In 2008, the Indian automobile company Tata Motors launched its new Tata Nano car.Footnote 1 Branded and massively promoted as an Indian version of ‘the people’s car’, and priced at a very affordable 100,000 Indian Rupees (INR), the launch of the Nano made headlines not just across India, but across the world. Not only did it promise to bring car ownership within reach of Indian middle-class families; it also demonstrated India’s unique capacity for innovation and engineering. Yet only a decade after the spectacular launch, the production of the Nano was quietly being phased out, and by 2020 both production and sales were officially discontinued.

Drawing on social theories of consumption, this chapter analyses the rise and eventual decline of the Nano, from the drawing board to the paradoxical situation where the car that was aggressively marketed for the ‘Indian people’ found itself without a people, that is, without a significant consumer base. Based on this chronological account, we argue that cars and their reception as a particular consumer good feed into historically constituted linkages between objects and social status displays in India. These linkages, we suggest, are mediated in new ways in a context of accelerated global economic integration and trade, an increasingly globalised media, and changing consumer aspirations.

We first locate the story of the Nano in the trajectory of the car in post-colonial India, before presenting our account of the rise and fall of the Nano. We argue that the Nano failed neither because it was a mediocre car, nor because it remained economically out of reach for most Indians. Rather, we suggest that its insertion into the lower ranks of a powerful status hierarchy of identity-defining objects precluded it from adequately tapping into new and hegemonic forms of middle-class aspiration in ‘New India’. The rejection of the Nano among Indian consumers was therefore not directed only at the car itself, but at the image of ‘the Indian middle-class consumer’ that the car conjured up. To substantiate this argument, we engage substantially with the literature on consumption, India’s ‘new middle class’, and the discourse of a ‘New India’ in which the nation is projected as rapidly entering into a new world of global possibilities.

The Car in India

Soon after India became independent in 1947, the Indian government banned the import of completely built cars, and from 1953 it refused permission to Indian manufacturers to assemble imported vehicles without increasing local content. This would mean that domestic manufacturers such as Hindustan Motors—who produced the iconic Ambassador car—and Premier Automobiles consolidated their grip on production (D’Costa, 2005: 82), constituting a duopoly in the Indian car industry which would last until the 1970s.

Because the car industry was tightly regulated and cars treated as luxury products subject to price controls (D’Costa, 2005), the Ambassador remained out of reach for most Indians. It was the car of ministers and a small segment of the upper middle class, a well-established marker of social status and distinction (Wilhite, 2008: 123). In the 1970s, however, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi promoted the idea of domestic production of an Indian ‘people’s car’. In 1971, Sanjay Gandhi started a car manufacturing company of his own, Maruti Limited (Guha, 2007: 469–470), vowing that his company would soon produce a car that would come to dominate the market. But when Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in 1980, Maruti had not produced a single vehicle (D’Costa, 2005: 85), and only in 1983 did the company—through a joint venture with Suzuki—release its ‘Maruti 800’ model, the first car within the affordable range for the Indian middle class.

The Maruti 800 was more than just a car. It would also be the vanguard of a new consumption-driven Indian political economy. India’s Prime Minister from 1984 to 1989, Rajiv Gandhi, shifted the economic development emphasis from production to consumption and ‘to the possibility of commodities that would tap into the tastes and consumption practices of the urban middle classes’ (Fernandes, 2000: 613). In this context, the Maruti 800 constituted an ‘aesthetically pleasing and economically attractive’ vehicle from the point of view of ‘a consuming class accustomed to expensive and shoddy products’ (D’Costa, 2005: 91). Nonetheless, in the 1980s there was still a lingering element of the longstanding social valuation of frugality in Indian middle-class consumption, and in this early phase of the birth of the consumption economy, products were still designed to be practical, functional and durable. This included the successive versions of the Maruti 800 that would remain fairly standardised with interchangeable parts, allowing owners to harvest social approval by making their car last while keeping it in mint condition.

