...........and you thought the Mustang II & Pinto where bad!

[wayiwalk]

Re: ...........and you thought the Mustang II & Pinto where bad!

That reminds me of the Yugo, which didn't last too long in this country - a friend had one and wasn't too happy about its reliability.

another commenters note about the potholes swallowing this car up - that is certainly true in the north east, where roads are so continuously congested that they make restoration difficult and poorly reconstructed that they barely last a season before the potholes reform.

I suspect these vehicles won't last so long before suffering the same fate as the Yugo.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: ...........and you thought the Mustang II & Pinto where bad!

When I think of Tata Nanos in the US I think about EJs(and others) posts describing inflation via reduced quality/quantity.

I think that's the most important point of the Nano being launched in the US.

While Yugo was a disaster when introduced in the US circa 1984-ish......there was also another car manufacturer that launched at nearly the same time in the US, Hyundai.

Back them Hyundai cars were piles of poo too.....now they make a pretty good value for dollar car.

For me, the Nano also represent the reason why I think that investing in energy as a hedge against inflation is just as important, and possibly more so, than precious metals.

I'd like to see a "Bart Chart" on projected per capita energy consumption of China/India/Brazil/Indonesia/Malaysia/Thailand/Egypt/Vietnam going forward.......and what impact that will have on current/projected excess refined energy production capacity.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if a long-energy hedge fund offers $100 rebates for every Nano sold and another $100 for every 10,000km on the odometer...you could probably make it back x25 as long as you are leveraged x50

[GRG55]

Re: ...........and you thought the Mustang II & Pinto where bad!

When I think of Tata Nanos in the US I think about EJs(and others) posts describing inflation via reduced quality/quantity.

I think that's the most important point of the Nano being launched in the US.

While Yugo was a disaster when introduced in the US circa 1984-ish......there was also another car manufacturer that launched at nearly the same time in the US, Hyundai.

Back them Hyundai cars were piles of poo too.....now they make a pretty good value for dollar car.

For me, the Nano also represent the reason why I think that investing in energy as a hedge against inflation is just as important, and possibly more so, than precious metals.

I'd like to see a "Bart Chart" on projected per capita energy consumption of China/India/Brazil/Indonesia/Malaysia/Thailand/Egypt/Vietnam going forward.......and what impact that will have on current/projected excess refined energy production capacity.

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if a long-energy hedge fund offers $100 rebates for every Nano sold and another $100 for every 10,000km on the odometer...you could probably make it back x25 as long as you are leveraged x50

The Nano won't be coming to North America. It's a car designed specifically to get people to move up from a scooter [which is what they moved up to when they ditched their bicycles]. Not many scooters in North America.

Instead of a Nano, we appear to be going the other way...from a Hummer back to a bicycle.

[but of course the cycle is a very high tech and costly one with numerous suspension and other features one is unlikely to find on any Indian bicycle...:p]

[Rajiv]

Re: ...........and you thought the Mustang II & Pinto where bad!

Instead of a Nano, we appear to be going the other way...from a Hummer back to a bicycle.

On that topic, two good articles - The Great Reskilling

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To some extent, The Great Reskilling is about turning the clock back. Not for dogmatic reasons ("technology is evil") or for romantic reasons ("everything was better in ye olde times"), but because the required direction of action - given coming (energy) resource scarcity and climate change concerns - is so obvious. And it is thus better to start acting now, rather than to wait until we have no other choice than to learn everything all at once. However, we should of course hold on to any and every technology that we can possible manage to maintain. From this perspective, it is clear that cars are not a sustainable transportation technology, and that resources for transporting people (in cities) already today should focus on rail traffic and bicycles, rather than wasting resources on building brand new roads.
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Second - Useful work versus useless toil revisited

It was the contention of William Morris, the great progenitor of the modern arts and crafts movement and the historic preservation movement, that the signal qualities of industrial society are waste and useless toil. One hundred and twenty-six years after Morris gave a lecture entitled "Useful work versus useless toil" to a group of workingmen in London, little has changed except perhaps that the amount of waste and useless toil has grown exponentially.

The waste, of course, is obvious: wasteful consumption (tied neither to survival nor beauty but rather status); planned obsolescence as an industrial principle (which helps create repeat sales as well as ever higher mountains in our landfills); and profligate energy use which exhausts finite sources of energy such as fossil fuels.

Useless toil refers to all those tasks which either produce nothing of value for society (even if they enrich some individuals) or which actually detract from the overall public good. Morris had a nascent environmental awareness and decried the destruction of the landscape caused by industrialism in England.

Today, some of Morris's themes may seem passé. He champions shorter working hours so that people can not only rest but also have adequate leisure to enjoy their lives. He thinks work ought to be on the whole pleasurable, that human beings want to work and make things of value and beauty. And, he wants working conditions to be not merely tolerable, but actually pleasant and enticing.

Some of the world's leading companies have striven to make work as Morris had envisioned it a reality. But perhaps the most questionable aspect of modern work is what it produces. Craft was at the core of Morris's philosophy, and so the mass consumerism made possible by industrial production has created a world that is an anathema to Morris's notions of usefulness and beauty. And, it has condemned countless millions of industrial workers in so-called developing countries to live in conditions not far removed from those suffered by the English working class in the 19th century. Think Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, the latter a truly grim accounting.

Another important indictment would be that against the so-called FIRE economy, that is finance, insurance and real estate. Morris would consider these functions parasitic on the true productive output of the economy. He might have advised keeping such functions to a minimum, more like public utilities than central players in the economy. And, the great mass of jobs involving sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, consulting, legal work, accounting and the broad array of desk jobs necessary for any large industrial concern--the jobs we tell college students to prepare for--would also be considered parasitic on the system. Morris would consider practically all the work in these occupations useless toil, no matter how pleasant the working conditions or how good the pay.

How then to run a complex, modern industrial society along principles conceived by Morris? The simple answer is you can't. But in a society beset by the problems of peaking fossil fuels, climate change, deforestation, depletion of water, destruction of fisheries, and erosion of farmland, Morris sounds like a person in the vanguard of the sustainability movement. Even more famous during his life for his novels than for his tapestries and stained glass work, Morris described the kind of society he deemed consistent with his principles in a utopian novel entitled News from Nowhere.

News from Nowhere describes a highly decentralized craft- and agricultural-based society of small towns and villages, one with democratic governance and equality of the sexes. Using the trope of a man visiting the future--200 years into the future to be precise--we get not only a description of the current conditions, but also a history of how the world evolved to that point.

News from Nowhere is not a literary masterpiece. But it offers a useful look into the mind of a man who thought deeply about the relationship between the way we organize the economy and the way we structure society. And, he offered a radical vision that sounds very much like the radical vision of those now proposing the relocalization of human society in response to the myriad challenges we face to our very survival as a species.
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