This are illiteracy

India car giant Tata unveiled this week the worlds cheapest shitest car. Following the trend of suffixing inferior products with the word nano, Indian car giant Tata has just released the most dangerous thing to hit the roads since that guy who’d played a bit too much Grand Theft Auto decided to take a tank for a spin.

Costing just 100,000 rupees (just over a thousand dolars), the nano will go on sale next month, meaning the road accident death toll in India should start to climb somewhere around mid July.

Although I don’t feel I need to justify this wildly negative outlook, I will humour you this once. What much of the world does not realise is that cars are a massive status symbol in India, I mean, they are a status symbol everywhere but over there just owning one produces the same ammount of smugness that a Prius would to a US driver. For example many families are going without other necesities, just to save up enough to buy a new Nano.

Whats the problem with that I hear you ask, well there are many. First, the nano is so cheap because it has been stripped of many safety features that are mandatory in other cars and replaced them with navel lint.

That in itself isn’t great, but you can argue that people in india are already driving in worse, and you would be right. However the devious people at Tata have made this car so cheap that it has opened up car ownership to a far larger slice of the population, so you will have far more people driving these mobile incendiary devices around their towns. Couple increased driver numbers with the infamously bad drivers to be found in their country and you’ve got yourself a problem.

And of course the thing that the most people will harp on about is the environmental effects of this tiny auto.

This is the main grievance I have with people getting all excited about being ‘green’. You can buy all the hybrid cars you want, make your carbon footprint smurf sized and plant a tree every time you fart and on the other side of the world there will still be 250,000 more people a year driving around in their $1000 pollution mobiles negating all your well meaning actions. The worse news is that Tata has announced if demand is high enough, these cars may start appearing in Britain. If this ever happens I may be obliged to go join Tankboy on his next highway sojourn.