As Wilhite (2008: 123) reports from Kerala, in the 1980s the Ambassador and the Maruti 800 combined to constitute a fixed and stable social hierarchy: the rich drove Ambassadors, while the rest (of those who could afford a car) drove a Maruti. Yet this began to change after 1991 and the opening of India to foreign models, manufacturers and investments. The passenger car segment was completely de-licensed in 1993 (D’Costa, 2005: 103), following which the auto industry has rapidly internationalised, forming a market with a great variety of car models. This has coincided with high, if erratic, rates of economic growth over many years so that more Indians than ever before now aspire to the expanding comforts of middle-class life. This includes air-conditioned homes, a number of household electric appliances such as washing machines and microwave ovens, and new home entertainment technologies, as well as an explosion in the ownership of smartphones (Tenhunen, 2018). Car ownership forms an important ingredient in this comfort regime, emerging as ‘totems’ or ‘marker assets’ of upper-middle-class status (Krishna & Bajpai, 2015: 71).

The availability of a multiplicity of cars and models unfolded in a context in which frugality was waning as a positive factor in social performance. The rush for new consumer goods that followed after liberalisation soon displaced this older ethos (Krishna & Bajpai, 2015), indexing how the unfolding politics of state-led economic liberalisation and the formation of new, conspicuous or ‘aspirational’ (Mazzarella, 2003) consumption practices among India’s new middle class have been mutually constitutive and reinforcing (Fernandes, 2009). As new products and new models of household appliances and cars of differing price and quality became available, holding onto older commodities was gradually associated with an inability ‘to keep up’.

As discussed in the introduction to this volume, Veblen’s (1899) work shows how people in socially stratified societies use commodities to emulate the consumption of the elite. In the 1980s, the vast difference in cost between the Ambassador and the Maruti made this form for emulation impossible for most middle-class Indians. However, by the 1990s the consumption landscape had changed. Foreign cars, SUVs and other kinds of quasi-luxury cars now came within reach, making the car—highly visible in driveways and on the roads—a perfect means to project a family’s social identity. Already more than a decade ago, Saavala (2010) noted how a family that bought a car did not do so simply for practical purposes, but also to position themselves in relation to people who ‘only’ had a motorbike.

As shown in Bourdieu’s (1984) work, in societies where class distinctions are blurred and consumption choices vastly elaborated, consumption not only signals a move upward through social hierarchy, but rather through an articulated social space consisting of multiple identities. As Brosius (2010) shows for India, the intangible and fuzzy nature of the middle-class category makes the social performance of taste and preferences through consumption practices particularly important in the production of class distinctions. The proliferation of automobile models since 1991 created a new, dynamic consumption landscape in which new models, and thus new potential social identities, were being produced at a high rate. This brought about a virtual collapse of the earlier bi-polar Ambassador-Maruti social hierarchy, through the incorporation of an ever-greater variety of vehicles. This increasingly rendered the Ambassador a charming but outdated car of ‘Old India’, leading to the suspension of its production in 2014. The production of the Maruti 800 stopped the same year.

The Making of the Nano

To understand the rise and decline of the Tata Nano, it is important to be mindful of how its prolonged planning, design and production process played out in this rapidly changing consumption landscape. The idea of producing a genuinely inexpensive car for ‘the people’ took shape in the early 2000s. Having observed how mass transport in India is often not available or is of poor quality and that two-wheelers are an unsafe mode of transportation for a family, Ratan Tata, the chairman of the Tata Group at the time, was motivated to create a safer alternative for Indian families.

Tata’s vision was shared among industrialists and politicians. During his inaugural address at the 2004 Auto Expo in New Delhi, the then Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, had stressed the importance for the nation of exploring new ways to produce and promote affordable transportation for the great Indian multitude. Advani had asked rhetorically: ‘If only we had a people’s car costing no more than INR 100,000, how many millions of people would be queuing up to buy it?’ (quoted in The Economic Times, 2004).

While most auto manufacturers questioned the feasibility of producing a car priced at only INR 100,000, Ratan Tata boldly responded to the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement by declaring that ‘the one lakh car is under development’ (quoted in rediff.com, 2004), reassuring critics that it would be a real car, not a simple four-wheeled auto rickshaw or ‘a car with plastic curtains and no roof’ (quoted in Tiwari, 2009: 106). Clouded in secrecy, the penultimate design of the car was ready in 2005, and by 2006 the design was ‘frozen’. The fact that the car was kept behind a curtain of impenetrable security (Freiberg et al., 2011: 205) added to the mystique and excitement that surrounded the Nano prior to and during its launch in January 2008 when it officially received the name ‘Nano’.

