The Great Indian Motorist and the Ultra Low-Cost Car - An Open Letter

Dear Renault-Nissan, dear Bajaj, dear Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, GM, Hyundai and the rest of you,

I understand that more or less all of you intend to follow the lead of Tata's Nano and roll out Ultra Low-Cost Cars, small vehicles carrying a price tag of USD 2k ... 3k, within the next 2...3 years to flood India and other emerging markets. This is obviously a challenge and will be one of the most dynamic sectors in automotive engineering. Time to think out of the box, and reason enough to question the traditional Indian approach to take foreign designs based on, well, mature technology and then primarily rely on India's low labour cost, scale effects and a more cavalier approach to product quality in order to bring the price down.

So, Gentlemen, here comes some free advice and a deeper look at what functionalities can fairly simply be dropped on Indian roads:

1. Indicators: Whereas the rest of the world creates fancier and more elaborate designs, just skip this feature. No motorist in India uses indicators in any consistent or even predictable way, except, strangely enough, when switching on the hazard flashers in tunnels and fog. If your customers do not know what they are for and do not use them - why bother?

2. Rear view mirrors: As we now no longer require the mirrors to accommodate fancy indicators, there is no real reason to bolt these things to the vehicle. Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, folds them in anyway or does not replace them after they have been brushed off by pedestrians or other motorised vehicles. The internal mirror should be kept, so that your customer can occasionally check on his hairdo. And isn't there an underlying message? What you see in the rear view mirror is the past, and India shall not dwell on that - we look into the future, which, of course, lies ahead. Which brings us to point 3.

3. Headlights: Yes, the Great Indian Motorist will need them. After all, few places in the Universe are as dark as Indian roads at night, and few things have bigger holes in them. But why complicate matters by offering a choice of High Beam and Low Beam? The Great Indian Motorist only uses High Beam, of course, because he can see better and further. It is an interesting observation that some of the world's most sophisticated driving machines are imported to India with ultra-bright high-tech Xenon lighting systems, which then burn the retina of other people on the road to crisps as they are never ever switched into low beam. That oncoming traffic cannot see anything is someone else's problem, and India does not dwell on problems. There is one situation to dip the lights, though: To support the horn by flashing at and annoying the hell out of vehicles and other obstacles ahead. Nevertheless: To get the same obnoxious strobe effect, we can also briefly switch off the lights totally. Done.

4. Ventilation: Whereas the rest of the world demands air intakes, HEPA filters and high-performance climate control systems, you will be able to ignore all of that. The Great Indian Motorist does not believe in oxygen, and always sets the ventilation system to closed circulation. Fresh air is for other parts of the world (and rarely available in Indian cities anyway), your customers prefer the stale odour which can only develop in hermetically sealed environments under the influence of humidity, heat, underpaid slum-dwelling drivers spending long waiting hours in the vehicle and the worlds highest consumption and digestion of lentils. Aircon it is, on full throttle, refrigerating yesterday's gaseous content of the vehicle.

Now, you will say that you cannot do this, as these features are considered crucial elsewhere and important to protect your customers.

Face it: Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, is the world's worst driver, and he is more than happy to prove that by killing 150,000 fellow countrymen per year on the subcontinent's roads. Your job, however, is to manufacture and sell cars, not to run a driving school. The Great Indian Motorist does not give a rat's arse about his own safety, and much less about the safety of others. The Great Indian Motorist knows best what is good for him and what is silly stuff for the rest of the world - or as he would put in: People in Foreign. Indicators, mirrors, low beam, fresh air, common sense and regard for other people are not asked for in India.

So, Mr. Ratan Tata, Carlos Ghosn, Chung Mon-Koo, Takanobu Ito, Mr. Whitacre, Winterkorn, Bajaj and Toyoda, here is a straightforward way to shave unnecessary costs of your revolutionary cars and to help bringing out even more imbeciles to the roads of India. Take it, it is free.

You are welcome.