Mabe its time to do something

I have always been wanting to do something to help, but No, I have not bought my Prius yet nor have I joined the Green Peace. Maybe a blog could help. What actually pushed me to start ? The intense debate in the media about the release of Tata Nano and Sunita Narain’s comments saying that “Ratan Tata would be a hero if he made a bus like Tata Nano”. I don’t know if Sunita actually emphasized these words or if the press just made a big deal of it because it’s a nonsensical statement. It makes me wonder, if Tata really made a big ass bus that would carry 50 people, for let’s say 5 lacs, would people buy it and would the government make use of it and how much money would it make? I don’t know, maybe Tata would do that maybe Tata won’t.

Introducing the Tata Nano Hybrid

Given that, I was thinking, what is the solution here? How are we going to solve this problem? Bajaj is now jumping into the small car segment. May be Mahindra will make a small car too. How much pollution is this going to cause. And how do we mitigate this ?

I don’t know how many people in India really know about Hybird Cars. Toyota Prius is the most popular hybrid car in the US right now driven by several celebrities including CEOs Sergy Brin, Larry Page and Hollywood stars like the Brangelina couple. It works with a combination of IC engine and Electric Motors. I don’t want to really get into the details of how it works, since that is freely available on the internet (http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/demos.html), but here is the point. If I was Bajaj and I was thinking of competing with the Tata’s I would be hard at work building me a really cheap Hybrid Engine. I would put one of those on a small car and one of them on a bike ( Putting it on bike would be little harder I would imagine).

Hybrid cars would just be great for India. Here is why.

If you take a typical city like Bangalore or Chennai how much time do you spend waiting in traffic? How much time do you spend going at less that 40 kmph? The hybrid engine does not run on the Internal Combustion engine until it reaches a cruising speed. It runs on its Electric motor. How much do we slam the breaks on city roads in India? Pretty much all the time! When ever we break, the hybrid engine would convert that back into electrical energy and store it in its batteries.

If I was able to make 1.5 lakh hybrid with a 40 km/l (The Prius gives a 24 km/l in the city which is less than a Tata Nano’s 25 km/l but is larger and built for higher speeds), that would reduce the Fuel consumption of the whole country and will cut the pollution too. Now if I was able to make a bike do the same thing and make it run at fuel consumption of 200 km/l imagine the benefits. To beat that, if this car/bike was made to be pluggable hybrid that would bring down pollution even further down. Not only do these hybrids save gasoline but they all cut emissions in half. They are also silent reducing the crazy noise at all the lights. The benefits are endless. Indian Automobile companies have proved that they can make a uniquely low priced car by completely designing it from scratch, but can they compete in the big leagues with Toyotas and the Hondas ? Can they get to the cutting edge? We might have to wait for that answer. May the government should do something about this!