Approaching the Launch

In the years leading up to the launch, the Nano was the target of considerable public attention. The establishment of a new Nano factory in West Bengal embroiled Tata Motors in one of the most controversial instances of coercive land acquisition for an industrial project in the 2000s (Nielsen, 2010, 2018), generating a measure of negative press. Yet when the focus was on the car itself, the public mood was upbeat. The Nano was described by some as ‘the most awaited car in the world’ (Hutton, 2009), and its success was virtually guaranteed since, as one journal wrote, Tata Motors had a history of being ‘adept at learning not just the needs but the hopes and desires of their customer base in this, “the most optimistic country in the world”’ (Bennett, 2008). And it continued: ‘Indians are very status-conscious, and the move to a four-wheeled vehicle is considered a huge event … even a little USD 2,500 four-door can be a dream machine, a freedom machine’ (Bennett, 2008). A similar enthusiastic anticipation would mark the reception of the Nano at the launch itself, during which the media and the public had its first view of the new vehicle. As Der Spiegel observed, the Nano ‘grabbed more attention than anything shown at the North America International Auto Show in Detroit held the same month’ (Rowley & Srivastava, 2008).

Nano, Nation, ‘New India’

The enthusiasm and effervescence surrounding the Nano are, we suggest, not just about the car itself, but about the nation and national identity. As Edensor (2004) has shown, automobility and national identity are deeply intertwined and often mediated by so-called ‘iconic vehicles’ to the extent that certain cars can, like the Ambassador until the 1980s, signify national identity. Cars are, in other words, loaded with national significance (2004: 102–104), and manufacturers and advertisers often seek to encode their vehicles with these symbolic national significations. In this regard, the Nano was no exception. On the one hand, it was aggressively promoted and branded as the car of ‘the Indian people’, a car for everyone. This ‘connect’ with the people was, for example, stressed on the Nano’s official webpage that featured a section called ‘Nano Diaries’. Here Nano owners would relate their personal experiences with driving the Nano, often on longer journeys traversing various corners of the country, thus inscribing the Nano onto the nation’s physical geography.Footnote 2 On the other hand, the Nano also sought to symbolise the nation in other, more spectacular ways. In 2011, a special version called the Tata Nano Goldplus went on a 6-month tour of India, stopping at 29 Tata-owned Goldplus jewellery stores across the country. The Nano Goldplus was covered in 80 kg of gold, 15 kg of silver, and inlaid with 10,000 semi-precious stones and gems, including a jewel-encrusted peacock (India’s national bird) on the front bumper, its design combining traditions of craftsmanship from different Indian regions. This car, worth an estimated USD 4.5 million, not only exuded affluence; it celebrated a famous yet diverse national tradition of skilled craftsmanship and tied the nation together by traversing its length and breadth for half a year.

Such marketing strategies, of course, beg the question: what ‘people’ and which nation are being signified? In our view, what is conveyed through the Nano is the idea of ‘New India’, an idea that at one level indexes the socio-political and economic realities that characterise India today, after decades of liberalising economic reforms and the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption (Kaur, 2020). While one could potentially dismiss ‘New India’ as little more than a hyperreal construct, we here draw inspiration from Kaur (2012, 2020) in examining the significance of ‘New India’ precisely at the representational level, that is, as a symbolic construct that mobilises particular identities, desires and aspirations, and ideas about ‘the people’.

‘New India’ sees India as ‘a new world of enterprise, techno-mobility, consumption and fresh market opportunities’ (Kaur & Hansen, 2016: 2) as embodied in its globally renown IT and ITES industry; its impressive rates of economic growth during the first decade of this millennium; its global soft power spearheaded by Bollywood and its film stars; its capacity for attracting corporate praise and foreign investment; and not least its consumer-oriented new middle class that has been measured and celebrated precisely on the basis of its capacity and desire for consumption (Fernandes, 2009; Brosius, 2010; Saavala, 2010). And it is this new middle class that has increasingly come to stand in for ‘the people’ insofar as it has ‘come to define and represent the nation as a whole’ (Upadhya, 2011: 169–170). ‘New India’, in other words, is an India that wants to divest itself of its image as a developing country, emerging instead as an important actor on the global scene. The Nano, we suggest, was intended to tap into, and become iconic of, the ideas, desires, and aspirations of ‘New India’ in a fourfold manner.

