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| For designers of Tata Emo, |
| For designers of Tata Emo, no glitz, but plenty of promise
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 28-June-2012
4:59:40 AM |
| During a week when journalists queued for 10-minute test drives of the Tesla Model S electric sedan in Fremont, Calif., this reporter enjoyed a stint in another new E.V., albeit one with decidedly less curb appeal.
No flag-waving employees, no charismatic chief executives and no governors had congregated on June 19 around the Tata Emo concept, or Electric Mobility Study, in a parking lot in northern suburb of Detroit. Granted, the concept included only a notional motor-drive system, not a production unit. It was little more than a way to move the car on and off a stage.
"The Emo was built as a kind of calling card," said Peter Davis, the chief of design at Tata Technologies, a branch of the Tata Group conglomerate based in India. With offices in Singapore, Britain, Novi as well as Pune, India, the division provides engineering and design services to automakers and other manufacturers. The Emo resulted from a joint effort by teams in Pune and Novi.
Mr. Davis is a veteran of General Motors and Fiat design staffs. Also on hand in Novi was Nikunj Jain, a designer for Tata Technologies.
The Emo symbolizes a philosophy of designing and marketing electric cars that is very different from that employed by Tesla, or for that matter Nissan or Ford. Rather than addressing the top or middle of the market, the Emo is an effort to devise a bare-bones, low-priced E.V. In theory - no production plans have been made by Tata - the Emo would be priced around $20,000, excluding any applicable government incentives.
Mr. Davis stressed that the Emo did not represent an electrified Nano, the people's car built by Tata Motors that has met with limited success. Among Americans, Tata may be best known for the Nano, along with its ownership of Jaguar Land Rover.
For the teams involved, the goal was to provide the maximum amount of interior space in relation to the car's footprint. Mr. Davis restated Tata's performance estimates for the four-door supermini:
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