Tata Halts Production of Nano's Entry Level Variants

Tata Motors has struggled to perform well in the market for the past 3-4 years since none of its new products have been able to do any wonders in the market. In fact, it's best-sellers, the Indica and Indigo, also saw a decline in their sales. Though at one point Tata easily sold 9,000-10,000 units of the Indica and Indigo every month, the average has now come down to about 2,500-3,000 units.

Same holds for the Safari range (DiCor + Storme), which has also been continuously losing its share to new entrants like the Renault Duster and Nissan Terrano. Ditto for Ratan Tata's dream project, the Tata Nano; this one's lost its charm too. In May 2014, the company managed to sell a mere 1,001 units of the Nano, a rather dramatic drop from its average of 10,000 units during its early years; that's not even the total number units produced every month, i.e. 1,500.

Tata's facility in Sanand, Gujarat, which has the capacity to produce 2.5 lakh cars per year, has been running only four days a week due to the low demand for the Nano. It was only a few months back, that Tata Motors had cut Nano's production by almost 80% to only 1,500 units/month. Considering the exceptionally low demand for the car, it has now halted the production of the Nano's entry-level variants, namely, the Standard, CX and LX variants, till the existing stock is cleared out.

The company launched two new versions of the Nano, including one powered by CNG and another with power-steering, in the last one year. But that's not all, for Nano will soon get a 5-speed automated manual transmission (AMT) equipped model in its lineup too.