First, the Nano was represented as a triumph of the determined, individual entrepreneurial spirit of Ratan Tata. Not only had this brought the Nano into being. It had seemingly also earned its rightful place in the global history of automobility, alongside other iconic ‘people’s cars’ of the past such as the Ford T, the Beetle, and the Mini. In addition, Ratan Tata’s personal success placed him alongside other new business ‘icons’ (particularly within the IT industry) who have garnered ‘immense symbolic power for the aspiring middle classes’ (Upadhya, 2011: 190) because they embody what an individual can, in theory, achieve not through inherited or ascribed social status, but through personal vision, acquired merit and hard work.

Secondly, the Nano firmly placed ‘New India’ on the global map as innovative nation capable of astounding engineering feats. Just how astounding this ‘feat’ appeared can be seen if we compare the price of India’s ‘people’s car’ to those other legendary ‘people’s cars’ produced elsewhere: Adjusting prices to 2009 USD, Ford’s Model T would have cost USD 21,000 and the Volkswagen Beetle USD 11,000 when first put on the market. The Nano was priced at only USD 2100 (Freiberg et al., 2011: 214), that is, one-tenth of the price of a Ford T. The Nano’s affordability, in turn, allowed for a re-articulation with the traditional Indian valuation of frugality, albeit in new form. Both inside and outside of India, the Nano was hailed as the outcome of a distinctly Indian form of ‘Gandhian’ or ‘frugal’ engineering that aims to ‘get more from less’. Sometimes subsumed under the Hindi word jugaad—a term initially used to describe jury-rigged, self-repaired bricolage vehicles—such frugal engineering re-articulated within global business and marketing jargon comes to denote a special kind of shrewd, entrepreneurial, improvisational Indian savoir-faire, a sense of Indian genius that makes the most out of limited resources (Birtchnell, 2011; Jeffrey & Young, 2014).Footnote 3

Thirdly, the Nano was represented as an emancipatory invention, simultaneously playing a key role in national development, and holding out the promise of democratising automobility by making a new and affordable form of personalised transportation available to ‘the people’. In this context, it is significant that the Tata Group has a carefully crafted public image as a business conglomerate imbued with a larger social purpose, known for its nation-building ethos and philanthropy. The popular rhetoric surrounding the Nano thus resonated strongly with dominant tropes of national development and upliftment, and with the Tata Group’s historical contribution to these.

Fourthly, and most importantly, from the point of view of sales, the Nano was represented as appealing directly to middle-class aspirations and desires for personal mobility and social status. The ‘people’ indexed by ‘the people’s car’ was thus in key respects the new middle class. From the vantage point of the middle class, the Nano had obvious practical advantages compared to other forms of mobility. The choice of when, why and for how long to travel is, with a car, no longer subject to the vagaries of often crowded and uncomfortable public transportation; one is spared unpleasant situations of close, physical proximity with society’s lower orders on crowded busses (Saavala, 2010: 117–118); one is less impeded by the monsoon rains that makes travel by bicycle or motorbike difficult; and in a car, one is sheltered from the high rates of air pollution and suspended particulate matter that plague major Indian cities. But as Ananya Roy (2011: 267) has argued, the crucial appeal of the Nano was its capacity for symbolically becoming a ‘phantasmagoria of middle-class consumption’, as she puts it: an elusive and malleable object that could embody shifting desires and aspirations for physical and social mobility, status, comfort and affluence among ‘New India’s’ middle class (see also Hansen et al., 2016).

In this fourfold way, then, the iconic Nano powerfully synthesised key characteristics associated with ‘New India’ at the level of the nation and the people, but also at the level of the family and the individual: personal achievement through individual merit and determination; the realisation of middle-class consumerist aspirations; mobility for the people, both spatial and social; national development; and a global reputation for creative innovation. Yet in practice, this synthesis would be difficult to sustain over time.

Hitting the Road

The first Nano only hit the road in mid-2009. The initial demand was so great that Tata Motors decided to institute a lottery to decide the owners of the first 100,000 cars among more than 200,000 orders, and second-hand models were soon reported to cost up to 30 per cent more than the original price—such was the demand that consumers were willing to pay more for a used model rather than wait a few months extra for a new car.

By most accounts, the Nano was an efficient, manoeuvrable and reliable car. Equipped with a 624 cc, twin-cylinder engine with a 35 HP output, the small car of around three metres in length easily accommodated four passengers. And with a maximum speed at around 100 kilometres per hour, it had no difficulties keeping up with larger vehicles. Many expert test drives reviewed the Nano relatively favourably, identifying its affordability, fuel efficiency and utility in cramped urban traffic as its main strengths. The UK-based Autocar, for instance, described it as ‘an amazing car’ and a truly Indian contribution to ‘the new world of motoring’.

