CV launch in recent history. Thanks to an impeccable level of secrecy maintained by Mahindra’s PR team, most of us scooted to Mahindra’s ‘Cube’ to witness the controversial Sandero or the much-hyped World SUV greeting Indian lens men. It was neither. We saw a Xylo-like goods carrier, derived from a three wheeler, good for hauling a half-ton load and no air-conditioning.

See, ‘cc’ is getting tossed into the deep sea

The two-wheeler industry is all of a sudden least worried about ‘cc.’ They say it’s not cc, but ‘other things,’ which makes motorcycles what they are. Rather than introducing sub-brands and giving customers products with unique identities, bike makers want to piggyback on a brand that their bigger bike buyers built. Only in India can we find a 110cc Honda CB1000R, and a performance brand like the Pulsar designed to deliver fuel economy. Just like in the rest of the world, many of the globally popular motorcycles are also becoming smaller by the day. I’ll wait for the Hayabusa mopeds, and GSXR step-throughs in India to finish this sentence…

Tata’s Nano shines at the land of the rising sun

The Fukuoka Motor Show in Japan is the latest exhibition to learn what crowd-curiosity-amazement and DL means – a New Delhi registered, white colored Tata Nano was the cause. The Tata Nano has proved one thing – you don’t need a nuclear weapon to generate a global shockwave. Wherever it’s gone, the Nano’s wiped out people’s baseless perceptions of the tinny, stunted and unsafe Indian automobile. Apart from running on diesel and electricity, what I’d like see the Nano do is force governments across the world to put in place better infrastructure, and move a million others to safer and more efficient public transport.