The Tata Nano is One of The Cheapest Cars Ever Produced

Let me get this straight. You want a new car, but you only have $3,000. Okay, how about one of these? This tiny funny looking car from India is the Tata Nano, and it is quite simply one of the cheapest new production cars to ever exist. Tata produced the Nano from 2008 to 2018. It's rear-engined and rear-wheel drive, and that engine is a two-cylinder, 624cc liquid-cooled engine, making about 37 horsepower, which is actually fairly good for a car this size. It has a four-speed manual transmission, and later Nanos were even offered with a semi-automatic transmission. Would you like to see that engine? Because it's right in here. Yeah, this is where the extreme attention to cost-cutting starts to become apparent, because even though this looks like a hatch, it is not. It is a fixed body panel. Later Nanos did have a hatch here, but this one does not have that. To access the engine, you have to pull the back seat forward like so, and then the engine is under this little hatch. And of course, the attention to cost-cutting doesn't stop at the lack of a hatch. It goes much further than that. The car is made out of very thin sheet steel, because that was cheaper. The doors are very light, because they're very thin, and they have no detents on them. They just float around, much like a Trabant. The wheels only have three lug nuts, because that saved four lug nuts per car, which was slightly cheaper. There is no wing mirror on this side, only on the driver's side. This is a right-hand drive car, by the way. There is only one windshield wiper, where two would have been slightly better. And there is no external fuel filler. You have to access the fuel by opening the hood. It's right over there. But it goes even further than that. Base models of this car not only didn't have air conditioning, they didn't have heat or any ventilation for the climate control whatsoever. The only ventilation you got was from rolling down the windows and hoping for the best. They also had unassisted steering and unassisted brakes. When you look at how extreme the cost-cutting was on this car, it becomes amazing that they did things like this. Make custom headlights just for this car. They're not parts from some other car. They made it just for the Nano. Same goes for the taillights. It's a custom piece. I mean, the whole rest of the car body is made for the Nano because it is the Nano. But it amazes me that they didn't use an off-the-shelf part for this stuff. But here's what really blew my mind. I keep mentioning the base-level Nano, but the one I'm sitting in isn't the base model. It's the LX trim Nano, or the deluxe version. So despite having no detents in the doors and no hatch in the back to save money, this specific one has power windows, power and central locking, and here's the real kicker, air conditioning. This car, according to the museum staff, it cost about $3,200 when it was new, has air conditioning. I would have never expected that. As you can quite clearly see, the Nano has four doors, and you would be surprised how much leg room there is in here. I have no trouble sitting in this back seat, and I sat in the front seat to make sure that it was in my position. There's a lot of space back here. It's almost more spacious than my Fiesta, which is mind-blowing. Now of course, one of the reasons it is so spacious in here, aside from the engine being in the back, is because there's not much in the way of crash structures, as you might imagine. The way this car performs in a crash is, have you ever stepped on an empty soda can? If you're looking for actual numbers, this car got a zero-star crash safety rating, but that's not really that surprising. This is, after all, a very cheap car, and it certainly is better than your family of four riding on the back of a motorcycle. In the middle, we have the gauge cluster, which consists entirely of the speedometer and the fuel gauge, also the odometer and some idiot lights. We have the climate vents just below that, and just below that, the optional climate controls, which unbelievably includes air conditioning. In front of the passenger is basically nothing. It's just a dip in the dash and a vent. As you might expect, this car has no glove box and no airbags. Oh my God, that's the cutest thing ever. In the backseat, you have the backseat. You can roll down your windows via crank, and you can open the doors, and you can lock the doors, but there's nothing else back here. Let's go for a short spin now, shall we? Now, unfortunately, I can't take this anywhere outside of the parking lot because this one has a coolant leak and therefore overheats, or maybe that's just what they told me. I don't know. Let's go. Get the handbrake off. Typical stuff, except I'm on the right-hand side of the car. I mean, it's actually kind of normal car-esque, very, very small, but normal car feeling. Surprisingly refined-feeling two-cylinder, shifting with the wrong hand. This car only weighs about 1,400 pounds, and it has 12-inch wheels, or maybe they're 10-inch wheels, 12-inch wheels, I think, so everything about it is very diminutive. It tops out at about 65 miles per hour. It actually feels quite sprightly at these low speeds here. I won't know anything until I get to higher speeds, which I will never be able to do, but I wish I could take it on a longer drive, but what can you do? This is the only one in the country, I'd have to imagine, and I will not be able to import one for 25 years, so this will do. It's surprisingly quiet. There is minimal sound deadening because cost, but it's pretty quiet in here. I think this has power steering. I'm not sure. I know they had power steering as an option, and this one feels like it has power steering. It's still fairly heavy, but why would you need power steering in this car? All the weights, well, there's no weight anywhere. All the weights in the back end of it. Alright, that concludes my very short drive. I'm going to go take it back before it overheats on me, and I feel bad for partially ruining their car. So that's the Tata Nano. One of the cheapest cars to ever be produced in history, and a fascinating look at extreme value engineering. Now unfortunately, the Nano didn't sell well. In fact, it was a colossal sales failure. Tata expected to sell about a quarter million of these per year, but the most they ever managed to sell in a year was 75,000. In India, and really most other places in the world, a car is seen as a bit of a status symbol. And what does it say about you if you bought the cheapest car in the world? Never mind that you're getting your family off of a motorcycle, you bought the cheapest car in the world. You must be poor. Now of course, a car like this can't even exist in Europe, or the United States, or other places with safety regulations, because it very clearly does not comply with a lot of regulations. So it's very sad to see that it didn't work in one of the places that they could sell it. But anyway, that's your brief look at the Tata Nano Deluxe. A very basic car that somehow has air conditioning. So thanks for watching, and thanks to the Lane Motor Museum for loaning me this car for this video.