However, the initial flurry of euphoria soon subsided. This was partly due to engineering problems that caused a number of Nanos to spontaneously combust. Several cases of faulty electrical switches that caused smoke and melted plastic components were also reported, alongside a number of other production problems, delays and technical snags. These contributed to plunging Nano sales: despite a production capacity (and projected sales rate) of more than 20,000 vehicles per month, Nano sales would generally hover between 3000 and 8000 per month. It would very rarely exceed 10,000 per month, but would often drop to around 1000 or even less. For a car that (admittedly over-optimistic) estimates had suggested would expand the Indian car market by upwards of 65 per cent (Tiwari, 2009: 107), these were very modest sales figures indeed.

According to Carl-Peter Forster (interviewed in The Economist, 2011) who took over as head of Tata Motors in February 2010, engineering problems were not the sole reason for the Nano’s poor performance. When the car was launched there was no real national distribution scheme, very little marketing and advertising, and no effective system of consumer finance. The large majority of the Indian people therefore never got to hear about or have the opportunity to see the car that would ostensibly transform their lives. A significant part of Nano’s marketing problems in fact began with its product positioning. The real price of the car—including taxes, etc.—was around INR 140,000, putting it out of reach of first-time buyers with no access to formal credit. In an ironic way, then, the Nano’s status as iconic of ‘New India’ was refracted through the prism of an ‘Old India’ in which ‘technical snags’ in production; poorly targeted marketing and advertising; lacklustre infrastructure; inefficient distribution; the lack of dealers in small towns and rural areas; and a lack of institutional credit prevented ‘the people’s car’ from actually reaching ‘the people’. Yet, in addition, India’s shifting consumption landscape that we described above also crucially shaped the reception of the Nano.

From Affordable Car to ‘Cheap’ Car

As stated above, people use cars to make statements about themselves and their families (Wilhite, 2008: 127). As mobile symbols, the car ‘materialises personality’ (Sheller, 2004: 225) and projects to the public how we like to see ourselves, and how we would like others to see us. They convey and connote images of status, wealth and social standing in public spaces in a manner in which no other commodity can (Hansen, 2017). But, in this domain of status and social standing, the line separating frugality from cupidity; moderation from excess; and not least affordability and cheapness is a fine one that is prone to shift.

The Nano had been made affordable by keeping production costs low. This was a source of pride and achievement for Tata Motors insofar as it documented unprecedented innovation skills on the part of Tata’s designers and subcontractors. But, from the point of view of consumers, the insistence on keeping the price low meant doing away with the potential to symbolise something more than the buyer barely managing the economics of a move to four wheels. In short, the low production costs meant that there was nothing to brag about. Indeed, as one reviewer lamented, the base Nano was pure minimalism: a manual gearbox with four speeds; no power steering; no ABS, no vacuum booster for the four-wheel drum brakes; only one windshield wiper and one side mirror; only one gauge (the central speedometer); no heater and no ventilation system (Hutton, 2009); and thinly padded nonadjustable seats. The Nano, in other words, exuded frugality. But these values had by the time the Nano hit the road increasingly reseeded from the broader register of social performance among the new middle class, among whom bigger vehicles and a comfortable and lush interior design were now much more significant (Tetzlaff, 2013).

Ratan Tata had evidently been well aware of the delicate balance between cutting costs to ensure affordability, and the risk of projecting an image of ‘cheapness’. Designing the Nano, he admitted, had involved ‘saving money on every single bit of the car’. Yet Tata Motors had still believed that it would nonetheless be possible to produce the Nano without any quality stigma attaching to the Nano: ‘One thing we were clear about: This was never going to be a half-car. Nobody wants a car that is less than everybody else’s car’, Ratan Tata had said (quoted in Noronha, 2008).

