Different standards are being applied on climate change especially when it comes to cars, writes Tony Kinsella.
Ratan Tata drove his conglomerate's spanking new Tata Nano on stage at the Delhi 2008 Auto Expo on January 10th to the strains of Richard Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra - universally famous from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The "People's Car", as he baptised it, will sell for 100,000 rupees (€1,700), around the price of the DVD player in a high-end Lexus.
Three days later, half-a-planet and several light years away, traffic in Detroit was stopped as Chrysler drove their new Dodge Ram pick-up surrounded by 150 Texas longhorn cattle into the American International Auto Show. Ford echoed this cowboy theme by bringing in country and western star Toby Keith to unveil their new F-150 mammoth pick-up truck. The 2008 F-150 starts at $33,545 (€22,500).
Tata engineers worked to develop the aluminium shell Nano, with input from Germany and Italy. It is 3.1 metres long, 1.5 wide and seats four. Its 623cc two-cylinder engine, like that of the Volkswagen Beetle, is rear-mounted. The Nano's top speed is just over 60 mph and, according to Tata, does 50 miles to the gallon (mpg).
The F-150 is 6.3 metres long, 2 metres wide, and seats 2, 5, or 7, depending on the cab configuration selected. Its standard engine is a 5.4 litre V-8. Ford sales material vaunts the company's efforts to boost its fuel efficiency. The 2008 F-150 can achieve 24mpg in highway driving, although this falls to a more modest 17mpg with urban use.
Comparisons between the Spartan finish of the basic Nano, with its one windscreen wiper, absence of electric windows, air conditioning or radio, and the thirty-five luxurious variants of the F-150, are essentially meaningless.
Tata plan to produce 250,000 Nanos this year for the Indian market, but expects to double that output within four years to offer their People's Car in southeast Asian, African and Latin American markets. Tata have no current plans to produce a version for the European market although the Nano meets EU emission standards. Estimates suggest that a fully compliant European model would retail for around €9,000.
Large mini-trucks form an essential part of the dwindling operating profit base for GM, Ford and Chrysler. Some 2.2 million were sold in the US last year, and while higher petrol prices are expected to cut that by 10 per cent in 2008, these sales remain vital.
Chrysler's top-selling vehicle is its Dodge Ram which accounted for 17 per cent of its total US sales in 2007. The Ford F-150 has, for 26 consecutive years, held the top-selling position in the US, and the F series accounted for 26 per cent of Ford's domestic sales last year.
"The Ford F-150 is an American icon. Ford is the truck leader, and F-150 customers expect and demand the best truck on the market," according to Mark Fields, president of Ford North America.
Since the two motor shows ran concurrently it is not surprising that they were covered by different journalists. It is slightly more surprising that relatively few media covered both, and hardly anyone accorded them equal coverage.
It is, however, quite remarkable to note the differences in the commentaries most editors included in their Delhi coverage, but omitted when it came to covering Detroit.
Virtually all coverage of the Nano launch mentioned concerns over the climate impact of millions of Indians taking to the roads in CO2-emitting Nanos. A Greenpeace picket on the Delhi Auto Expo was widely reported, as was the comment from the chairman of the UN's international panel on climate change, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, that he was "having nightmares" about the Nano.
If concerns about the impact of 250,000 50mpg. Nanos joining the world's roads are legitimate, similar concerns must apply to two million 20mpg Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s. Yet no such concerns were included in reports from Detroit.
This apparent double standard speaks volumes about what we have come to view as normal, the challenges we face in addressing global climate change, and the changing nature of our planet's economy.
We have come to see it as normal that rangy American cowboys drive from their suburban homes to shopping malls in grotesquely oversized and criminally fuel inefficient vehicles. Yet it strike us as unusual that Indians wish to move from motorbikes and motorised rickshaws to the comfort of cars. This smacks of us continuing to view our world through a distorting colonial prism.
Any approach to the challenges of global climate change which uses such a prism is doomed to failure. Reducing global greenhouse emissions is never going to be achieved by the rich world hoping that our poorer relatives won't seek to reproduce a version of the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed.
We do not have the resources of the five planets required for developed world living standards to become universal. We must therefore develop technologies and systems our one planet can sustain. These cannot include Ford F-150s.
India's economic development highlights global economic changes. The Asian approach first realised in Japan, then applied in Taiwan, South Korea and most spectacularly in China was based on manufacturing goods for export to North American and European markets. Export-led growth then transformed domestic economies.
The Nano approach is different. Tata has developed a car for the Indian and other emerging markets. Its success is not predicated on North American or European sales, but on Indian, Vietnamese, or Ethiopian consumers offering themselves an enhanced degree of comfort.
About one billion of the Earth's population lives in the developed world. Tata is targeting the other five billion potential customers.
The US economy is sliding into recession, with its construction sector reeling as housing supply outstrips demand. US consumer demand may focus even more on low-cost Chinese imports, but the number of contractors buying F-150s is bound to shrivel.
If rising demand for modern products across the world's five billion less well-off consumers becomes the motor of global growth, the Nano will be more industrially significant than the Model T Ford.