Rumor has it the Tata Nano may be heading to our shores. I'm not at all sure how. According to road tests I've read in the various popular magazines, the Nano has no modern safety features. No air bags, no side-impact bars, heck I'm not even sure if it has seat belts. See, in India, doors and a roof are considered big upgrades in safety already. Everything else is expensive gravy they don't need. As the US auto market experience in the mid 70s proves, it's hard to add these things to a vehicle not engineered for them. And those add-ons were relatively straightforward, things like battering-ram bumpers and big bars inside the doors.

Nowadays the safety features often involve things that go, "bang." Sometimes in your face, and are sophisticated enough not to kill you, your grandmother, or your toddler doing it. Can the engineers at Tata handle the challenge? Can they make money on the result? Who knows? There will always be a market for cheap cars, even in the US. The trick is making money off them.