Yet in practice, the stigma of being a car that was in fact ‘less than everybody else’s car’ soon attached itself to the Nano. As Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar India, put it: ‘In communications, it’s gone out as the world’s cheapest car … there’s a kind of stigma attached to it, as though you can’t afford anything else’ (quoted in Dhume, 2011). Similar sentiments were reported in Der Spiegel in an interview with the prospective Nano owner Rajesh Malhotra in 2008 (Rowley & Srivastava, 2008). Malhotra had been contemplating exchanging his USD 1400 motorbike for a Nano but had started having second thoughts. Once taxes and insurance costs were added, the price of the entry-level Nano would rise to just over USD 3000. For an extra USD 500, Malhotra claimed he could buy a decent used car with a more powerful engine and air conditioning, luxuries that the Nano did not have. He was therefore personally inclined to ‘wait and see what others think’ before going ahead with the purchase. In this, Malhotra was not alone. The stigma attached to the Nano alienated several categories of potential buyers and, as Tata’s Managing Director said (quoted in Philip, 2013) in 2013 when the Nano’s lack of popular appeal was evident, scooter drivers were not attracted to it because others ‘don’t think I’m buying a car, they think I’m buying something between a two-wheeler and a car’. Comparably, people who already had a car would not want to buy a Nano either, because ‘it was supposed to be a two-wheeler replacement’.

In other words, comfort and engine power were not all that mattered to potential buyers. Public opinion and taste embedded in the broader consumption landscape were also crucially significant. As we have argued, this landscape is fluid, and the commercialised cultural markers that are used to define class status—or to distinguish affordable from cheap, or frugality from cupidity—may change very frequently. Yet within this fluid landscape, a particular ‘dominant fraction’ within the new Indian middle class arguably exerts a greater influence in terms of defining the standards against which the aspirations of other fractions of the same class and within the same landscape are measured (Fernandes & Heller, 2008; Brosius, 2010). Fernandes and Heller (2008: 150) argue that the dominant fraction of the middle class is engaged in a hegemonic project rooted in a politics of consumption that simultaneously holds out ‘the promise of inclusion to other aspiring social segments even as it reconstitutes the subtle hierarchies and exclusions that anchor its class position’. The pursuit of this ‘promise of inclusion’ via consumption by those social groups aspiring to middle-class status has been described as a ‘new sanskritisation’ (Krishna & Bajpai, 2015: 74) whereby the emulation of elite practices reaffirm and reproduce hierarchy and distinction, even as these are transformed. As the case of the Nano shows, cars and car ownership figure crucially in these subtle processes of reconstructing distinction and exclusion. Here, the Nano has ended up at the lower rungs: It did not succeed in establishing itself as ‘the people’s car’ because it was not and could not be incorporated into the hegemonic project of the dominant fraction of the middle class; it rather acquired the tag as the car of that segment of the middle class who ‘can’t afford anything else’, as Hormazd Sorabjee put it (quoted in Dhume, 2011). In this sense, ownership of a Nano came to be indexical of an incomplete or adverse inclusion into the new Indian middle class, and ‘Nano rejection’ in favour of other models conversely an aspirational refusal to occupy the subject position of an ‘incomplete’ Indian middle-class consumer subject that the Nano conjures up.

This rejection of the basic Nano and all that it entailed is brought out not simply by low sales across the board. It is also evident from how most early Nano-owners in fact preferred to buy the more expensive ‘CX’ or ‘LX’ models (Wells, 2010: 6) that came with extra features and conveniences such as air conditioning or an integrated music system. And, not least, it is evident in how Tata Motors soon began to rebrand the Nano in new ways to erase its stigma. This rebranding exercise and its attendant advertising campaigns show how Tata Motors has sought to manipulate brand desire by establishing a different kind of aspirational resonance with a new category of consumers: the cool people.

The Nano as ‘The Cool People’s Car’

By mid-2015, the ‘basic’ Nano had been removed from the Tata Nano webpage, which limited itself to promoting the three latest versions of the car.Footnote 4 One was the compressed natural gas (CNG) powered Nano emax with bi-fuel facility, boasting what was at the time claimed to be the best-in-class CNG mileage at 36 km/kg. Launched in late 2013, the emax was projected as environmentally friendly, and as the smart, intelligent, and green choice for knowledgeable consumers conscious about their ecological footprint. Priced from INR 2.5 lakh upwards, it cost two and a half times as much as the basic Nano.

The second new Nano that emerged from the rebranding exercise was the Nano Twist, launched in early 2014. Described as a ‘new smart city car’ with ‘cool, young and trendy features’, the Nano Twist was, in the words of the President of Tata Motors’ Passenger Vehicle Business Unit, created to cater ‘to the dynamic desires of our growing customer base of young, trendy urbanites’ (Tata Motors Media Centre, 2014). The Nano Twist was available in a range of ‘trendy’ colours and came with a stereo and AC, as well as hubcaps and chrome trim. The price was comparable to the emax. The third new Nano to emerge from the rebranding initiative was the GenX Nano, a ‘compact hatch’ with automatic transmission, power steering, and new technology to facilitate bumper to bumper driving in dense urban traffic. Launched in mid-2015, prices ranged from INR 2 to 3 lakh.

