On a showroom floor in India’s westernmost state of Gujarat sits the prototype for a car made at a local production plant and expected to be commercially available early next year.
The non-air conditioned, four-seater model is expected to be priced at Rs. 85,000 to 1 lakh ($1,748 USD to $2,057 USD).
And it’s an electric car, one that’s said to run on either nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion batteries.
According to a news report out of India, the long-awaited Tata Nano might have a challenger for the title of “the people’s car.” It’s called the Oreva Super.
Guess Tata Motors should have gotten to know the stealth competitor in its new neighborhood.
The Super is the Oreva Group’s first car; the company produces a line of electric scooters. And Oreva’s parent company, the Ajanta Group, is better known for making clocks.
The only tidbit dropped by Oreva’s national marketing manager is that the car is expected to run up to 200-250 kilometers (124-155 miles) on a single charge.
Tata Motors has said the basic Nano model is expected to have a top speed of 65 miles per hour and to be able to go 50 miles on a single gallon of gas.
Oreva officials have been close-mouthed about the Super, saying only that the car’s production is on schedule. The owner of the car dealership that has the prototype Oreva Super is also under a vow of silence with regard to the vehicle.
The secrecy doesn’t soothe the skeptics.
Bruce Belzowski, associate director of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute summarized his feelings on the projected competition between the Tata Nano and the Oreva Super to the Cleantech Group this way: “One [company] actually has a model out there that works and it has technology that everyone understands. The other one sounds like vaporware.”
What Belzowski really wants to know is how a company with seemingly no experience in building cars, much less electric ones, has figured out a way to manufacture such a vehicle and install a lithium-ion battery in it for under $2,500.
“It sounds impossible,” he said.
Oreva’s stealthy approach doesn’t necessarily mean the Super can’t live up to the hype. For example, Fremont, Calif.’s three-year old stealth startup Solyndra recently revealed its cylindrical thin-film tube design for capturing solar energy.
On the other hand, there was Cuil, the web search engine that launched in July claiming an index of 120 billion web pages. Not only did the site turn up fewer hits to keywords compared to projected arch-nemesis Google, it also crashed soon after its launch.
But while Oreva may eventually be able to satisfy automotive industry analysts on the car’s manufacturing process, the company is still likely run into problems involving the Super’s choice of fuel, electricity.
A spokesman for Tata Motors confirmed that the company does intend to produce versions of the Nano that run on other fuels later on. In the meantime, Tata Motors has decided that India isn’t ready for an electric vehicle, opting to launch the electric version of the Indica in Europe next year.
Indian drivers might find themselves stuck somewhere without a handy electrical socket to recharge the car battery when it runs out. Roughly half of India still doesn’t have electricity, and the areas that do have power are prone to blackouts due to power shortages.
Maybe the Oreva engineers should consider giving their electric battery a battery of its own.
Then again, maybe the real cause of the blackouts in India is the smog. In that case, having electric cars on the road could help reduce India’s emissions problem (it currently ranks sixth on the list of countries emitting the most greenhouse gases in the world) and keep the lights on.
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