India November 2010: Nano sinks to 509 sales

In this blog I normally focus on best performances and don’t dwell on the weak ones, but this is such shocking news that it had to be the main headline: the Tana Nano only found 509 new owners in the whole of India last month…

This is very bad news for Tata which had sky high expectations for this model (starting with 250,000 units/year). Instead, apart from 3 months above 5,000 sales this summer, the Nano had been vegetating around 3,500 monthly sales most of the year, with supply issues blamed. Now, with the car fully available across the country, it seems the real issue is that there is actually no market for the Nano in India. Too rudimentary, noisy and overtly ‘low-cost’ for a demanding and image-conscious consumer that, for the same price, prefers a larger second-hand car…

Is it the end of the road for the Nano?

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