The shift from branding the Nano as ‘the people’s car’ to ‘the cool people’s car’ was equally evident in the many promotional videos focused on the Nano Twist. These videos celebrated the ‘awesomeness, youngness, kickassness, zigzagness, cityness and magicness’ of the Nano. They exclusively portrayed young, trendy urbanites having a good time, and highlighted the Nano’s ability to manoeuvre effectively in urban traffic, as well as the ease of parking because of the car’s compactness. Increasingly, then, the Nano came to be rebranded and redesigned to appeal to younger buyers looking for a car that was ‘a little more aspirational’ (McLain, 2013) than the basic Nano. Alongside this, it was also, albeit more discretely, rebranded as a family’s ideal second or third car, a car for the ‘youngster in the house’, on the hopeful assumption that Nano ownership might thereby come to index a family capable of affording multiple cars. These new marketing and branding strategies, and the different consumer subjectivities and aspirations they appeal to—being environmentally conscious; a trendy urbanite; part of an affluent family; etc.—are undoubtedly more attuned to the real social location of the dominant fraction of the middle class that claims to speak for ‘New India’ and ‘its people’ as a whole. But the consequence of this repositioning of the Nano and its attendant increase in purchasing price was that the Nano’s claim to being an affordable ‘people’s car’ in the conventional sense was progressively undermined. The new key consumer group, the new people in ‘the cool people’s car’, is far removed from the vision of ‘the people’ that originally inspired Ratan Tata to build the car, namely an average Indian family of four cramped onto a single two-wheeler.

In the event, Tata Motors’ attempted repositioning of the Nano made little impact as sales continued to decline. By 2018, a mere 518 models were sold in the entire year, averaging a mere 43 cars per month. With new and stricter Indian safety regulations and emission norms coming into effect in 2019 and 2020—with which existing Nano models did not comply—the company announced its decision to discontinue production, thereby signalling the end of the road for the people’s car.Footnote 5

Conclusion

Our account of the rise and fall of the Tata Nano has covered a period of close to two decades during which important shifts have occurred in India’s globalised consumption landscape. This landscape is defined by an increasingly consolidated social dynamic in which commodities are seen as positive social identifiers, and where visible, aspirational consumption has become a key signifier of middle-class status. Here, the car is arguably one of the most important objects for conveying images of status, wealth and social standing. Parked in front of the house or transporting its owner and family through urban geographies, the car has become the perfect vehicle for and symbol of the ‘new’ Indian middle-class family (Saavala, 2010).

Prior to the launch, the massive hype surrounding the Nano indicated that the small car was expected to both tap into the tastes and desires of the ‘New India’ and to contribute to ‘New India’s’ realisation, growth and expansion. ‘New India’ as idea, image or brand (Kaur, 2012, 2016, 2020) sees the nation as an emerging actor on the global stage, ‘eager to make its presence felt in the global community’ (Kaur, 2016: 14). The Nano aimed to both capitalise on and fortify this positive image through innovative, world-class engineering, appealing in the process to a thrifty and consumerist new Indian middle class, with the aim of outcompeting more expensive and luxurious foreign and domestic models. But as the termination of production shows, the Nano failed. A key explanation for this, we argue, is that in conception, design, and partly also in marketing, the Nano largely appealed to an older ethos of frugality and simplicity as positive social signifiers, an ethos which had, by the time the car was finally on the market, increasingly lost its positive connotations. Tata’s design and innovation discourse, in other words, failed to engage sufficiently with important shifts in the possession and social positioning of key consumer goods such as cars. More specifically, it failed to speak sufficiently to the aspirations of dominant fractions of the middle class who set the consumption standards against which the aspirations of other fractions of the same class are measured. The result was that the Nano came to acquire a dual set of negative identity connotations, signifying adverse or incomplete inclusion into the new middle class, and a consumer identity whose desires and aspirations could be fulfilled by a simple, cheap vehicle. The fact that the frugal Nano was incompatible with the aspirational consumerist desires and practices of ‘New India’s’ middle class effectively deprived the people’s car of ‘a people’.